Honors in Paris - Spring Term 2008

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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:

• Image-Time: Cinema in Paris and the Landscape of History
  (ENG 4133, 4 credits)
  Professor Scott Nygren
• Jews and Arabs in France: Parallel Otherness in French Literature and Film
  (LIT 3400, 3 credits)
  Professor Maureen Turim
• Court and Capital in Paris, 1364-1715
  (ARH 4930, 3 credits)
  Professor Elizabeth Ross
• Avant-garde Poetics, Politics and the Social
  (FRT 4956, 3 credits)
  Professor Gayle Zachmann
• Beginning French, (FRE 1182, 3 credits)

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

• See the Honors in Paris 2007 course listings
• See the Honors in Paris 2006 course listings

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