Axe « Puissances du Mode Mineur »

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.

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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.  

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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