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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.

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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.

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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? 

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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.

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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’? 

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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.

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