Master Études anglophones

Il est recommandé à tous les étudiants inscrits dans le Master Recherche d’assister à un maximum de manifestations scientifiques relatives au champ anglophone : civilisation, littérature, cinéma, traduction, traductologie, linguistique. Il pourra s’agir de conférences, colloques, journées d’étude, séminaires organisés par les Unités de recherche, UMR ou l’École Doctorale de l’université Bordeaux Montaigne, ou encore par d’autres instances, en fonction du projet de recherche ou professionnel ou des centres d’intérêt de chaque étudiant. Cependant les manifestations organisées par l’UR CLIMAS (Cultures et
Littératures des Mondes AnglophoneS) (https://climas.u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr/), et notamment le séminaire mensuel Intersections, devront être considérés en priorité dans la mesure où le MASTER d’Études Anglophones est adossé à cette unité de recherche, qui rassemble la majorité des enseignants
chercheurs du département des Pays anglophones.

A la rentrée universitaire, les étudiants seront renvoyés à un calendrier des diverses manifestations suggérées, sans que cette liste soit exhaustive.

Voir la page complète

Les étudiants seront répartis en quatre groupes qui suivront chacun 8h de travaux dirigés. Chaque groupe de travaux dirigés sera encadré par deux enseignants-chercheurs.

Une présentation de l’UE aura lieu lors du premier cours magistral à la rentrée de septembre.

Cette UE a pour but d’entraîner les étudiants à la pratique de l’écriture scientifique, de maîtriser les normes de présentation, d’apprendre à exploiter les acquis dans un esprit de perfectionnement.

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

This seminar aims at studying the rich connections between the worlds of music, politics and religion in 18^th-century Britain. Following George Frederic Haendel’s arrival in England in 1712 (originally as Georg Friedrich Händel, from Germany), the production of court music, operas and religious oratorios resulted from an intense and fruitful dialogue between composers, men of the Church and the world of politics. While composers, Handel and others, massively sought inspiration from the stories told in the Old Testament, the Anglican church viewed music as a means to “illustrate” their belief that England was, indeed, the New Jerusalem. Politicians – mostly the Crown and the Court – extensively relied on musical compositions, commissioned or not, to build up the nation’s narrative.

Although never an official composer per se, Haendel played a major role in this cultural/religious/political project. His many hymns, odes and oratorios form a coherent body of musical works whose religious, political and ideological dimensions offer a fascinating insight into a more general issue: how can art take part in the building up of a nation’s identity?

Students DO NOT need to know how to read music to take up this seminar. Written sources from librettos, newspapers, diaries, letters, pamphlets as well as simply listening to pieces of music will serve as a diverse and easily accessible material for the various presentations.

Voir la page complète

This seminar aims at providing students with a critical vocabulary and a variety of theoretical approaches to video games. It seeks to provide a historical and cultural overview of the medium, to question its boundaries and to introduce students both to game studies and play studies.

Though part of the lecture will be devoted to historical and formal analysis (using narratology and weighing in on the narratologist/ludologist debate), the emphasis will be put on the uses of video games, as well as on the discourses and practices they foster. Thus, the history of the medium will be approached both as a factual chronology and as a process of self-definition, as demonstrated by the rise of retrogaming, but also by the way contemporary “independent” games appropriate and rewrite this history, the better to establish their alternative credentials. Contemporary concerns such as the increasing fragmentation of the various player communities (“hardcore” vs. “casual”/”AAA” vs. “Indy”) and, more crucially, the issue of gender representations in games will also be broached.

Students will be expected to conduct a range of theoretical readings before each class, but also to play selected games in a sustained fashion in the course of the seminar, and to participate in class discussions. They will be required to obtain and play through Portal (Valve, 2007), which will be used to examine many of the key arguments developed in the lectures.

Though a familiarity with the medium and some of its main products is recommended, this seminar does not take as a pre-requisite an extensive knowledge of either contemporary or classical video games.

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

Linguistics is frequently misconstrued as "abstract", "dry and technical", "removed from real life situations". Do linguists really inhabit a different world from the rest of academia? Are they self-indulgent theoreticians? 

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

This seminar explores one of the richest periods in the history of the American cinema. For many reasons (economic as well as cultural and socio-political ones), the 1970s saw the budding of a new kind of cinema that was totally opposed to the earlier classical way of making films in Hollywood.

We will therefore first analyze these reasons, before dealing with this new conception of the cinema in those days. The core of that seminar will be the detailed study of the most typical features of the main films of the period. The classes will alternate the study of some representative scenes with a more global view of how the cinema was conceived by all these talented directors (Bogdanovich, Penn, Hopper, Altman, Coppola, Scorsese, Friedkin, De Palma…) and by some producers (Schneider, Rafelson, Evans…). There will also be a focus on William Friedkin, whose career does encompass the most striking facets of that conception of the cinema, the director having somehow managed to outlive the glorious 1970s to enrich his filmography in the 21th century with films that still ensue from the canon of the now late New Hollywood.

And so, we will eventually see the reasons why this New Hollywood ended in the early 1980s, and we will look for some traces of its heritage in the cinema of the following decades, not only in Hollywood (and in Friedkin’s filmography) but also around the world (Lars Von Trier’s and Thomas Vinterberg’s “Dogme 95 Manifesto” sharing, for examples, some beliefs in the “Cinéma Vérité” advocated in the New Hollywood).

As mentioned before, the class will be based on the study of some excerpts, and this requires the active participation of the students who will be asked to comment on some aspects of the studied scenes.

Voir la page complète

This seminar is intended to be an introduction to the existence of phonetic variation and change in in present and recent days English, and to give students some tools to detect and analyse this variation. Far from being a theoretical course on the major changes that took place in the history of English, this class will focus on language as can be directly accessed by us using recent and contemporary sources and tools. It will be made of three main parts:

• 1/ How pronunciation was indicated in older dictionaries as objects of knowledge and culture, starting from 16^th and 17^th century books, and mainly focusing on 18^th to 20^th century dictionaries. We will try to deceipher their various transcriptional methods in times when phonetic alphabets did not exist yet, including their lacks and inconsistencies. We will also study the way dictionaries gradually turned from prescriptivist objects meant to dictate an idealized view of the language, into present-day descriptivist objects that try to show the language as it actually is.
• 2/ How a collection of dictionaries from various periods can be used as a relevant corpus used to identify and explain phonetic variation and change in present-day English as well as from a historical perspective, including the way new linguistic features can be born and spread through the language. We will tackle the methodological and epistemological aspects of what a corpus is and how to consider it reliable on account of what is or is not to be found in it. We will also learn how to use the electronic versions of the latest pronunciation dictionaries so as to use them as a way to detect ongoing change in recent and contemporary English. Additionally, we will discover a few other electronic corpora and tools (OED, BNC/COCA, Google Ngram Viewer) that can help us interpret the data we can find in dictionaries.
• 3/ How to collect, annotate and analyse oral English. The last part of the seminar will offer an introduction to the use of the speech analysis software PRAAT. We will discover what a spectrogram is in order to describe and analyse phonetic variation directly from audio recordings: personal, contextual, regional variation, etc. Do you remember what a sinusoid and wavelength are? In order to define and describe stress, vowels, consonants and intonation from an accoustic perspective, we will tackle a few elements of physics through PRAAT, such as the distinction between noise and sounds, but also intensity, voice pitch and the formant structure of vowels.

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

The subject of this seminar is the history of British radicalism, with a focus on two moments: the late 19^th century around the work of William Morris, and the post-war years, up to the 1980s.

It will explore the intellectual, artistic and material production both of Morris and his circle and of alternative cultures in the post-war period.

