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.

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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.

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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.

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‘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.

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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.

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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.

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