In response to my department chair’s plea last year for a faculty member to come up with a course in French culture “jazzy” enough to appeal to a broad cross-section of undergraduates, I developed something more literally “jazzy” than my chair had anticipated: French 153, “French/American Cultural Relations: From Jazz to Freedom Fries.” I am currently in the third week of teaching this course for the first time, and so far, so good. I conceived the course to be taught in English so that, in these days of shrinking enrollments in foreign language, it would attract a relatively large audience and so that it could fulfill for these non-francophones a “Cultures and Ideas” General Education Requirement. In teaching this course, my objectives for students are to help them to understand better 1) France's essential role in the formation of the United States and its democratic institutions; 2) France's position on many of the cultural phenomena the U.S. has exported to that country especially since World War I; 3) the causes of the resentments that the (especially cultural) influence of each nation upon the other has generated and continues to generate today; and finally, 4) that familiarity with a foreign culture can produce an illuminating estrangement from the students’ own culture by seeing it through the eyes of the “other.” While students analyze texts produced from both American and French perspectives, the course places more emphasis on the latter, since I assume that most students will already have some familiarity with popular American conceptions of France and its people. In it, students study a a range of cultural texts, from literature to comic books to popular songs, including Hergé’s Tintin in America, Duhamel’s America the Menace (Scènes de la vie future), Godard’s Breathless (A bout de souffle) and Serge Gainsbourg’s “New York USA.” At the time of the “Cold War” conference, I will have finished teaching the course, and in my paper, I will perform a post-mortem on the course (in the hopes of resuscitating it to be taught, in ever better shape, next spring quarter). Specifically, I will explore the following questions: to what extent were students already familiar with past and present French images of America? To what extent are they receptive to and sympathetic of French criticism of American culture? To what kinds of criticism are they receptive? How “French-like” are these university students?