Below, you will find an image of the oldest building on campus (background) and the adjacent library (foreground/ modern building):
The university was originally founded in the 11th century and continued to be a prestigious school until it was shut down durring the French Revolution. It was re-founded in 1875 and has continued to be an excellent school of higher education ever since. The campus is very small, much smaller than UD's campus, but 9000 students attend durring a given semester. There is no real housing, but there are general student appartments. I'm glad I opted for the host family. Classes only meet once a week, and some can last up to 3 hours with a short break in between. Here is the rundown of my course schedule:
Monday-- Comparative Literature (4-6pm)
Tuesday-- History of Theater (1-4pm)
Wednesday-- French Literature (9h45-11h15am), Classic Literature (11h30-1pm), French writing (3-4h30pm)
Thursday-- Translation (11h15-12h15), History of modern art (2-5pm)
Friday-- Literature and Philosophy (9h30-12h30pm)
That's 8 classes for a total of 25 credit hours (that's 12.5 American credit hours).
Seem like a lot..? You ain't seen nothin' yet! Here follows pictures of my books for this semester for my 4 literature classes.
Comparative Lit aka Littérature du Shoah aka Holocaust Literature. 3 books. And I cannot read them at night because... well... nightmares of concentration camps and Jewish children who escaped but barely managed to survive in the wilderness isn't something I'm into.
This guy is a BEAR to read. Why, oh why did he have to write in a stream of conciousness and not use paragraphs? Why, oh why did he have to go back through everything he ever wrote and add superfluous notes? Why, oh why does he have to say the same thing in 3 different convoluted ways just to confuse me? Now add an analysis every week of the chapter assigned for homework and you have Tuesday Night Meltdown.
Next comes Classic Lit aka Explication du Texte. This is a special kind of class where we do a close reading of a single book. In this case, the book is Les Confessions I by none other than the fabulous J.J. Rousseau (blog on him to follow).
And the final literature course that consumes some of my Friday mornings (there are only 4 more meetings of this class!), Literature and Philosophy. We're reading the book Lettres Persanes by Montesquieu. It's truly fabulous and entertaining and we get to do a research paper on it and the topic of our choice. Pretty cool, huh?
That comes to about 2130 pages of reading... aproximately. That's just the books pictured. This does not include suplimental reading assignments or readings for other classes. So when I tell you that I am overwhelmed by reading, please take it seriously.
But I'm crazy, so I still love every minute of it!!!
That is a breakdown of my classes and part of my workload for the first bit of the semester.
Tune in tomorrow for a discussion of where I go to get this done (it'll be interesting, I promise!)
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