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French

  • France is the UK’s closest neighbour on the continent and relations between England and France date back to the Norman conquest and even before. The relationship has certainly been a tempestuous one, but since the Entente cordiale was established at the beginning of the twentieth century, the French have on the whole been our friends and allies.
  • Learning French provides the opportunity to find out more about our gallic friends. The French have an enormously rich culture and history, and learning their language offers access to the great tragedies of the seventeenth century, for example, to the wit, satire and decadence of the eighteenth-century novel, to the lyrical beauty of nineteenth-century poetry and to the existentialist philosophy of Sartre and Camus in the twentieth century.
  • Studying francophone literature means learning about France’s colonial project and also about Maghrebian, African and Caribbean cultures. How have these communities represented their own lifestyles and traditions using the language of the coloniser? Also, how do immigrant communities living in modern France perceive their relationship with mainstream French culture?

Teaching and Research Staff: