As the speaker of a foreign language in the United States, you are in a unique position to innovate, improve, and corrupt French. Baaaaaaad French! enables you in this endeavor. It introduces you to historical precedents of bad French, and provides you with the opportunity to conceive, theorize, historicize, and execute projects in bad French. You will think and you will write with the awareness that you are in the presence of all the bad Frenches that have ever preceded you. You will read and you will write your own logics of emancipation, liberation, and disorientation out of the prison house of language. Baaaaaaad French! ultimately resists all forms of standardization. It empowers you to harness your innate capacities to sound different, to write wrong and ungoodly, and to take pride in the innovative impulse to resist the standardizing imprint of globalizations on your accent and pronunciation.
Baaaaaaad French! lies at the intersection of cultural history and the creative writing workshop. It is an invitation to read and write creatively, historically, and across genres and media. The course adopts a long historical view of the dynamic history of French as it plays out in a wide array of media. You will learn this history nonchronologically, which places different strains and genealogies of bad French into stronger relief. The material provides us with the opportunity to slowly develop together a broad collective definition of badness over the course of the term, with a particular emphasis on the distinctly sonic dimensions of our linguistic identities. You will engage in a series of class discussions, creative writing assignments, and workshops, and you will have the freedom to pursue and create a final project in any medium, produced in a bad French language of your own invention. A contest and awards ceremony for the baddest project caps the course.
The course stars readings by Monique Wittig, Rupi Kaur, Amandine André, Rim Battal, Claire Star Finch, Alpheratz, Stéphane Bouquet, Katalin Molnár (aka Kité Moi), Luc Bénazet, Loïc Demey, Ghérasim Luca, Isidore Isou, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lamartine; music by Rahim Redcar, Saint Levant, Aya Nakamura, PNL, Dita Von Tease and Sébastien Tellier, Jeanne Added, Camille, Françoise Hardy, Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, Claude François; films by Catherine Breillat, Mathieu Kassovitz, Stephen Spielberg, Melvin Van Peebles, François Truffaut; media by Joyce Mansour, Les Coquettes, clips from French radio and television (Apostrophes, Quotidien, Les Marseillais, Brice de Nice).
This course may only be taken once for credit.