Séminaires

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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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 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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“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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