Option allemand / Anglais

Le cours vise à l’étude approfondie des courants picturaux du réalisme à la Nouvelle Objectivité. L’objectif est d’apprendre à analyser un tableau et d’acquérir une bonne connaissance des champs de la création picturale.

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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 stimulating new readings of American literature through the lens of theories that have developed in the field of gender and women’s studies over the last decades. The students will be introduced to a wide array of critical perspectives, ranging from early advocates of gynocriticism and theoreticians of écriture féminine to champions of intersectionality, queer studies, masculinity studies, and ecofeminism. Special attention will be paid to the development of Black and Chicana feminist discourse and to their contribution to gender politics. Such key concepts as revision, mestizaje, silence, queering, performance, empowerment, resistance, embodiment, margin and center will be used to foster a revaluation of certain canonical or lesser-known texts and, sometimes, to uncover hidden layers of meaning beneath more conventional readings.

The literary texts included will be drawn from different periods and from a variety of genres (novel, short fiction, poetry). Extracts from works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Alice Walker, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Carmen Tafolla, Paula Gunn Allen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and many more will be analysed and discussed in class but the students are also invited to offer reading suggestions of their own if they wish to do so.

This seminar will be conducted in French and in English.

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New Folk Horror in British Cinema (J.-F. Baillon)

This seminar will offer a critical examination of the resurgence of “folk horror cinema” in British Cinema since the 2000s. Based on cultural references involving neo-pagan cults, witchcraft and a largely fantasised rewriting of the national past in terms of pre-Christian heritage, this profoundly ambiguous tradition has variously been re-appropriated by feminist as well as masculinist discourses and has given rise to a range of aesthetic propositions, from exploitation cinema to “elevated horror”. 

New Folk Horror in American Cinema (C. Chambost)

From times immemorial, superstitions have been at the origins of horrific folk tales taking place in the wilderness or in rural areas and which were told either to restrict people’s freedom, or to entertain them in some spellbinding manner. 
This course analyzes how British and American horror cinemas have both developed a subgenre based on stories that resort to some folklore deeply engrained in a country’s traditions. Using recurring themes like religion, hostile landscapes, supernatural creatures, these films rely on Man’s deepest fears, and they may also be a means for some artists to criticize the human tendency to act in some superstitious and harmful ways.

The course will study British then American folk horror films, pinpointing the specificities of both cinemas

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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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Thomas More’s Utopia in the early 16th century created a genre of writing and a mode of thought that
was to have a longstanding fortune in Britain. Besides a strong tradition of utopian writing, revolutionary
moments prompted attempts at realizing utopia on earth. Think of the Owenist industrial communities
in the early nineteenth century. Think also of the ‘Diggers’ of the 1650s English Revolution, who earned
their nickname because took their spades and dug up a wasteland in Surrey, establishing a short-lived
communistic colony of Puritan saints. This seminar explores the intertwining of revolutionary junctures
in Britain, utopian thought and/or practical realizations, and their impact on gender relations.

This course addresses itself to students of civilisation, literature and linguistics. Students will
construct their corpus of study and choose their own critical approach.
Utopia lends itself to many kinds of approaches, including intellectual history, the history of
political movements (during the English Revolution of the 1640, the French Revolution, etc.),
translation, literary studies (utopia as a genre, wordplay, onomastics, narratological perspectives...) and
linguistics (imagined languages, metalinguistic comments, eg Thomas Spence’s phonetic alphabet).

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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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Speakers are social movers (Birdwhistell 1970) who physically engage in communication. Their bodily moves are not random but patterned – and always meaningful. In this seminar we learn to observe how speech is “orchestrated to a choreography of the human body” (Asher 1972). We look at the way meanings - abstract or concrete - are physically produced and enacted on the socio-interactional stage. We start by observing facial expressions and co-speech gestures in silent movies. We gradually become aware that speech production necessarily comes with gestural action.

This multimodal course resembles no other, in that combines formal research seminars, animated classroom discussions, creative workshop sessions and film screenings.

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 This seminar will explore the relations between Transcendentalism and various reform movements and utopian projects of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, in the areas of religion, education, women's rights, socialism, pacificism, and abolitionism.   Special emphasis will be placed on three themes: 1) the religious and philosophical roots of the idea of human perfectibility; 2) the self-image of the age (the nineteenth-century as the Age of Progress), and its critics; 3) the tension between individual and collective ideals of reform. 

N.B. The 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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This seminar will explore the emergence and tranformations of women’s cinema in Britain from the 1950s with a focus on the contemporary period. We will examine the position of women directors within the film industry (mainstream productions and art films) as well as their appropriation of genre and history. 

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Ce séminaire structurant sur le 19ème siècle britannique, est centré sur Londres et les ailleurs. Londres est le centre névralgique du 19ème siècle anglais, un objet incontournable des études d’anglicistes – elle se prête donc très bien à une approche pluridisiplinaire, civilisationnelle, artistique, historique, et littéraire. Des éclairages complémentaires donneront à voir la spécificité de la capitale, au 19ème siècle. Mais Londres est aussi une invitation au voyage, spatiale (les étrangers qui visitent Londres, mais également, à l’inverse, les ailleurs de l’Empire/Commonwealth, l’orientalisme qu’ils génèrent) mais aussi temporelle : Londres est aujourd’hui une figure, elle se prête à tous les engouements « néo », et le Londres victorien semble résolument moderne.

N. Jaëck traitera de la représentation du paysage urbain chez Dickens, du développement de la banlieue, dont la représentation littéraire conduit à une prise de position politique et à une forme de mutation narrative. Elle comparera cette représentation à celle de Doyle, et à celle de Conrad, où le quai génère l’aventure. La persistance de l’imaginaire de Londres dans la fiction néovictorienne pourra également être abordée.

Ph. Chassaigne évoquera l’underworld homosexuel du Londres victorien, à travers des documents variés: le roman pornographique Tales of the City of the Plain, or, the Confessions a Mary-Ann (disponible sur archive.org), le journal Illustrated Police News en ce qui concerne l’affaire “Boulton and Park” encore le procès d’Oscar Wilde.

B. Laurent proposera une réflexion sur la Tamise comme lieu de passage, de pollution, de perdition. De 1858, année de “la grande puanteur”, aux titanesques travaux de construction des quais, la gestion de l’eau fluviale, et son assainissement furent au coeur des préoccupations des Londonniens. A travers l’analyse d’un corpus de textes et d’images, nous examinerons les faits et l’imagerie qui étaient associés au fleuve.

Trevor Harris traitera de l’expansion de Londres tout au long du dix-neuvième siècle. La capitale est perçue comme lieu de déperdition ou de déclin à travers des guides ou enquêtes sociales, ou encore des récits de voyage : un lieu étrange(r), déjà un « ailleurs ». Cette capitale impériale maintenant disparue perdure encore, pourtant, aujourd’hui dans des objets et pratiques néo-victoriens qui tentent de la faire revivre et de nous la rendre de nouveau familière.

Laurence Machet s’intéressera au système carceral à travers l’étude des hospices pour indigents (workhouses) et des asiles. Alors que le dix-neuvième siècle est marqué en Grande-Bretagne par une formidable expansion, les lieux emblématiques de l’époque sont des espaces de confinement, ce qui conduira à réexaminer la notion de ‘care’.

A. Sotropa abordera la sculpture victorienne sous différents aspects : commandes publiques et commandes privées (du monument public à la statuette( dans une ville qui, sur le plan artistique, cherche à rivaliser avec Paris. La génération des sculpteurs actifs dans les années 1880-1900 semblent rejeter l’exemple rodinien, adopté par toute l’Europe, et forger une nouvelle esthétique : la New Sculpture. 

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Il s’agira dans ce séminaire d’essayer de circonscrire et de qualifier un espace littéraire à la fois un peu flou et un peu furtif, niché entre les deux systèmes de signification littéraires majeurs et constitués que sont le Réalisme et le Modernisme anglais. Il s’agira de démontrer à la fois la cohérence et l’intérêt formel de cette période intermédiaire.

