French Papers

The class is designed to encourage the active use of the French language in reaction to a variety of topics. Knowledge of grammar and syntax will be reinforced and built upon in class; users will also extend their vocabulary and improve their writing style.

The aim of FRB2 is to expand reading experience and to develop translation skills based on passages of French prose covering the period 1500 to the present day, written in a range of styles and genres. Oral supervisions aim to develop your oral and general language expression skills in French, working with a native speaker in small groups.

FRB3 builds on your grammatical and lexical knowledge of the French language through systematic practice and feedback, helping you develop the skills and the confidence to translate complex English structures and registers into French. FRMD offers you the opportunity to engage with authentic material/sources in French and to explore a number of cultural topics relevant to the French-speaking world while building up your vocabulary and your command of both spoken and written French.

Translating into English will allow students to hone their translation skills, consolidate their reading skills in French, and increase their ability to create a natural and fluent text. Translating into French will allow students to consolidate their grammatical accuracy, as well as their vocabulary and command of idioms. Both classes will develop the candidate's ability to control register and tone in French and English.

This paper offers the opportunity to engage with advanced use of French in stimulating and intellectually challenging ways, through the analysis of texts of various types and genres under a prescribed topic.

Fr1 introduces students to the many different aspects of French culture taught at Cambridge. Students will engage with works from the twelfth to the twenty-first century across a variety of genres, including verse, theatre, discursive prose, and film. 

This paper will help students develop their knowledge of French grammar and pronunciation and to familiarize themselves with the many varieties of French, as well as introducing them to the techniques and problems involved in the structural, sociolinguistic and stylistic description of a language.

This paper will introduce students to the earliest literature in the French language, composed and written down ca. 1050–1300.

This paper covers key literary, cultural, philosophical and religious developments in the two centuries involved, and explores the effects of these developments, along with the impact of expanding geographical horizons, on inherited conceptions of human nature.

This paper combines a focus on particular key texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a broad chronological scope and thematic focus. The concept of Revolution will be interpreted with reference to the socio-political transformations of 1789, 1848 and 1870-81 respectively, but also, more generally, to innovations in the figure and role of the writer, to literature of revolt and reform, and to new stylistic and aesthetic models.

This paper will allow students to explore key developments in literature, thought and visual culture from the French-speaking world from the perspectives of innovation and upheaval, conflict and renewal. 

To be embodied is to take up space, to exist in time, and to be part of a community. In this paper we explore a series of medieval texts and artefacts which shed light on how bodies were interpreted, imagined, included, and excluded in the Middle Ages. 

This course connects two dimensions of the Renaissance fascination with ‘form’: i) limit forms at the margins of human experience (e.g. heroes, prodigies, natural marvels, witches, tyrants, cannibals, monstrous births, impostors) and ii) the newly emerging literary forms of the period (e.g. emblem, sonnet, modular narrative, tragedy, essai).

The seventeenth century has a huge place in the French cultural imagination and is vital for the study of francophone literary history more generally, as so many later writers and theorists engage critically with the period. In Fr9, we study dramatists such as Corneille, Racine and Molière, whose intense portrayals of passion and comedic depictions of error remain a central part of the French educational curriculum. We examine intellectual developments that try to shatter previous ways of thinking: Descartes’s vigilant mindfulness, or Pascal’s depictions of an interstellar universe that extends from the infinitely great to the infinitely small, leaving human beings displaced and decentred. We look at the short, polished fragments and maxims of writers like La Rochefoucauld or La Bruyère, who want to hold a mirror up to the world around them, while contemporaries like La Fontaine and Perrault shift the formal focus onto fables and fairy tales, where human and non-human animals and worlds collide and the ‘moral of the story’ is never as simple as it seems.  Prolific writers such as Mme de Sévigné and Mme de Lafayette are interested in dissecting the patriarchal society they inhabit: what does it mean, they ask, to be defined as a mother or a daughter, and is it possible to challenge traditional models of authority while existing within them? Playful, collaborative forms of authorship emerging from female-dominated salons provide a whole new model for literary production at this time, even as the absolutist king Louis XIV controls and choreographs his every move against the extraordinary backdrop of Versailles. Meanwhile, satirists observe the supernatural aura surrounding king and church and state, and find the compelling subversive potential within… Throughout, reason and authority are submitted to the test of everyday experience, in all the different forms this takes. Whether we are recovering little-known voices from the past or reconsidering the canon, the better to question its history, the sights and sounds of Fr9 will stay with you throughout your studies in Part II and beyond.