1^st 6 weeks: Béatrice Laurent

Steeped in the romantic poetic tradition as well as in Pre-Raphaelite art, William Morris’s program of artistic transformation of Victorian Britain was paradoxically a product of the age whose ‘civilization’ he was so adamant to condemn. Morris’s rejection of middle-class mass culture motivated his efforts to restore ancient crafts; to revive medieval ways of life such as the Victorians invented them; and finally to strive to make his dream of a better world come true through political activism.

News from Nowhere (1890), “a Utopian romance” as well as a book supporting anarchist ideology, details the radical reconstruction of society. It will serve as a base for the exploration of late-Victorian aesthetics and politics, and will help students appreciate the contemporary scope and significance of William Morris’s revolutionary cultural legacy.

2^nd 6 weeks: Mathilde Bertrand

The second half of the seminar will examine the evolutions of radicalism in post-war Britain through the development of alternative cultures and “new social movements”, while exploring intellectual debates within the British left. Developing in arenas outside of parliamentary politics, post-war radicalism sought to combine theory and practice with a view to redefining political action. The seminar will pay close attention to artistic expression and cultural practices within radical cultures. The themes covered will include the intellectual debates of the New Left in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the cultural politics of the underground in the 1960s; the challenges of feminism; the emergence of participatory forms of political action around “community politics” and “community arts” practices; the influence of Black and Asian political and cultural organisations on a post-colonial critique of Britain’s imperial legacies; the cultural and class politics of Punk and the question of its position in the British history of radicalism.

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

In this seminar we will examine the essay, and more particularly the personal essay, as a form. What makes an essay an essay? What distinguishes it from related forms such as the letter, the article, the sermon, or the academic essay? The essay has often been characterized by its spontaneity, its lack of system—characteristics which make it difficult to define. According to one of its great American practitioners, Joseph Epstein, it is “a form of discovery,” and so entirely unpredictable.

One way to approach the essay is to look at its history. The modern prose essay was born just outside Bordeaux at the end of the sixteenth century with the publication of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (1580). After 1603, when these were translated by John Florio, a wave of imitations appeared in English. Montaigne's title, and the word essay itself, alerted readers to the fact that they were about to read something new, that they were aproaching a new point of view, a renewal in perspective. Later, the essay proliferated with the rise of the periodical which created a market for essay writing.

Right from the beginning, the essay had an anti-authoritarian bent. Montaigne managed to avoid being accused of impiety by claiming his essays were merely sketches, and so of little importance. His strategy served to circumvent authority. Apparent humility has remained an attribute of the essay, which often begins with the particular—personal—experience of the essayist and connects it to universal questions. Other important characteristics of the essay are its questioning stance, its skepticim, its openness, and thus its anti-dogmatism. The essay is not a means of conveying the whole (or even a whole) truth. It is the expression one observer’s vision.

In the United States, a large body of work has been produced since colonial times. We will work chronologically, from Benjamin Franklin to Joan Didion.

Voir la page complète

“Otherness” is a concept we handle with relatively fluidity – in our XXIst century language at least.  The umbrella term denotes the foreign, in gender, in nationality, in culture, in body and mind, it embraces what we do not understand, struggle to recognize, or cringe to self-appropriate. Introspectively, it refers to that part of ourselves we do not care to show, or have not come to terms with, indeed, have not yet discovered, and therefore have no control over.  Otherness comes to designate “us”. By contrast, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries do not yet talk of otherness in this way. Not with this term, at any rate. That is not to say that the notion is not in circulation.  So how does early modern England think and express “otherness”? How does this notion receive expression and representation? This seminar explores the early modern stage, from Everyman and Faustus, to plays by Shakespeare, Webster and Dekker, with the aim of identifying what the pre and post-reformation theatres consider as to be “otherness” –from spitting images within to spitting diseases without – how they word it, perform it, and explore it.

Students will spend six weeks reading extracts from plays and critical theory (Lupton, Kottman), in particular, French critical theory (Levinas, Derrida). They will choose one topic among a set of topics put to them before 1^st November. They will write a paper of 700-800 words on the topic of their choice. The paper will be given in at the latest for the 1^st January.

Students are particularly invited, during the course, to take part in conversations and rehearsal in writing in weekly forums devised to the effect. This is a space where they ask questions in methodology and share ideas they are working around.

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

Ce séminaire propose d’étudier l’écriture de la souffrance — qu’elle soit physique, mentale ou morale, consécutive à une maladie ou à une expérience traumatique — dans la littérature américaine, et le rôle que joue l’écriture face à la maladie ou au trauma. Il sera divisé en deux parties.

La première partie s’intéressera au récit de maladie (« illness narrative ») et tentera de répondre à la question : comment se disent les maux, physiques ou psychiques, avec les mots du récit ? L’étude portera sur deux œuvres :

• un récit de fiction : The Story of Forgetting (2008) de Stefan Merrill Block,
• une nouvelle : « The Yellow Wallpaper » (1892) de Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Il s’agira d’étudier les modes d’énonciation de la maladie (et de la douleur), ainsi que les modes de représentation du corps ou de l’esprit malades dans deux types de récit (fiction, nouvelle) à la première et à la troisième personne. On s’intéressera aussi aux formes de résistance que peut fournir l’écriture (humour, ironie, parodie, discours métaphorique ou fragmentation pour ne citer que quelques exemples) avant de tenter une évaluation de l’approche dite « vitaliste » des philosophes Georges Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze ou, plus récemment, Philippe Godin.

Dans le prolongement de ce premier volet, la seconde partie du séminaire permettra d’aborder des textes d’écrivaines américaines dans lesquels la question du trauma tient une place centrale. Ce volet s’articulera dans un premier temps autour des modes de représentation du corps en souffrance, corps qu’il s’agit de concevoir autant dans sa dimension individuelle (un corps de femme ici) que collective (le corps social). Nous nous pencherons ensuite sur des textes qui tentent de mettre en mots l’indicible d’une expérience traumatique, qu’il s’agisse de l’holocauste (Ozick) ou de l’odyssée des « picture brides », confrontées à la réalité du « Rêve » américain et condamnées à l’oubli dans les camps d’internement pour Japonais lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Les œuvres au programme sont les suivantes :

• les deux nouvelles rassemblées dans le recueil The Shawl (1989) de Cynthia Ozick,
• un roman contemporain : The Buddha in the Attic (2011) de Julie Otsuka.

N.B. Il est vivement recommandé aux étudiants s’inscrivant à ce séminaire d’avoir lu Beloved de Toni Morrison (édition recommandée : New York, Vintage, 2004 [1987]). Il y sera fait référence au début du cours pour poser les jalons de la réflexion. L’essai de Morrison intitulé « The Site of Memory » (cf. bibliographie ci-dessous) fait partie des textes fondateurs dont la lecture est aussi conseillée en priorité.

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

La compétence transversale « documentation » proposée dans l’offre de formation de l’Université Bordeaux Montaigne vise à doter les étudiants des outils indispensables à la réalisation du mémoire, mais également plus largement à approfondir leur maîtrise des compétences informationnelles, désormais indispensables à tout citoyen. Cet enseignement comprend deux séries de séances, qui ont lieu respectivement au premier et au second semestres (3 heures au S1, et 3 heures au S2).
Les séances permettront d’approfondir la méthodologie et la recherche documentaire, de revoir les attentes en matière de normes de présentation d’un mémoire universitaire et d’une bibliographie, de proposer aux étudiants de faciliter leur travail de rédaction par la maîtrise de la feuille de style (word, open office, libre office). Par ailleurs, ils découvriront un outil de gestion bibliographique : Zotero permettant de rassembler, organiser leurs ressources documentaires et de générer automatiquement des références bibliographiques.
L’évaluation repose sur un examen au S1 ainsi qu’un autre au S2 permettant de vérifier la maîtrise de ces compétences à partir d’une recherche effectuée sur un sujet fourni. Il n’y a pas de session de rattrapage pour la documentation.

