This course is designed to fulfill the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. The primary goal of this course is to develop students' reading and writing skills through a series of assignments that will provide them with the opportunity to formulate observations made in class discussions into coherent argumentative essays. Emphasis will be placed on the refinement of effective sentence, paragraph, and thesis formation, keeping in mind the notion of writing as a process. Other goals in this course are a familiarization with French literature and the specific questions that are relevant to this field. In addition, students will be introduced to different methods of literary and linguistic analysis in their nonliterary readings.

In a 2017 article for Glamour, beauty vlogger Fatou N’diaye writes, “The French girl as a style and beauty icon is inescapable, aspired to, and everywhere we look […] And yet, for a universal craze, [it] is surprisingly singular.” N’diaye points to a decades-long phenomenon rooted in centuries of socio-literary and filmic conversations surrounding “beauty” wherein the French—especially French women—are the ideal. But what are the limitations and ramifications of this beauty ideal? And to what degree is it fantasy? With French literature and film as points of departure, this class interrogates the ways contemporary beauty ideals have been constructed, distorted, proliferated, and questioned from the nineteenth century into the digital age. Students will be asked to consider: to what degree is being beautiful a gendered phenomenon? Where does youth(fulness) emphasize or limit our understanding of who deserves beauty? Where might beauty find new contours in populations who were long banished from being conventionally ‘beautiful,’ such as queer populations, populations of color, or class subjugated peoples? Where might we draw the line between beautification, fetishization, and exoticization, especially given France’s colonial treatment of Black, Caribbean, Arab, and Asian subjects? And can beauty, so closely tethered to nature, exist in a world where nature endures an increasingly changing climate? A special consideration will be given to beauty in the digital age and the ways that computer systems (such as AI) encode and re-code beauty politics and standards in their design.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills