Spring Term, Honors in Paris

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• Download the Advisement Form (pdf)
• Download the Scholarship Application (pdf))
• Download the 2006 Program Scrapbook/Activities (pdf)

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 2007 Program Theme
Mapping French Culture: Visual, Literary and Political Movements of 20th-Century France

Instructors & Courses:

• The Parisian Avant-Garde: 1960-2006 (ARH 4930, 3 credits) Professor Alexander Alberro
• Cultures of Performance (LIT 3400, 3 credits)* Professor  Nora M. Alter
• Super 8mm Film Production: Representing City, Nation, World (ENG 4133, 3 credits) Professor Roger  Beebe
• The Twentieth Century: Modern French Literature and the Quest for the Sacred (FRT 4956, 3 Credits) Professor  William Calin

Courses descriptions 2007

The Parisian Avant-Garde: 1960-2006
(ARH 4930, 3 credits)

Professor Alexander Alberro

This course will explore the artistic maneuvers and innovations of the Parisian avant-garde from the 1960s to the present.  The course will begin with the Pop art of the group that Pierre Restany named the Nouveau Realistes in the early 1960s.  We will also examine the critical reception of postwar surrealism in Paris, focusing specifically on the Decollage work of the Lettristes, Jacques de la Villegle and Raimond Hains, as well as on the Paris-based BMPT group of painters in the mid-1960s .  Next we will investigate the conditions of art production in the period of `68 and its aftermath, locating the emergence of the formalist abstractions of the Support-Surface movement and the culminating experiments of artists affiliated with the Situationist International in the previous decade-and-a-half (Asger Jorn, et al) within this legacy.  The course will also focus on the activities of expatriate artists working and residing in Paris in the 1960’s and 70’s, such as Lygia Clark, Louise Bourgeois, David Lamelas and others, analyzing in particular the impact that these figures had on younger Parisian artists such as Annette Messanger and Christian Boltanski.  The course will end with an examination of the contemporary avant-garde in Paris, including the work of figures such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and others.  The practices of these artists will be contrasted to the theoretical program layed out by the critic, writer and curator, Nicholas Bourriaud, whose manifesto-like texts Relational Aesthetics (1998), Formes de vie: l'art moderne et l'invetion dee soi (1999), and Post Production (2002) have been highly influential.

Super 8mm Film Production: Representing City, Nation, World
(ENG 4133, 3 credits)

Professor Roger Beebe

This is a film production course, but its approach is primarily theoretical rather than technical.

How do we locate ourselves within the new global economic system?  What connections can we make between our local environment and the bigger stage of multinational capitalism?  These are the big questions that this course hopes to begin to answer by the end of the semester, but it will start more modestly with a series of mappings of more local areas and structures (specific buildings, streets, neighborhoods, etc.) then building to representations of the city itself before then tackling the more abstract issues of nation and the world system of global capital.  We will be looking at various historical attempts at representing the world on these different scales (mostly in experimental film and video), but we will also look at some of the more ambitious literary and theoretical attempts at such mapping, including Fredric Jameson’s work on “cognitive mapping,” the Situationists’ radical urbanism, Benjamin’s Arcades Project, etc.

Practically, the course will focus on aesthetic approaches to this project of cognitive mapping.  Students will be given super 8mm film cameras and will produce a series of short exercises designed to tackle these progressively larger scales of representation.  The course should provide a good way of engaging with Paris, its geography, its history, and its people while concurrently developing a set of technical and aesthetic strategies.  While the primary focus will be on super 8mm filmmaking, students may elect instead to do photo-essays, write fictions, or experiment in non-traditional essay forms instead.

No previous experience with film or video production is necessary, but a willingness to experiment is required.  There will be a lab fee for film and processing expenses of $150, but there will be minimal fees for texts, to offset student cost.

Cultures of Performance
(LIT 3400, 3 credits)

Professor Nora M. Alter

This course will examine performance in several different media: film, theatre, opera, dance, performance art and video. How does a medium affect and direct performance? We will trace a history of performance from the early theories of acting as articulated by Diderot through to Stanislawsky, Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski,  and Genet, ending with contemporary theories of performativity as found in the writings of Homi Bhabha, Patrice Pavis, Helene Cixous, Judith Butler, Marvin Carlson, Margorie Garber, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and Shannon Jackson. How is individual subjectivity constructed through performance? We will examine how roles of race, gender, and sexual identity are played out. In addition, constructions of national, and cultural identity will be examined in tandem with readings in post-colonialization and nationalism.   The course will be structured around performance offerings in Paris during the semester. Students will attend theatre, film, opera, contemporary dance, exhibitions, and other relevant performances each week. Classroom time will be devoted to analyzing and discussing the performances in relation to assigned theoretical texts. In addition, special sessions will be organized with directors, actors, artists, performers and critics who will discuss the conception of performance and how it manifests in their work.

The Twentieth Century: Modern French Literature and the Quest for the Sacred
(FRT 4956, 3 Credits)

Professor William Calin

In past centuries coexisted two literary traditions of approximately equal importance: the sacred and the secular.  Today, in an allegedly post-Christian age, the quest for the sacred retains its importance, indeed, becomes as excitingly problematic as the 20th century itself, especially in the meeting of and tension between religion and everyday life.  The meeting and the tension also have a political function in a land where religious issues are to be found at the center of political, social and intellectual discourse; they also function as one way of looking at French identity.  The question of religion reflects the continuities and the disparities in the French tradition; today we find, in addition, a more varied, diverse representation of the religious with Muslim and Jewish voices in addition to the Catholic and the Protestant.

Students may also chose to take French Language courses (FRE 1116 or higher) and Independent Studies, depending on their needs & interests.

Previous Honors in Paris Programs

• See the Honors in Paris 2008 course listings
• See the Honors in Paris 2006 course listings

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