Teaching and learning French – A tale of desire in the humanities

Abstract

This article considers the way we talk about learning and teaching the humanities in higher education in the UK. By using the tools of the arts and humanities within the scholarship of learning and teaching, and examining a personal perspective, the author explores the transformational impact of French language learning and teaching. Close textual analysis of literary language learning memoirs highlight the sensual and physical effects of language learning that can remain muted in our everyday conversations. As a result, the author suggests that rather than lament the death of the humanities in 21st century higher education, learning and teaching a language offers a pedagogy of desire that embodies the transformation aspect of our disciplines, as we deal with the business of being human.

The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights

“…On Crimes and Punishments marked a major turning point in the law's trajectory, leading to wide-ranging criminal justice reforms in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. 174 The book, like Pietro Verri's later-published Observations on Torture (1777), rejected the cruelty and inhumanity of torture, stimulating torture's abolition in Denmark (1771) and Austria (1776) and leading to a prohibition in Spain (1775) on torturing those not yet convicted of crimes. 175 In 1777, in a sign of the times, Sweden's monarch, King Gustav III, decreed that no death sentences were to be carried out without his approval 176 and submitted a bill to the Swedish Parliament to curtail executions in that country.…”