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

L’enseignement de la traduction en M1 fournira des bases théoriques et d’application pratique, à partir d’un éventail de textes de préférence littéraires. Seront exploitées les pistes ouvertes par les approches linguistiques récentes, dont l’approche stylistique et comparative. Les étudiants seront  invités à prendre conscience de l’acte de traduire, du phénomène de passage d’une langue à l’autre et de tout ce qui, dans le contexte, voire le péritexte, ou encore chez le récepteur de la traduction, entre en ligne de compte dans cette activité. Ils pourront avoir à réfléchir sur des traductions existantes, parfois comparer des traductions. Essentiellement, ils viseront à améliorer leur capacité à traduire, par l’observation, l’entraînement et l’acquisition de connaissances, que ce soit de l’anglais vers le français ou le contraire, dans l’optique des concours, de la recherche, ou de la préparation à la filière professionnelle de la traduction et des métiers du livre.

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

New Folk Horror in British Cinema (J.-F. Baillon)

This seminar will offer a critical examination of the resurgence of “folk horror cinema” in British Cinema since the 2000s. Based on cultural references involving neo-pagan cults, witchcraft and a largely fantasised rewriting of the national past in terms of pre-Christian heritage, this profoundly ambiguous tradition has variously been re-appropriated by feminist as well as masculinist discourses and has given rise to a range of aesthetic propositions, from exploitation cinema to “elevated horror”. 

New Folk Horror in American Cinema (C. Chambost)

From times immemorial, superstitions have been at the origins of horrific folk tales taking place in the wilderness or in rural areas and which were told either to restrict people’s freedom, or to entertain them in some spellbinding manner. 
This course analyzes how British and American horror cinemas have both developed a subgenre based on stories that resort to some folklore deeply engrained in a country’s traditions. Using recurring themes like religion, hostile landscapes, supernatural creatures, these films rely on Man’s deepest fears, and they may also be a means for some artists to criticize the human tendency to act in some superstitious and harmful ways.

The course will study British then American folk horror films, pinpointing the specificities of both cinemas

Voir la page complète

 This seminar will explore the relations between Transcendentalism and various reform movements and utopian projects of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, in the areas of religion, education, women's rights, socialism, pacificism, and abolitionism.   Special emphasis will be placed on three themes: 1) the religious and philosophical roots of the idea of human perfectibility; 2) the self-image of the age (the nineteenth-century as the Age of Progress), and its critics; 3) the tension between individual and collective ideals of reform. 

N.B. The seminar will be conducted in English.  International students are welcome.

Voir la page complète

Ce séminaire structurant sur le 19ème siècle britannique, est centré sur Londres et les ailleurs. Londres est le centre névralgique du 19ème siècle anglais, un objet incontournable des études d’anglicistes – elle se prête donc très bien à une approche pluridisiplinaire, civilisationnelle, artistique, historique, et littéraire. Des éclairages complémentaires donneront à voir la spécificité de la capitale, au 19ème siècle. Mais Londres est aussi une invitation au voyage, spatiale (les étrangers qui visitent Londres, mais également, à l’inverse, les ailleurs de l’Empire/Commonwealth, l’orientalisme qu’ils génèrent) mais aussi temporelle : Londres est aujourd’hui une figure, elle se prête à tous les engouements « néo », et le Londres victorien semble résolument moderne.

N. Jaëck traitera de la représentation du paysage urbain chez Dickens, du développement de la banlieue, dont la représentation littéraire conduit à une prise de position politique et à une forme de mutation narrative. Elle comparera cette représentation à celle de Doyle, et à celle de Conrad, où le quai génère l’aventure. La persistance de l’imaginaire de Londres dans la fiction néovictorienne pourra également être abordée.

Ph. Chassaigne évoquera l’underworld homosexuel du Londres victorien, à travers des documents variés: le roman pornographique Tales of the City of the Plain, or, the Confessions a Mary-Ann (disponible sur archive.org), le journal Illustrated Police News en ce qui concerne l’affaire “Boulton and Park” encore le procès d’Oscar Wilde.

B. Laurent proposera une réflexion sur la Tamise comme lieu de passage, de pollution, de perdition. De 1858, année de “la grande puanteur”, aux titanesques travaux de construction des quais, la gestion de l’eau fluviale, et son assainissement furent au coeur des préoccupations des Londonniens. A travers l’analyse d’un corpus de textes et d’images, nous examinerons les faits et l’imagerie qui étaient associés au fleuve.

Trevor Harris traitera de l’expansion de Londres tout au long du dix-neuvième siècle. La capitale est perçue comme lieu de déperdition ou de déclin à travers des guides ou enquêtes sociales, ou encore des récits de voyage : un lieu étrange(r), déjà un « ailleurs ». Cette capitale impériale maintenant disparue perdure encore, pourtant, aujourd’hui dans des objets et pratiques néo-victoriens qui tentent de la faire revivre et de nous la rendre de nouveau familière.

Laurence Machet s’intéressera au système carceral à travers l’étude des hospices pour indigents (workhouses) et des asiles. Alors que le dix-neuvième siècle est marqué en Grande-Bretagne par une formidable expansion, les lieux emblématiques de l’époque sont des espaces de confinement, ce qui conduira à réexaminer la notion de ‘care’.

A. Sotropa abordera la sculpture victorienne sous différents aspects : commandes publiques et commandes privées (du monument public à la statuette( dans une ville qui, sur le plan artistique, cherche à rivaliser avec Paris. La génération des sculpteurs actifs dans les années 1880-1900 semblent rejeter l’exemple rodinien, adopté par toute l’Europe, et forger une nouvelle esthétique : la New Sculpture. 

Voir la page complète

Partant du présupposé que les différences sexuées sont au fondement d’une structure inégalitaire Homme/Femme à laquelle se greffe d’autres formes de domination, notamment de race et de classe, et que cette inégalité résulte d’une construction sociale reposant sur des préjugés et des stéréotypes, nous explorerons comment ces mécanismes d’assignation de genre sont à la fois reflétés, construits mais aussi remis en cause dans la littérature. L’enjeu du séminaire est de réfléchir aux processus de construction et de déconstruction du genre dans un corpus de textes littéraires anglophones et francophones, et aussi dans les va-et-vient entre les langues et les cultures, dans la mesure où le déplacement géographique induit aussi, très souvent, un déplacement des enjeux sexués et textués : comment le genre s’inscrit-il dans la littérature et comment se traduit-il ?

Nous envisagerons l’espace littéraire comme un espace symbolique où les modèles genrés sont aptes à être transgressés et contestés. Nous alternerons pour ce faire cours théorique et analyse textuelle de textes littéraires proposés en langue anglaise et française. Ces textes seront systématiquement contextualisés et historicisés, afin de voir comment l’écriture et la traduction littéraires sont déterminées par l’idéologie. Enfin, nous nous demanderons quelles peuvent être les modalités d’une traduction littéraire dite « féministe » et quels sont les apports possibles de la théorie queer à l’analyse littéraire et traductologique.

Voir la page complète

The mask on stage is a fundamental topic in theatre studies that has received much coverage. Less studied, arguably, is the moment when the mask comes off, or down. The fall of the mask on stage always creates a gasp, a smile, a sense of horror, awe, satisfaction amid the audience as with the characters who witness the event. Which ever way you look at it, this becomes a public event. This seminar explores our reactions in such moments, on stage, by asking : What is the character letting fall, when it lets fall its mask? What do we include in the definition of a mask ? In deed, depending on how we understand the concept of the mask, the “fall” can take on a variety of different significances, and the consequences of such an event can make the play fall in the category of a comedy, or a tragedy. This seminar is about character identity as much as it is about audience response, or the representation of risk running, immunity, disease, loss of self, loss of life.

