ABSTRACT
This volume investigates how teaching practices can address the changing status of literature in the French classroom. Focusing on how women writing in French are changing the face of French Studies, opening the canon to not only new approaches to gender but to genre, expanding interdisciplinary studies and aiding scholars to rethink the teaching of literature, each chapter provides concrete strategies useful to a wide variety of classrooms and institutional contexts. Essays address how to bring French Studies and women’s and gender studies into the twenty-first century through intersections of autobiography, gender issues and technology; ways to introduce beginning and intermediate students to the rich diversity of women writing in French; strategies for teaching postcolonial writing and literary theory; and interdisciplinary approaches to expand our student audiences in the United States, Canada, or abroad. In short, revisiting how we teach, why we teach, and what we teach through the prism of women’s texts and lives while raising issues that affect cisgender women of the Hexagon, queer and other-gendered women, immigrants and residents of the postcolony attracts more openly diverse students. Whether new to the profession or seasoned educators, faculty will find new ideas to invigorate and diversify their pedagogical approaches.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|2 pages
Exploring Identities/Exploring the Self: French Literature and Women’s Studies in the Twenty-First Century
chapter 2|8 pages
Fractured Families
chapter 4|8 pages
“Representing the Self”
part 2|2 pages
New Beginnings, New Horizons: Women Writers in Beginning and Intermediate French Classes
part 3|2 pages
Colonial and Postcolonial French Women Writers: Teaching Diversity on Shifting Ground
chapter 9|8 pages
Peoples, Authors, Protagonists
chapter 11|8 pages
Making the Case for French Studies
chapter 13|8 pages
Teaching Hélé Béji, Postcolonialism, and the Arab Spring
part 4|2 pages
Interdisciplinary Approaches to French Studies