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Honors in Paris - Spring
Term 2008
A partnership between the UF's Honors Program and the Paris Research
Center offers the opportunity for high achieving students to enroll in
challenging, interactive courses, enhanced by excursions, guest speakers,
and tours. The curriculum is tailored for high-caliber students who are
enthusiastic about living in France, with Paris as your classroom. In
addition to intensive studies of Modern French Culture taught by distinguished
UF faculty members, students will participate in activities including
a week-long trip (location TBA), lectures by esteemed guest speakers,
group dinners, wine tasting, concerts, as well as excursions to other
areas of France. You will also be able to take advantage of an array
of weekly activities designed by native Parisian students to provide
an insider's view of Paris for students. Classes are held at the UF Paris
Research Center, located in Columbia University's Reid Hall, an innovative
center for American academic life in the heart of France.
This program is open to students from all majors; you do not have to
speak French to attend. Priority will be given to students in the Honors
Program, but all students with a 3.0 GPA or above are encouraged to apply.
This is a UF sponsored UFIC program so the credits you earn will satisfy
major, minor and university requirements while living and studying in
Paris with top UF professors. Bright Futures scholarships will cover
the tuition for the courses in which you are enrolled.
For more information, please contact the UF Campus Program Coordinator
Honors Advisor, John Denny (jdenny@clas.ufl.edu), Dr. Gayle Zachmann,
Director of the Paris Research Center (paris-research@clas.ufl.edu),
or Dr. Susanne Hill of the UF International Center (shill@ufic.ufl.edu).
Honors in Paris 2008 Program Theme
Engagements with Modern France: Arts, Poetics and the Social
Instructors & Courses:
Students may also choose to take French Language courses (FRE 1182
or higher) and Independent Studies, depending on their needs & interests.
Courses descriptions 2008
Image-Time: Cinema in Paris and the Landscape
of History
(ENG 4133, 4 credits)
Professor Scott Nygren
This course introduces cinema as the medium is conceived in Paris, through
both historic and contemporary film in a European cultural context. A
central premise of the course is that in the contemporary postmodern
and postcolonial context, the modern world becomes historicized as a
resource for current innovation. In Paris, the landscape embodies the
historical context that contemporary projects reinvent, so past and present
are continually interwoven. Cinema works in conversation with the other
visual arts, such as painting, sculpture and architecture.
Accordingly, the class will continually alternate between screening
films shot or set in Paris, and visiting the locations and contexts that
the films transform and bring to life. Films will be drawn from all eras
and include some of France's most famous directors, from Lumière,
Méliès, Leger, Ray, Epstein, Kirsanov, Dulac, Duvivier
and Carné, to Godard, Varda, Jeunet, Jacquot, Klapisch and Allouache.
Students will visit the streets of Montmartre where Amélie was
set and the Champs Elysées for Godard's Breathless, to consider
how Paris has been continually reinvented through film. We will visit
the site of the first cinema exhibition by the Lumière brothers
on the Boulevard des Capucines, and the Studio des Ursulines theater
where Dulac?s La Coquille et le clergyman premiered. You will have the
opportunity to watch films at Parisian theaters, visit museum exhibitions
in relation to cinema, and see several current exhibitions specifically
on cinema. In addition to quizzes on narrative theory and film
analysis, students will maintain a journal to prepare for their final
paper. Students who have digital photo or video cameras are encouraged
to bring them, to include visual materials in their work for the course.
Jews and Arabs in France: Parallel Otherness in
French Literature and Film
(LIT 3400, 3 credits)
Professor Maureen Turim
Inspired by Karin Albou’s La Petite Jérusalem,
(2005) a film set in the Sarcelles banlieu, a film in which a young philosophy
student from an Orthodox Jewish background falls in love with a young
Arab illegal immigrant fleeing oppression in his homeland, only to be
rejected by both communities, this course takes a look at concerns (some
parallel, others intersecting, and some quite different) faced by two
communities in France, Jews and Arabs. Through literature, film, and
art, and site visits which correspond to sociological and historical
readings, this course will ask honors students to engage in a unique
opportunity to explore current social issues and their expression in
the arts. One parallel shared by the communities, of course, is
an outsider status, and a history of oppression, and this course will
take as its touchstones the history of anti-Semitism in France culminating
in the Shoah, and the wars of decolonialization, particularly the war
in Algeria. Students will gain a firm grasp on this historical background,
including the waves of immigration to France, and on processes of assimilation. Religious
identities will be studied through our readings, and students will visit
synagogues and la mosqué, and talk to religious leaders. They
will eat at restaurants associated with these communities, and attend
concerts. They will visit the Jewish Museum, The Arab Institute, The
Memorial to the Shoah, and other such museums and sites. Our focus
will be on a selection of films and novels that speak to the issues we
will be exploring in site visits and the other readings.
Court and Capital in Paris, 1364-1715
(ARH
4930, 3 credits)
Professor Elizabeth Ross
This course will explore the interface between the development of the
French court and the city of Paris during the early modern period when
they rose together as centers of power and culture. We will begin
with the florescence under Charles V in the late fourteenth century when
the rebuilding of the Louvre was first linked to a royally-sponsored
cultural campaign of literature, visual imagery, and ritual elaboration. Focusing
on the reigns of Charles V (1364-80), Francis I (1515-1547), Henri IV
(1589-1610), and Louis XIV (1643-1715), we will describe the organization
and historical development of court society and the integral role that
artistic works played in furthering rulers’ social, political,
and cultural goals. We will follow the development of the Louvre—its
architectural design, symbolic function, and role in the fabric of the
city, while tracing the accompanying urbanization and conceptualization
of Paris as French capital. We will investigate how Paris developed
not only as a site of royal residence, but also in relationship to the
competing court centers of Fontainebleau and Versailles. The course
will examine architecture in the widest sense, including the arrangement,
use, and decoration of spaces for social and ceremonial life. Topics
discussed will include the transformation of Renaissance classicism into
a French royal style, the mechanics and centralization of court patronage,
the social and political uses of architecture and urban planning, and
the ritual orchestration and visual depiction of the royal body. In
addition to visiting the Louvre (both as architectural site and as art
museum), Fontainebleau, and Versailles, we will take walking tours to
identify how the remains and patterns of old Paris influence the shape
and meaning of the contemporary city.
Avant-garde Poetics, Politics and the Social
(FRT 4956,
3 credits)
Professor Gayle Zachmann
A historical survey of the French Avant-Gardes, this course focuses
on how “modern” poetic movements engage with cultural politics.
We will begin by exploring how historical relations between text and
the construction of national identity in France pave the way for 19th
century constructions of the figure of the poet and the later interventions
of 20th century poets, revolutionaries, and public intellectuals. Course
includes guest lectures, site visits and literary and art criticism.
Readings will be used as a basis for understanding the constantly shifting
social, political and commercial contexts with which post-revolutionary
artists, critics and thinkers engage.
Students may also choose to
take French Language courses (FRE 1182 or higher) and Independent Studies,
depending on their needs & interests.
Previous Honors in Paris Programs
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