The first section of the seminar, from weeks 1 to 6 explore our response to the « existential » nature of the theatrical drop of the mask. Weeks 6 to12 the semester concentrate on the risks run when the mask falls : risks of losing face, when discovered by the enemy, or even risks of losing one’s life in times of crisis, in times of an epidemic. 

Students will each week be given an extract of a play with supporting critical material to read. The seminar will provide a supporting analysis in the shape of a video, All documents are provided on the e-moodle platform. Students are invited to explore language, gesture, costumes, as well as to think about the language on disease (and the spread of) that spans through the plays.

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

This seminar will be divided into two segments of unequal length. The first one (weeks 1 to 4) will address methodological concerns and focus on the nature and specificity of cultural history as distinct from other types of history. It will highlight the diversity of objects that can be studied through the lens of cultural history but also some specific notions resorted to by cultural historians (such as agents, constructivism, memory, practices, representations).

The second segment (weeks 5 to 12) will concentrate on a number of topics and issues emblematic of the cultural history of the United States, introduced every week by means of assigned readings.

Voir la page complète

This seminar aims at understanding North American comic books as an ever-transforming form of popular culture, shaped in large part by its interaction with other media.

The approach will be mostly chronological, ranging from the “invention” of comics in Europe in the 19th century to the rise of YA graphic novels in the US since the beginning of the 21st century. It will also include examples of the way comics have served as an inspiration for other media – most notably in the contemporary wave of superhero films – and have conversely adapted or imported content origination in other media, from silent movie stars to literary classics. Beyond specific examples, the course will offer a theoretical approach to intermediality, with a special focus on adaptation, franchising and transmedia storytelling, and will also broach issues of genre and cultural hierarchies.

At the end of this seminar, students will be expected to understand and to be able to explain the interactions between technology, market forces, aesthetic choices, intermedial circulation and social uses in specific comics.

Students will be expected to conduct a range of readings including select examples of comics and theoretical texts before each class.

Voir la page complète

The first six sessions of this seminar will focus on accounts of Eastern North America from the 17^th to the 19^th centuries, during the colonial and post-colonial eras. Defined as non-fiction prose, these accounts generally rely on two traditions: the travel genre, that provides the narrative framework, and the science of natural history, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the facts relating to the natural objects, plants, or animals of a place; the natural phenomena of a region as observed or described systematically”.

We’ll be more particularly interested in authors such as John Lawson, John Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, John and William Bartram, Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Wilson. Their accounts stand as examples of American self-creation. They also provide an insight into colonial attitudes towards the natural environment and the Indigenous and slave populations.

Selected readings from these authors will be provided electronically.

This seminar will be conducted in English. International students are welcome.

Voir la page complète

‘Victorian’ qualifies a particular set of values, perception and experiences reflected in the literature and culture of the nineteenth century. In a collective act of interactional storytelling, the Victorians communicated their values and experiences through narratives supported by emblematic images, which purported to explain ‘natural facts,’ while they naturalized their ideological visions. To fully appreciate the depth of associations which enriches the understanding and appreciation of Victorian texts and objects, an analysis of the man-made myths they embody is required.

The focus of the seminar will be on identifying key images in the Victorian imagination and analyzing the process through which these figures became loaded with meaning.

Throughout this seminar, we will be asking how, in an age of growing class conflict, gender (re)definition, technological progress, and scientific enquiry, symbolic figures aggregated hypotheses emanating from various fields of interest. Oral presentations will be supported by visual material and will explore the complexities and contradictions crystallized in iconic images considered in a Barthesian perspective as products of the Victorian cultural history.

Voir la page complète

Étude des textes produits par les intellectuels et militants amérindiens au début du XXème siècle, à l'ère progressiste, période pendant laquelle le "problème indien" est posé. Alors que certaines solutions étaient proposées par des réformateurs euro-américains, les Amérindiens avaient eux aussi un discours à proposer, jugeant qu'il était primordial d'être actifs dans les représentations et les politiques les concernant.

Voir la page complète

This seminar is about literary and artistic production during the Modernist era seen as a period of crisis (from the Greek krisis meaning “decision”), that is both a moment of rupture and a critical moment in the field of art and literature after the First World War. It was also the moment when modernity began with the development of science and technology, the advent of psychoanalysis (the discovery of the unconscious) and the boom of the consumer society during the American Prosperity. D. H. Lawrence thus wrote: “It was in 1915 the old world ended.” Not everybody agrees on the date. But it does not really matter. No doubt, after the First World War, as artists were confronted with an unstable world and an uncertain, if not inaccessible, reality, they felt the need to free themselves from traditional art forms and created new modes of expression and representation—hence Picasso’s Cubism, Bartok’s and Stravinsky’s music, Diaghilev’s Russian ballet and on the European literary scene: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence in Great Britain; Marcel Proust and André Gide in France, to quote only a few writers among the most famous.

In America this new literary “modernity” will be examined in the field of fiction through works like Dos Passos’s 1919 (1932), Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934). Each novel will be an opportunity to study the tension between satiric representation and formal experimentation, that is, as Michael Levenson put it, the “creative violence” characteristic of Modernism.

The purpose of the second part of this seminar is to look at how modernist writers engage with ordinary life and objects. Far from being solely concerned with subjective interiority, as they are traditionally perceived to be, modernist texts are deeply aware of the external world, not only from a phenomenological standpoint as they explore the sensible aspect of subject/object relationships, but also from a political one. Indeed, their evocation of material life, to paraphrase Marguerite Duras, often leads to or is underwritten by gender and economic considerations. The numerous, sometimes uncanny, encounters with daily matter in modernist fiction are critical in the characters’ existence but also of the materialistic and consumerist turn of XX^th century society.

Mme Ravez will be using ecampus (“cours en ligne”) as a pedagogical tool for her part of the seminar.

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

This seminar aims at stimulating new readings of American literature through the lens of theories that have developed in the field of gender and women’s studies over the last decades. The students will be introduced to a wide array of critical perspectives, ranging from early advocates of gynocriticism and theoreticians of écriture féminine to champions of intersectionality, queer studies, masculinity studies, and ecofeminism. Special attention will be paid to the development of Black and Chicana feminist discourse and to their contribution to gender politics. Such key concepts as revision, mestizaje, silence, queering, performance, empowerment, resistance, embodiment, margin and center will be used to foster a revaluation of certain canonical or lesser-known texts and, sometimes, to uncover hidden layers of meaning beneath more conventional readings.

The literary texts included will be drawn from different periods and from a variety of genres (novel, short fiction, poetry). Extracts from works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Alice Walker, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Carmen Tafolla, Paula Gunn Allen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and many more will be analysed and discussed in class but the students are also invited to offer reading suggestions of their own if they wish to do so.

This seminar will be conducted in French and in English.

Voir la page complète

Ce séminaire s’adresse à la fois aux civilisationnistes et aux étudiants plus littéraires, car les exposés s’appuieront sur des sources diverses, y compris le roman, l’essai littéraire, ou des genres poétiques ou dramatiques, en fonction des sujets.

