French
The advantage of studying French within a Department of European Languages is that it is embedded in a context which necessarily (and in our view, beneficially) emphasises the relationship of the language and of its literature and culture to the rest of Europe. This conviction that it is a good thing not to study any one language in isolation also underlies the recent changes we have made to our first-year courses , where the opportunity to range more widely across matters of European relevance is offered. Areas of expertise within French include: linguistics, both modern and historical; dialectology (the study of different forms of French, past and present); modern literature; the history of ideas, and in particular of twentieth-century philosophies; modern poetry; the relationship between Paris and the regions in literature; the novel.