On montrera que des auteurs contemporains aussi apparemment hétérogènes que Dickens, Conrad, Stevenson ou Doyle partagent, au tournant du siècle, le même désir d’innovation littéraire ; ils entreprennent tous, chacun à sa manière, de redéfinir le rapport entre le réel et la représentation. Dans cette période de latence littéraire où le réalisme classique semble avoir perdu de sa pertinence, et où le modernisme ne s’est pas encore érigé en système, ces auteurs ont précisément en commun cette position historique transitoire, ce désir de s’installer sciemment dans l’imminence, et d’y puiser les structures d’un texte nouveau, encore à inventer.

Tous exploitent le caractère aventureux et indéfini de cette période littéraire que l’on peut, en suivant Barthes, qualifier de « Neutre », au sens où elle cède à la tentation de déjouer les paradigmes. Tous investissent cet espace aventureux de l’avènement pour y puiser l’inspiration d’une littérature nouvelle. On s’attachera donc à montrer que loin d’être un prolongement ou une annonce, une fin de partie réaliste ou un avant-dire moderniste, cette fin de siècle redéfinit le texte littéraire autour d’un contexte commun, d’une problématique commune, et de stratégies littéraires similaires. Tous ces auteurs, au-delà de leurs différences, exploitent l’indécision historique contextuelle, et proposent, autour de la redéfinition du roman d’aventure, une littérature soucieuse que la stabilisation textuelle soit toujours provisoire, que le sens ne prenne pas.

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Partant du présupposé que les différences sexuées sont au fondement d’une structure inégalitaire Homme/Femme à laquelle se greffe d’autres formes de domination, notamment de race et de classe, et que cette inégalité résulte d’une construction sociale reposant sur des préjugés et des stéréotypes, nous explorerons comment ces mécanismes d’assignation de genre sont à la fois reflétés, construits mais aussi remis en cause dans la littérature. L’enjeu du séminaire est de réfléchir aux processus de construction et de déconstruction du genre dans un corpus de textes littéraires anglophones et francophones, et aussi dans les va-et-vient entre les langues et les cultures, dans la mesure où le déplacement géographique induit aussi, très souvent, un déplacement des enjeux sexués et textués : comment le genre s’inscrit-il dans la littérature et comment se traduit-il ?

Nous envisagerons l’espace littéraire comme un espace symbolique où les modèles genrés sont aptes à être transgressés et contestés. Nous alternerons pour ce faire cours théorique et analyse textuelle de textes littéraires proposés en langue anglaise et française. Ces textes seront systématiquement contextualisés et historicisés, afin de voir comment l’écriture et la traduction littéraires sont déterminées par l’idéologie. Enfin, nous nous demanderons quelles peuvent être les modalités d’une traduction littéraire dite « féministe » et quels sont les apports possibles de la théorie queer à l’analyse littéraire et traductologique.

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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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The mask on stage is a fundamental topic in theatre studies that has received much coverage. Less studied, arguably, is the moment when the mask comes off, or down. The fall of the mask on stage always creates a gasp, a smile, a sense of horror, awe, satisfaction amid the audience as with the characters who witness the event. Which ever way you look at it, this becomes a public event. This seminar explores our reactions in such moments, on stage, by asking : What is the character letting fall, when it lets fall its mask? What do we include in the definition of a mask ? In deed, depending on how we understand the concept of the mask, the “fall” can take on a variety of different significances, and the consequences of such an event can make the play fall in the category of a comedy, or a tragedy. This seminar is about character identity as much as it is about audience response, or the representation of risk running, immunity, disease, loss of self, loss of life.

The first section of the seminar, from weeks 1 to 6 explore our response to the « existential » nature of the theatrical drop of the mask. Weeks 6 to12 the semester concentrate on the risks run when the mask falls : risks of losing face, when discovered by the enemy, or even risks of losing one’s life in times of crisis, in times of an epidemic. 

Students will each week be given an extract of a play with supporting critical material to read. The seminar will provide a supporting analysis in the shape of a video, All documents are provided on the e-moodle platform. Students are invited to explore language, gesture, costumes, as well as to think about the language on disease (and the spread of) that spans through the plays.

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