La sociabilité est un axe majeur d’étude du « long dix-huitième » siècle. Classiquement on parle d’une « sphère publique », bourgeoise selon Jürgen Habermas, en expansion puis en contraction à la fin du siècle/ Les lieux se multiplient où les couches supérieures et moyennes de la population peuvent se rencontrer et « converser » au sens de l’époque : non seulement discuter, mais se fréquenter, nouer des rapports commerciaux, intellectuels, amicaux, intimes. Des clubs aux loges maçonniques, des théâtres, lieux de spectacles, jardins publics et autres institutions urbaines, en passant par les lieux de villégiature (villes d’eaux comme Bath, stations balnéaires comme Brighton), les modes de sociabilité sont infiniment variés et socialement contrastés. Ce séminaire entend penser à nouveaux frais ces sociabilités déjà bien balisées par l’historiographie et la critique littéraire, grâce à l’apport des food studies. Le prisme de l’alimentation, des repas, et des rituels afférents, permet de penser la sociabilité et de l’intégrer  dans les réseaux économiques d’approvisionnement et leurs logiques globalisées (pensons à l’économie de la traite négrière et du travail servile qui sous-tend la tea-table, les punch parties ou à l’impact du commerce avec la Chine et de la colonisation de l’Inde sur les goûts, les aliments et produits exotiques (thé, curry, porcelaine, etc.), les recettes et les pratiques sociales en Grande-Bretagne.

La sociabilité opère le lien entre l’alimentation et la politique. Il s’agit d’examiner la dimension politique des consommations et des pratiques sociales, depuis les années 1700 (essor colonial et nouvelles alliances diplomatiques suite à la Glorieuse Révolution de 1688-1689) jusqu’au milieu au dix-neuvième siècle, marqué par la Grande Famine irlandaise et sa gestion politique calamiteuse. L’abolitionnisme et la lutte contre l’esclavage se traduit dans les cuisines par les boycotts de produits, tandis que les famines, l’adoption de modes françaises ou italiennes ou l’élaboration de livres de cuisines adressés à des publics précis traduisent des logiques sociales et politiques de distinction et parfois de domination.

Les thèmes abordés comprendront des lectures de textes du 18^e siècle et de sources secondaires sur la sociabilité ; les dimensions impériales de l’alimentation ; la France et l’Italie comme modèles prestigieux mais sulfureux au 18^e siècle, et enfin l’Écosse et l’Irlande, envisagées comme provinces imitant le centre ou au contraire comme modèles originaux.

Voir la page complète

Speakers are social movers (Birdwhistell 1970) who physically engage in communication. Their bodily moves are not random but patterned – and always meaningful. In this seminar we learn to observe how speech is “orchestrated to a choreography of the human body” (Asher 1972). We look at the way meanings - abstract or concrete - are physically produced and enacted on the socio-interactional stage. We start by observing facial expressions and co-speech gestures in silent movies. We gradually become aware that speech production necessarily comes with gestural action.

This multimodal course resembles no other, in that combines formal research seminars, animated classroom discussions, creative workshop sessions and film screenings.

Voir la page complète

This seminar will explore the emergence and tranformations of women’s cinema in Britain from the 1950s with a focus on the contemporary period. We will examine the position of women directors within the film industry (mainstream productions and art films) as well as their appropriation of genre and history. 

Voir la page complète

Il s’agira dans ce séminaire d’essayer de circonscrire et de qualifier un espace littéraire à la fois un peu flou et un peu furtif, niché entre les deux systèmes de signification littéraires majeurs et constitués que sont le Réalisme et le Modernisme anglais. Il s’agira de démontrer à la fois la cohérence et l’intérêt formel de cette période intermédiaire.

On montrera que des auteurs contemporains aussi apparemment hétérogènes que Dickens, Conrad, Stevenson ou Doyle partagent, au tournant du siècle, le même désir d’innovation littéraire ; ils entreprennent tous, chacun à sa manière, de redéfinir le rapport entre le réel et la représentation. Dans cette période de latence littéraire où le réalisme classique semble avoir perdu de sa pertinence, et où le modernisme ne s’est pas encore érigé en système, ces auteurs ont précisément en commun cette position historique transitoire, ce désir de s’installer sciemment dans l’imminence, et d’y puiser les structures d’un texte nouveau, encore à inventer.

Tous exploitent le caractère aventureux et indéfini de cette période littéraire que l’on peut, en suivant Barthes, qualifier de « Neutre », au sens où elle cède à la tentation de déjouer les paradigmes. Tous investissent cet espace aventureux de l’avènement pour y puiser l’inspiration d’une littérature nouvelle. On s’attachera donc à montrer que loin d’être un prolongement ou une annonce, une fin de partie réaliste ou un avant-dire moderniste, cette fin de siècle redéfinit le texte littéraire autour d’un contexte commun, d’une problématique commune, et de stratégies littéraires similaires. Tous ces auteurs, au-delà de leurs différences, exploitent l’indécision historique contextuelle, et proposent, autour de la redéfinition du roman d’aventure, une littérature soucieuse que la stabilisation textuelle soit toujours provisoire, que le sens ne prenne pas.

Voir la page complète

Voir la page complète

The aim of this course is to give students an overview of the history of the English-speaking world from the end of the eighteenth century to the onset of globalization, during the twentieth. We shall study such themes as the slave-trade, industrial revolution, imperial expansion, military conflict, the Commonwealth, and culture and identity. The course is designed to help students understand the major ideas, events and social/political movements which have sometimes brought the English-speaking countries together, and sometimes driven them apart. The main objective is to provide students with a synthesis of the evolution of the ‘British World’ and to enable them to understand better how the challenges of a more diverse international system have progressively and profoundly affected the character and geopolitical role of the United Kingdom.

Voir la page complète

This seminar aims at providing students with a critical vocabulary and a variety of theoretical approaches to video games. It seeks to provide a historical and cultural overview of the medium, to question its boundaries and to introduce students both to game studies and play studies.

Though part of the lecture will be devoted to historical and formal analysis (using narratology and weighing in on the narratologist/ludologist debate), the emphasis will be put on the uses of video games, as well as on the discourses and practices they foster. Thus, the history of the medium will be approached both as a factual chronology and as a process of self-definition, as demonstrated by the rise of retrogaming, but also by the way contemporary “independent” games appropriate and rewrite this history, the better to establish their alternative credentials. Contemporary concerns such as the increasing fragmentation of the various player communities (“hardcore” vs. “casual”/”AAA” vs. “Indy”) and, more crucially, the issue of gender representations in games will also be broached.

Students will be expected to conduct a range of theoretical readings before each class, but also to play selected games in a sustained fashion in the course of the seminar, and to participate in class discussions. They will be required to obtain and play through Portal (Valve, 2007), which will be used to examine many of the key arguments developed in the lectures.

Though a familiarity with the medium and some of its main products is recommended, this seminar does not take as a pre-requisite an extensive knowledge of either contemporary or classical video games.

Voir la page complète

Language is ‘the best show’ that humans ‘put on’ (Whorf 1949). But who runs the show? And what are the rules, the scripts and the conventions for staging our little ‘plays’? 

Voir la page complète

This seminar is intended to be an introduction to the existence of phonetic variation and change in in present and recent days English, and to give students some tools to detect and analyse this variation. Far from being a theoretical course on the major changes that took place in the history of English, this class will focus on language as can be directly accessed by us using recent and contemporary sources and tools. It will be made of three main parts:

• 1/ How pronunciation was indicated in older dictionaries as objects of knowledge and culture, starting from 16^th and 17^th century books, and mainly focusing on 18^th to 20^th century dictionaries. We will try to deceipher their various transcriptional methods in times when phonetic alphabets did not exist yet, including their lacks and inconsistencies. We will also study the way dictionaries gradually turned from prescriptivist objects meant to dictate an idealized view of the language, into present-day descriptivist objects that try to show the language as it actually is.
• 2/ How a collection of dictionaries from various periods can be used as a relevant corpus used to identify and explain phonetic variation and change in present-day English as well as from a historical perspective, including the way new linguistic features can be born and spread through the language. We will tackle the methodological and epistemological aspects of what a corpus is and how to consider it reliable on account of what is or is not to be found in it. We will also learn how to use the electronic versions of the latest pronunciation dictionaries so as to use them as a way to detect ongoing change in recent and contemporary English. Additionally, we will discover a few other electronic corpora and tools (OED, BNC/COCA, Google Ngram Viewer) that can help us interpret the data we can find in dictionaries.
• 3/ How to collect, annotate and analyse oral English. The last part of the seminar will offer an introduction to the use of the speech analysis software PRAAT. We will discover what a spectrogram is in order to describe and analyse phonetic variation directly from audio recordings: personal, contextual, regional variation, etc. Do you remember what a sinusoid and wavelength are? In order to define and describe stress, vowels, consonants and intonation from an accoustic perspective, we will tackle a few elements of physics through PRAAT, such as the distinction between noise and sounds, but also intensity, voice pitch and the formant structure of vowels.

