Séminaires

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.

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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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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 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.

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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 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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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.

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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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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 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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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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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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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.

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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.

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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 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.

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“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.

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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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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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