Axe « Intermédialité, mémoires et communautés »

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

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 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

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

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

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

“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