Voir la page complète

Linguistics is frequently misconstrued as "abstract", "dry and technical", "removed from real life situations". Do linguists really inhabit a different world from the rest of academia? Are they self-indulgent theoreticians? 

Voir la page complète

This seminar aims at studying the rich connections between the worlds of music, politics and religion in 18^th-century Britain. Following George Frederic Haendel’s arrival in England in 1712 (originally as Georg Friedrich Händel, from Germany), the production of court music, operas and religious oratorios resulted from an intense and fruitful dialogue between composers, men of the Church and the world of politics. While composers, Handel and others, massively sought inspiration from the stories told in the Old Testament, the Anglican church viewed music as a means to “illustrate” their belief that England was, indeed, the New Jerusalem. Politicians – mostly the Crown and the Court – extensively relied on musical compositions, commissioned or not, to build up the nation’s narrative.

Although never an official composer per se, Haendel played a major role in this cultural/religious/political project. His many hymns, odes and oratorios form a coherent body of musical works whose religious, political and ideological dimensions offer a fascinating insight into a more general issue: how can art take part in the building up of a nation’s identity?

Students DO NOT need to know how to read music to take up this seminar. Written sources from librettos, newspapers, diaries, letters, pamphlets as well as simply listening to pieces of music will serve as a diverse and easily accessible material for the various presentations.

Voir la page complète

The subject of this seminar is the history of British radicalism, with a focus on two moments: the late 19^th century around the work of William Morris, and the post-war years, up to the 1980s.

It will explore the intellectual, artistic and material production both of Morris and his circle and of alternative cultures in the post-war period.

1^st 6 weeks: Béatrice Laurent

Steeped in the romantic poetic tradition as well as in Pre-Raphaelite art, William Morris’s program of artistic transformation of Victorian Britain was paradoxically a product of the age whose ‘civilization’ he was so adamant to condemn. Morris’s rejection of middle-class mass culture motivated his efforts to restore ancient crafts; to revive medieval ways of life such as the Victorians invented them; and finally to strive to make his dream of a better world come true through political activism.

News from Nowhere (1890), “a Utopian romance” as well as a book supporting anarchist ideology, details the radical reconstruction of society. It will serve as a base for the exploration of late-Victorian aesthetics and politics, and will help students appreciate the contemporary scope and significance of William Morris’s revolutionary cultural legacy.

2^nd 6 weeks: Mathilde Bertrand

The second half of the seminar will examine the evolutions of radicalism in post-war Britain through the development of alternative cultures and “new social movements”, while exploring intellectual debates within the British left. Developing in arenas outside of parliamentary politics, post-war radicalism sought to combine theory and practice with a view to redefining political action. The seminar will pay close attention to artistic expression and cultural practices within radical cultures. The themes covered will include the intellectual debates of the New Left in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the cultural politics of the underground in the 1960s; the challenges of feminism; the emergence of participatory forms of political action around “community politics” and “community arts” practices; the influence of Black and Asian political and cultural organisations on a post-colonial critique of Britain’s imperial legacies; the cultural and class politics of Punk and the question of its position in the British history of radicalism.

Voir la page complète

The time separating the Declaration of Sentiments (1848) from the 19^th amendment that granted American women the right of vote (1920) marked a turning point in the history of women in the US. Although a number of women rose to prominence in the male-dominated literary world of the second half of the 19^th century, most of them have long been forgotten. The recovery work to which feminist criticism gave an impulse in the 1970s and that is still ongoing today has drawn attention to the pivotal role played by some of these writers in the redefinition of women’s place in American society. This course will initiate a reflection on the way in which these women dealt with such issues as slavery, domesticity, industrialization and the rise of a visual culture in the fast-developing society of their times. Due attention will be paid to the Gothic genre that allowed them to express their most intimate concerns and anxieties under the cover of supernatural fiction, as well as to the regional sketch, a supposedly minor genre that some of them turned into an instrument of resistance to the dominant patriarchal ideology.

Voir la page complète

Ce séminaire propose d’étudier l’écriture de la souffrance — qu’elle soit physique, mentale ou morale, consécutive à une maladie ou à une expérience traumatique — dans la littérature américaine, et le rôle que joue l’écriture face à la maladie ou au trauma. Il sera divisé en deux parties.

La première partie s’intéressera au récit de maladie (« illness narrative ») et tentera de répondre à la question : comment se disent les maux, physiques ou psychiques, avec les mots du récit ? L’étude portera sur deux œuvres :

• un récit de fiction : The Story of Forgetting (2008) de Stefan Merrill Block,
• une nouvelle : « The Yellow Wallpaper » (1892) de Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Il s’agira d’étudier les modes d’énonciation de la maladie (et de la douleur), ainsi que les modes de représentation du corps ou de l’esprit malades dans deux types de récit (fiction, nouvelle) à la première et à la troisième personne. On s’intéressera aussi aux formes de résistance que peut fournir l’écriture (humour, ironie, parodie, discours métaphorique ou fragmentation pour ne citer que quelques exemples) avant de tenter une évaluation de l’approche dite « vitaliste » des philosophes Georges Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze ou, plus récemment, Philippe Godin.

Dans le prolongement de ce premier volet, la seconde partie du séminaire permettra d’aborder des textes d’écrivaines américaines dans lesquels la question du trauma tient une place centrale. Ce volet s’articulera dans un premier temps autour des modes de représentation du corps en souffrance, corps qu’il s’agit de concevoir autant dans sa dimension individuelle (un corps de femme ici) que collective (le corps social). Nous nous pencherons ensuite sur des textes qui tentent de mettre en mots l’indicible d’une expérience traumatique, qu’il s’agisse de l’holocauste (Ozick) ou de l’odyssée des « picture brides », confrontées à la réalité du « Rêve » américain et condamnées à l’oubli dans les camps d’internement pour Japonais lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Les œuvres au programme sont les suivantes :

• les deux nouvelles rassemblées dans le recueil The Shawl (1989) de Cynthia Ozick,
• un roman contemporain : The Buddha in the Attic (2011) de Julie Otsuka.

N.B. Il est vivement recommandé aux étudiants s’inscrivant à ce séminaire d’avoir lu Beloved de Toni Morrison (édition recommandée : New York, Vintage, 2004 [1987]). Il y sera fait référence au début du cours pour poser les jalons de la réflexion. L’essai de Morrison intitulé « The Site of Memory » (cf. bibliographie ci-dessous) fait partie des textes fondateurs dont la lecture est aussi conseillée en priorité.

Voir la page complète

This seminar will explore the relations between Transcendentalism and women's rights, family relations, and perceptions of childhood and education. It will draw almost exclusively on writings from the period. 

N.B. The seminar will be conducted in English.  International students are welcome.

Voir la page complète

This course is designed for students with an advanced knowledge of English and French who are interested in English and American studies, translation studies, comparative literature, literary studies, literary history, linguistics and stylistics. It will be particularly useful to students contemplating a career in translation or translation studies. Starting with a survey of the history of British and American literature in translation in France, we will also read and discuss landmark criticism in translation studies while identifying and evaluating the translation strategies and techniques at work in a number of translated works, with a focus on retranslation. Through a comparative study of translations, we will focus on the ethics and politics of translation, combining approaches drawn from sociology, stylistics, linguistics, gender theory and philosophy. 

