Bennington College

Foreign language courses center on culture, literature, art and history [More...]

Postcards from the Classroom: Languages at Bennington

Ever heard of the Lieutenant Nun? Born in the late 16th century, she ran away from a Spanish convent at age 15, disguised herself as a man, and spent the next few decades as a gambling, brawling soldier of fortune in the New World. She later detailed her exploits in her autobiography, Historia de la Monja Alférez.

How about the Lost Generation in twentieth-century China? During Mao's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, millions of educated teenagers were forced to relocate from their homes in urban areas to do manual labor in the countryside. The intricacies of their lives were captured in the Chinese novel Xuese langman (Blood Color Romance).

Or have you seen l'esprit in action? In the courts of King Louis XVI, l'esprit--wit, in the form of clever barbs and acidic wordplay--was the key to gaining social status and currying favor. The dramas that resulted were reenacted in the French film Ridicule.

Got all that? Now picture this: You show up for your foreign language class, and you actually get to step into these worlds.

One thing you will never find in Bennington language classes is grammar in a vacuum. Classes here--which include Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish--are content-based, always pairing fluency in language with fluency in culture. Even introductory courses are centered on a central idea, art form, or period in history. And so each term, you'll encounter Bennington students examining works like those described above: studying them, analyzing them, discussing and writing about them in their original language.

Among the Spanish courses Sonia Perez is teaching this term is Transgression in the First Person Singular, which examines autobiography and stories of transgression (like that of the Lieutenant Nun). The very format of the class, like all Bennington language classes, does some transgressing of its own--crossing over from abstracted exercises into the wilder territory of real lives and works of literature. In the process of analyzing those works, students by necessity pick up new vocabulary and agility in speaking and writing. "It's that combination of transgression and rigor that I think you can play with at Bennington," says Perez. "There's lots of reading to do, and we look at the subject very seriously, but that doesn't mean that the content of the class has to be dry."

Emily O'Brien '09 is currently taking the Historical Film, an intermediate French class with Isabel Roche, in which students analyze French film (speaking in French, of course) as the context for learning about history. "It forces you to step out of your comfort zone because you have to talk in class, and that's a good thing. Isabel creates a really welcoming environment where you can do that. And because of that, almost without me even noticing, it's all happening: my writing skills, comprehension, and vocabulary are all amassing." Roche allowed students to choose their own final projects, and some have decided to write screenplays in French. O'Brien took another route, seizing the opportunity to examine her interest in communities through the lens of French film. "This summer I worked in a summer camp with a program for the deaf, and I lived with a deaf woman, so I became really interested in that culture. In the film Ridicule, there's a scene where a famous French abbot, who was one of the first developers of sign language, was presenting it to the French court. I decided to research and write about the development of sign language and compare the history with its representation in the movie."

When the world is your textbook, nearly everything is fair game. In The Art of Spanish: Language through Painting, Mamie Schiller '09 is relishing the chance to examine baroque and neo-baroque paintings from Europe and Latin America, along with texts ranging from commentary by Che Guevara to excerpts from novelist Alejo Carpentier, who pioneered magical realism. "Even if it weren't a Spanish class," Schiller says, "the content could be a class in itself." Chelsea MacDonald '07 has had a similar experience, interacting with a range of texts from the classic to the contemporary. In a French class on paraliterature taught by Jean-Frédéric Hennuy, the students "read and analyzed the things an average French person might read on the subway: popular novels, science fiction, comic books, mysteries." In her Francophone Identities class, a discussion about eating in various cultures led to a spontaneous lesson in French table manners. That kind of interaction with French culture--not to mention a year studying abroad in France, which she did last year--helped pave the way for MacDonald's Field Work Term internship this year: a position with the French company Premier de Cordées.

"We're engaging real issues," says Shunzhu Wang, who teaches Chinese. "We want to develop language skills as we're developing cognitive conceptual thinking. The cultural understanding is not separate." Carol Meyer, who directs language study at Bennington, puts it another way: "At every level, we're trying to figure out the relationship between thought and language. Each word has huge conceptual underpinnings, and you can't divorce words from those cultures. So we're trying to teach the word and the whole murky, changing, dynamic world that is behind and supporting that word."

About the image: The collage includes a 1630 portrait of Catalina de Erauso at Seville painted by Francisco Pacheco; a slice of the poster for the TV miniseries based on the novel Xuese langman; and a still from the French film Ridicule.

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