Upper School Curriculum

Grades: 11, 12
Full-Year

PREREQ: Students are offered placement into WL ADV courses by their current teacher, in consultation with the department. Performance in previous courses, end-of-year assessments, overall language proficiency, and student skills are factors in offering placement to students.

During the first half of the year, this course will explore the themes of city and suburb, center and periphery in short stories and poems of the Belle Époque and first part of the 20th century, notably by authors of the realist and naturalist movements (Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert), romanticism/decadence (Charles Baudelaire, Rachilde), surrealism and dada (Jean Cocteau), and the unclassifiable Colette. The course incorporates urban history, visual art, and music in order to best understand our objects of study. Our focus in the fall semester is on apprenticeship in stylistics, close reading, literary analysis, and writing the analytical paper. Students will be introduced to reading literary criticism. In addition to learning the tools of literary analysis in French, students will have the opportunity to write many short creative texts and to perform short scenes from our plays. Students must have a high level of proficiency in reading and listening comprehension in French, but the pace of the course will be tailored to student abilities.

Assessments include journal entries, papers, oral presentations, and projects. During the second semester, the theme of the course remains the same, but our attention turns to anti- and post-colonial literatures. We will focus on a number of case studies of French-speaking regions of the world at different points in history: Haiti and the Antilles (Aimé Césaire, Lyonel Trouillot, Maryse Condé), West Africa (Léopold Senghor), and finally Vietnam and the former Indochina (Marguerite Duras, Anna Moï). This ADV 2-level course is conducted in French, and the goal is to raise students’ proficiency from Intermediate High to Advanced Low (in presentational speaking and writing; interpretive listening) and Advanced Mid (in interpretive reading, cultural connections) levels of ACTFL proficiency guidelines.

Note: This course changes each year; students taking it as juniors may take an entirely different version as seniors, with expectations matching their proficiency level.