The course will be conducted in French and English.

Voir la page complète

History—both the actual physical materials that help historians establish a timeline of events of the past and the imaginings contemporaries have of those events—is a crucial part of feminist and gay rights activism. This course analyzes feminist organizing in the U.K. and gay rights organizing in the U.S. from two perspectives. First, it delves into specific historical moments that have created significant cultural and political reverberations, such the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp from 1981. Second, it examines how those events and others become parts of the storytelling used by the feminist and gay rights movements as tools to advance their demands in specific national contexts. From this dual articulation, the seminar invites students to examine the relationship between the past and the present as well as the stakes that this reciprocity has for advancing or hindering social progress. Students will engage in independent and original research as they learn to engage in historical archival research and think about these issues from the perspective of apprentice scholars.

Voir la page complète

This seminar explores one of the richest periods in the history of the American cinema. For many reasons (economic as well as cultural and socio-political ones), the 1970s saw the budding of a new kind of cinema that was totally opposed to the earlier classical way of making films in Hollywood.

We will therefore first analyze these reasons, before dealing with this new conception of the cinema in those days. The core of that seminar will be the detailed study of the most typical features of the main films of the period. The classes will alternate the study of some representative scenes with a more global view of how the cinema was conceived by all these talented directors (Bogdanovich, Penn, Hopper, Altman, Coppola, Scorsese, Friedkin, De Palma…) and by some producers (Schneider, Rafelson, Evans…). There will also be a focus on William Friedkin, whose career does encompass the most striking facets of that conception of the cinema, the director having somehow managed to outlive the glorious 1970s to enrich his filmography in the 21th century with films that still ensue from the canon of the now late New Hollywood.

And so, we will eventually see the reasons why this New Hollywood ended in the early 1980s, and we will look for some traces of its heritage in the cinema of the following decades, not only in Hollywood (and in Friedkin’s filmography) but also around the world (Lars Von Trier’s and Thomas Vinterberg’s “Dogme 95 Manifesto” sharing, for examples, some beliefs in the “Cinéma Vérité” advocated in the New Hollywood).

As mentioned before, the class will be based on the study of some excerpts, and this requires the active participation of the students who will be asked to comment on some aspects of the studied scenes.

Voir la page complète

Dans ce séminaire, nous entendons réévaluer l'œuvre de Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) du point de vue de l'intermédialité, considérée comme un processus d'intersection entre les médias, en nous concentrant sur une variété d'œuvres, habituellement classées comme prose ou drame, de cet artiste multimédial qui a travaillé avec le texte, le film, le théâtre, la radio, la peinture.

Voir la page complète

“Otherness” is a concept we handle with relatively fluidity – in our XXIst century language at least.  The umbrella term denotes the foreign, in gender, in nationality, in culture, in body and mind, it embraces what we do not understand, struggle to recognize, or cringe to self-appropriate. Introspectively, it refers to that part of ourselves we do not care to show, or have not come to terms with, indeed, have not yet discovered, and therefore have no control over.  Otherness comes to designate “us”. By contrast, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries do not yet talk of otherness in this way. Not with this term, at any rate. That is not to say that the notion is not in circulation.  So how does early modern England think and express “otherness”? How does this notion receive expression and representation? This seminar explores the early modern stage, from Everyman and Faustus, to plays by Shakespeare, Webster and Dekker, with the aim of identifying what the pre and post-reformation theatres consider as to be “otherness” –from spitting images within to spitting diseases without – how they word it, perform it, and explore it.

Students will spend six weeks reading extracts from plays and critical theory (Lupton, Kottman), in particular, French critical theory (Levinas, Derrida). They will choose one topic among a set of topics put to them before 1^st November. They will write a paper of 700-800 words on the topic of their choice. The paper will be given in at the latest for the 1^st January.

Students are particularly invited, during the course, to take part in conversations and rehearsal in writing in weekly forums devised to the effect. This is a space where they ask questions in methodology and share ideas they are working around.

Voir la page complète

In this seminar we will examine the essay, and more particularly the personal essay, as a form. What makes an essay an essay? What distinguishes it from related forms such as the letter, the article, the sermon, or the academic essay? The essay has often been characterized by its spontaneity, its lack of system—characteristics which make it difficult to define. According to one of its great American practitioners, Joseph Epstein, it is “a form of discovery,” and so entirely unpredictable.

One way to approach the essay is to look at its history. The modern prose essay was born just outside Bordeaux at the end of the sixteenth century with the publication of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais (1580). After 1603, when these were translated by John Florio, a wave of imitations appeared in English. Montaigne's title, and the word essay itself, alerted readers to the fact that they were about to read something new, that they were aproaching a new point of view, a renewal in perspective. Later, the essay proliferated with the rise of the periodical which created a market for essay writing.

Right from the beginning, the essay had an anti-authoritarian bent. Montaigne managed to avoid being accused of impiety by claiming his essays were merely sketches, and so of little importance. His strategy served to circumvent authority. Apparent humility has remained an attribute of the essay, which often begins with the particular—personal—experience of the essayist and connects it to universal questions. Other important characteristics of the essay are its questioning stance, its skepticim, its openness, and thus its anti-dogmatism. The essay is not a means of conveying the whole (or even a whole) truth. It is the expression one observer’s vision.

In the United States, a large body of work has been produced since colonial times. We will work chronologically, from Benjamin Franklin to Joan Didion.

Voir la page complète

The vote in favour of leaving the European Union in June 2016, a move finally introduced only in 2020, marks a turning point for the United Kingdom not only in its relations with the rest of Europe, with which it remains closely tied in numerous ways but also in its own nature. Indeed, the deep divisions in the United Kingdom that the 2016 vote revealed – along lines of social class, levels of education, age etc. – have placed enormous strains on the cohesion of British society. British politics has also become increasingly divided and confrontational. One of the most significant dividing lines that was shown by the 2016 referendum was that between voters in England and Wales, where a majority voted in favour of ‘leave’, and those in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where a clear majority voted ‘remain’. This has led many observers to argue that Brexit is a phenomenon of English nationalism. For many Scots the fact that their choice, to remain in the EU, has been overridden by English votes has reinforced their support for Scottish independence. Although Scottish voters voted against independence in a referendum held in 2014 the question is now (2021) very much back on the political agenda (Indyref 2).

The questions of Brexit and the future of the relationship between the various nations of Great Britain – Wales, Scotland and England – are, therefore closely interrelated. Uncertainty over the future of Northern Ireland – continuing within the United Kingdom or reunited with the Republic of Ireland - has also been increased as a result of Brexit.

This course will begin by taking a brief historical perspective in an attempt to see how all these fundamental questions came to such prominence in the last decade. The roots of many of them are to be found in the history of the British Isles and this course will go back to the formations of separate national identities across the British Isles, how the relations between them evolved, and how the various ‘unions’ came about: by conquest, by assimilation or by unification. Conquest and occupation of Wales and of Ireland from the 12^th century onwards, followed by Acts of Union with Wales (1536) and Scotland (1707), created Great Britain. The Act of Union (1800) between Great Britain and Ireland created the United Kingdom. Throughout this long period, opposing forces operated, some working towards unification and unity, others in favour of the separation and the disintegration of the unions.

The main focus of the course will then move onto the more contemporary debates, from the post-second world war period up to the present day. The end of Empire and the steady decline in Britain’s industrial and economic strength after 1945 transformed both its position in the world and began to question its internal cohesion. The decision in the 1960s to seek entry into the emerging European Community, later the European Union, suggested that the country was rethinking its national identity along more European lines. At the same time both Scotland and Wales saw the emergence of well-organised, and increasingly popular, nationalist movements that were challenging the very existence of the United Kingdom. These two parallel developments from the 1960s onwards will constitute the main part of this programme.

