Frontières (GB)

Richard Davis – Civilisation britannique

This course will seek to address the various various frontiers/borders/fault lines within and across the United Kingdom. These may take various forms: physical and geographical, political, social, mental… As such, the course will consider the ways in which the United Kingdom has become an increasingly Disunited Kingdom.

While there are many forces working to pull the United Kingdom apart there are others, still strong, which operate in the opposite direction, holding the country together. On the one hand, therefore, we will look at the bonds holding the country and its people(s) together as a cohesive polity and society and, on the other hand, how different forces are creating or reinforcing divisions/oppositions.

Over the past fifty years numerous such debates have taken centre stage in the UK. The following will form part of this course: the frontiers within the UK/British Isles and the rival and overlapping national identities; Ireland and Britain sharing a common space; the English/British north-south divide. At the international level, the course will look at how the English Channel has operated as a frontier to the rest of Europe; the iconic role of the Cliffs of Dover from Shakespeare's 'sceptred isle' up to Brexit.

The overall idea will be to study how all these frontiers have been drawn, as barriers to others, as forces of inclusion and/or exclusion, why and how these frontiers came about, how they might be overcome.

Paul Veyret – Littérature britannique

The novel studied in class is Ishiguro’s now classic Never Let Me Go: the paradigm of borders and frontiers are central to its various interpretations. As a dystopian, sci-fi novel, it seems to have crossed the traditional borders of Ishiguro’s previous fiction and explored new forms of referentiality. The central themes itself, cloning and mortality, also question definitions of frontiers: human and post/human, mortality and immortality. Lastly, the theme of memory of recollection seems also to have been revisited as Ishiguro reversed his usual temporal paradigm (here with a particular narrative structure) with a spatial paradigm which insists on the geolocation of the protagonists.

Session 1 :

• Étudiants régime général : Contrôle Continu
• Étudiants régime spécial : Contrôle terminal Écrit 3h

Session 2 (« rattrapage ») :

Étudiants régime général et régime spécial: Oral 15 mn (préparation 30 mn)

Organisation des enseignements

1hCM et 1h30 TD/semaine pendant 12 semaines

Richard Davis – Civilisation britannique

• COLLEY, Linda. 'Britishness and otherness', Journal of British Studies, October 1992.
• COLLEY, Linda. Britons. Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (London, Pimlico, 1992).
• D'ANCONA, Matthew (ed). Being British. The Search for the Values that Bind the Nation. London and Edinburgh, Mainstream Publishing, 2009.
• JONES, Moya. Le royaume désuni: Angleterre, Ecosse, Pays de Galles. Paris: Ellipses, 2004.
• KEARNEY, Hugh. The British Isles. A History of Four Nations (London, Cambridge University Press, 1989).
• MARQUAND, David. 'How United is the Modern United Kingdom?' in Grant and Stinger (eds) Uniting the Kingdom? (London, Routledge, 1995).
• NAIRN, Tom. The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (2nd ed, 1981).
• WARD, Paul. Britishness Since 1870 (Routledge, 2004).

Paul Veyret – Littérature britannique

Ouvrage au programme : Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, London : Faber & Faber, 2005.

Further reading :

• Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. London: Polity Press. 2013
• Groes, Bas (ed.). Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels. London: Palgrave, 2011.
• Matthews, Sean. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Palgrave, 2010.
• Sloane, Peter. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Gestural Poetics. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
• Teo, Yugin. Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
• Westphal, Bertrand. La Géocritique : Réel, fiction, espace. Paris : éditions de Minuit. 2007.