The paper explores Enlightenment thought both through the writing of the philosophes (including Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau) and also through the lens of more recent commentaries and critiques. It covers the period in which the French novel arguably came of age through the works of Prévost, Marivaux, Graffigny, Rousseau and their successors. Central to the paper is the study of the complex interactions between writing and political power. The paper will allow students to gauge the achievements of Enlightenment writers but also, as importantly, to measure the limits of their enterprises.

This paper is about nineteenth-century France's most visible cultural form: the novel. It introduces students to ultra-canonical literary fiction of the period, and other less well-known novels, in asking how writers tackle some of the most pressing ideological questions of their age. We pay close attention to the political history of the period, which was marked by a tumultuous series of revolutions, changes to its colonial empire, the rise of socialism, and civil and foreign wars. We also explore the legal, institutional, and cultural powers that sought to regulate private lives and desires, gender roles, marital and familial relationships, and sexual freedoms. Across our reading on the paper, we ask: how did literary fiction participate in debates about the politics of sex, gender, race, and nation? What roles could the novel play in reproducing, critiquing, or endorsing the social worlds it described?

This paper focuses on four topics, ‘History and Memory’, ‘Ethics’, ‘Life-writing’, and ‘Intimacy’, used to offer perspectives on literature, thought and visual culture from all areas of the French-speaking world. The timespan runs from the start of the twentieth-century to the present. Students are encouraged, if they wish, to draw on areas in visual culture, film, photography, installation art, dance, as well as literary texts and areas of modern and contemporary thought.   The choice of our four topics represents a view that there is a particular interest and urgency in paying attention to: representations of postcolonial struggles for independence, as well as histories of genocide, migration and trauma; questions of ethics as they relate to the other, to race, to community, to care, to ecologies; questions of the self, class, the everyday, and literary genre; questions of intimacy, the erotic, attachment, consent, gender, queer and trans experience.

This course explores the related processes of language variation and language change in the context of French throughout the world, from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives.

This paper will be for Part II students and will be seminar- and supervision-based, with the aim of giving a cross-century overview of French theatre since 1600 from both a theoretical and a performative perspective. 

The troubadours were singer-songwriters in the Occitan language who invented the first independent lyric tradition to be preserved in a Romance language. They appeared about 1100 in the Limousin and Poitou, then the heartland of the duchy of Aquitaine, but their songs were soon heard in courts throughout Languedoc, Provence, and Auvergne. Troubadours followed Eleanor of Aquitaine into Northern France and frequented the courts of her many children, and they crossed the Pyrenees into Iberia and the Alps into Italy, inspiring new styles of courtly lyric across Europe. In their persons, the troubadours were men and women ranging from great rulers to castellans to merchants, minstrels, and disaffected monks. In their lyrics, they experimented with a range of themes from erotic love to politics to religious devotion. They valued the invention of new poetic forms and developed a myriad of lyric genres and compositional styles. A study of the troubadours not only uncovers this literature and history, but also allows us to question common assumptions about who should be given a public voice, whose desires should be heard, and how those desires should be formulated.

This paper will introduce students to troubadour song in parallel with examples of other genres of medieval Occitan literature, many of which were given a distinct shape by the influence of the lyric.

This paper explores the impact of technological innovation on the changing experience, understanding and representation of geographical/physical space and social/political identity through a comparative historical study of the ‘print revolution’ associated with the Enlightenment and the ‘digital revolution’ shaping today’s global society. The approach combines intellectual and cultural history with the study of contemporary philosophy and its innovative interplay with novelistic and cinematic modes of expression.