Today, many supporters of Brexit see a bright future for the United Kingdom: freed from what they see as the chains of the EU, they argue in favour of a ‘global Britain’, one able to forge new links with partners around the world. On the other side of the Brexit divide this is seen as no more than an idle dream, based on imperial nostalgia. For them Brexit threatens the break-up of the Union and the victory of a ‘little England’ outlook. Although it is not possible to foresee which of these two visions will prove correct this course will attempt to understand how the present situation came about.

Voir la page complète

“Re-writing First Encounters in Contemporary Australian Literature”.

The second half of this seminar will focus on Kate Grenville’s novel The Lieutenant (2008). This is the second novel in a trilogy set in the very early days of the British colonisation of Australia. The protagonist, Daniel Rooke, is based on William Dawes (1762-1836), a marine with a keen interest in astronomy who volunteered to go on the First Fleet of convicts sent to Australia in 1788. He was fascinated by Aboriginal culture and attempted to write a grammar and dictionary of the local Aboriginal language. He was forced to return to Britain after making known his disapproval of a retaliatory expedition against the Aborigines.

The Lieutenant is one of several Australian novels published at the turn of the twenty-first century which revisit early Australian history in an attempt both to challenge traditional history, which systematically excluded the Indigenous population, and to deal with the guilt of being descended from of people responsible for massacring Indigenous Australians.

Classes will explore the relationship between history and fiction. Topics covered will include the use of historical sources in a work of fiction, Aboriginal language, the depiction of violence, the creation of a sense of place and an exploration of the changing notions of Self and Other.

This seminar will be conducted in English. International students are welcome.

Voir la page complète

The history of Britain since the last decades of the nineteenth century, appears to plot an inexorable decline: from global ‘superpower’, sure of its identity and its international mission, to a medium-sized, regional power, hovering between reluctant proximity to, and temporary involvement with, successive European projects and attempts to rekindle global ambitions. 
The economic realities of Britain’s altered position in the international hierarchy of nations seem very clear. Less clear are the relationships between: a) the changing geopolitical role played by the British state within an evolving international concert of nations and the different crises which affect this; b) the desire of some in Britain to see change as necessarily reductive and to try to halt and even reverse national decline; c) the political and historiographical battles which have taken place around a) and b).
The position of Britain in Europe and beyond, its relationships with its key foreign partners, also have important implications for Britain itself, for the British state and for British society, and for how the British see themselves and how others see them. The changes that have occurred in these issues over the course of the past 150 years will form another important aspect of this course.  
This course aims to better understand these relationships and to give students a nuanced view of the changing role of Britain since 1870: attitudes of British observers to the changes, and of foreign observers as well. The broader aim is to discuss the nature and effect of concepts such as « decline » and national « identity » or « mission » and how they in turn affect changes to the operation of the international system.  

Voir la page complète

This seminar will examine the grotesque mode, a recurrent feature of American literature, by focusing on fiction works from the 19^th and the 20^th centuries. The grotesque is notoriously difficult to define. In a recent study, American critic Geoffrey Galt Harpham begins with this elusive definition: “Grotesqueries both require and defeat definition; they are neither so regular and rhythmical that they settle easily into our categories, nor so unprecedented that we do not recognize them at all. They stand at a margin of consciousness between the known and the unknown, the perceived and the unperceived, calling into question the adequacy of our ways of organizing the world” (3). For French scholar Maurice Lévy, the grotesque “is the presence of something unacceptable around us or within us that we turn into a circus freak in order to domesticate it or make it less unbearable” (162). Paula Uruburu, an American scholar, underlines that the grotesque deliberately arouses “contradictory emotions, such as fear, anger, disgust, hate, surprise, and amusement in a reader,” hence the “repulsion-fascination syndrome” (13) it provokes. The grotesque, therefore, requires special deciphering that will be examined in the seminar. An analysis of a selection of grotesque American fiction will also allow us to study the reasons for the use of the grotesque and the role it plays.

The students following this seminar will be expected to have read the books on the syllabus before the beginning of classes—most of them can be accessed on the internet. They will have to make oral presentations drawing parallels between theoretical books in the bibliography and the fiction works on the syllabus. The stress will be put on mastering the tools necessary to analyze literary works, on methodology and oral expression.

Voir la page complète

Le mémoire de recherche, préparé sur deux ans, constitue l’une des bases principales de la formation de l’étudiant.e de master. Le thème de recherche, choisi en concertation avec un enseignant-chercheur du département des études des mondes anglophones, aura été posé au plus tard en fin de M1. L’année de M2 est consacrée à l’approfondissement de la recherche et à la rédaction du mémoire. En fin de S3, une étape de bilan donne lieu à une série de vérifications destinées à soutenir l’étudiant.e dans sa recherche et à ajuster ses efforts avant les dernières étapes préalables à la rédaction puis à la soutenance. Cette étape n’exclut naturellement pas d’autres entrevues avec le directeur ou la directrice de mémoire à d’autres moments du M1 ou du M2.

La soutenance doit avoir lieu au plus tard le 30 juin de l’année de M2. Une dérogation peut être demandée par l’étudiant.e pour report de soutenance (au plus tard le 15 septembre de l’année universitaire suivante). Les motifs de dérogation sont définis de façon très rigoureuse : recherche de terrain (par exemple recherche en bibliothèque à l’étranger ou conduite d’entretiens nécessitant un traitement particulier), problèmes de santé. Les dérogations sont accordées par le VP CFVU. Les demandes de dérogation doivent donc être adressées directement au VP CFVU et envoyées au bureau de M. Frédéric Cerf (Bureau des Masters, Bâtiment d’accueil), accompagnées d’une lettre du directeur / de la directrice de mémoire.

Voir la page complète

Il est recommandé à tous les étudiants inscrits dans le Master Recherche d’assister à un maximum de manifestations scientifiques relatives au champ anglophone : civilisation, littérature, cinéma, traduction, traductologie, linguistique. Il pourra s’agir de conférences, colloques, journées d’étude, séminaires organisés par les Unités de recherche, UMR ou l’École Doctorale de l’université Bordeaux Montaigne, ou encore par d’autres instances, en fonction du projet de recherche ou professionnel ou des centres d’intérêt de chaque étudiant. Cependant les manifestations organisées par l’UR CLIMAS (Cultures et Littératures des Mondes AnglophoneS), et notamment le séminaire mensuel Intersections, devront être considérés en priorité dans la mesure où le MASTER d’Etudes Anglophones est adossé à cette unité de recherche, qui rassemble la majorité des enseignants chercheurs du département des Pays anglophones.

A la rentrée universitaire, les étudiants seront renvoyés à un calendrier des diverses manifestations suggérées, sans que cette liste soit exhaustive.

Voir la page complète

Le semestre 4 est entièrement consacré au mémoire. La soutenance a lieu au plus tard le 30 juin. Une demande de dérogation pour soutenance tardive (pendant la première quinzaine de septembre) peut être adressée au Bureau des Masters de la Scolarité centrale (M. Frédéric Cerf) par l’étudiant.e concerné.e, accompagnée d’une lettre du directeur / de la directrice de mémoire, attestant des raisons du report de la soutenance. Les dérogations sont accordées de façon exceptionnelles pour les motifs suivants : incidents de santé, recherche de terrain (notamment déplacement à l’étranger pour recherches en bibliothèque). Des circonstances exceptionnelles, telles que la crise sanitaire de la COVID-19, peuvent entraîner un aménagement de ces règles, comme de l’ensemble des règles et procédures exposées dans le présent Guide.

Voir la page complète