Séminaire d'ouverture

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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Enseignante : Mounira CHATTI

Littératures plurilingues du monde arabe (francophonie ; arabophonie ; Maghreb ; Machreq). Orientalisme et occidentalisme. Littérature et révolution. Exotisme, voyage, nomadisme, errance.

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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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Intervenante : Lise Segas, MCF Espganol

L’Amérique latine (ou Abya Yala) est actuellement le laboratoire le plus dynamique en matière de théories et de pratiques féministes intersectionnelles et décoloniales radicales et innovantes. Nombre d’actrices-teurs militant.e.s, théoricien.ne.s, activistes et/ou artistes, s’emploient  à questionner les cloisonnements du savoir et des pratiques de sa transmission, depuis un positionnement qui conteste la prééminence de la raison aux dépens du corps et des affects et la catégorie « objet de recherche », pour poser celle de sujets producteurs de connaissances. Iels s’inscrivent dans des écoles méconnues en Europe comme la pensée du sociologue colombien Orlando Fals Borda (la sentipensée) ou encore des féministes communautaires bolivien.ne.s et guatémaltèques (Julieta Paredes, María Galindo, Lorena Cabnal), entre autres, mais aussi hors de tout cadre conceptuel et théorique universitaire occidental (Victoria Santa Cruz).

Les pratiques artistiques sont à ce titre largement convoquées pour penser, vivre, exprimer et sentir autrement. Ce séminaire nous donnera l’occasion de découvrir à travers les musiques urbaines latino-américaines féministes (rap, reggaeton, champeta) de différents pays et contextes, des pratiques contre-hégémoniques de production/diffusion, des textes engagés (en traduction) au croisement de plusieurs traditions musicales et culturelles, des vidéo clips et des performances ainsi que la transfusion des théories féministes décoloniales, cuir et afro-féministes dans ces productions artistiques qui resignifient des corps objectivés et colonisés, tout comme la mise en pratique d'une culture féministe de circulation/organisation transrégionale propre à l’Amérique latine (Abya Yala).

Le séminaire a pour objectif d’articuler un dialogue entre théories et pratiques féministes en croisant pensées et productions artistiques musicales.

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