Current course offerings

Please Note: Course profiles marked as not available may still be in development.

Course description

In taking FREN3114, you are embarking on a sequence of two advanced language courses, each dealing with a different aspect of how French is used. These two courses are very important for working with literary texts in FREN3355, but not only literary texts.

FREN3114: Narration (through crime reporting and detective fiction)

FREN3115: Description (across fiction and non-fictional genres; from different points of view)

Although narration and description often work together, organizing the courses in this way allows us to work intensively on each function in turn and to think about the language that you need to understand, appreciate and perform them. Over these two courses, you also have the opportunity to read and watch a wide variety of documents, including contemporary popular fiction; monuments of classic literature; extracts from television news reports, from TV series and from films. It is expected that you will be able to demonstrate skills at the "Proficient User" level of the Common European Frame of Reference for languages. In FREN3114, some tasks are still at B2 level, but we are moving into C1.

Our work on narration means that we are looking how stories can be told to set up a sequence of events in time (even if the events are not told in chronological order). We therefore look at a selection of texts in which it is critically important to know what happened when - crime stories. Crime stories are integral to a range of genres which are important in French culture: news stories; true crime podcasts; detective novels and television series. We look at presentations of "real" crime stories (current or historical) and detective fiction and explore the tools necessary for effective narration.

Archived offerings