MASTER 1 ETUDES ANGLOPHONE

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En ANGLAIS: This class, in the form of a lecture, introduces students to the fundamental issues and challenges raised by Digital Humanities in the fields of Literature (M.Baudry) and Civilisation (M.Davie). These lectures aim to provide students with the conceptual framework for the study of Digital Humanities, allowing them in the second semester to turn (in the speciality they choose) to exploring concrete applications in smaller seminar groups.

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En ANGLAIS: This class is an introduction to Atlantic history, which since the late 1960s has offered a new geographic focus to study interactions and exchanges between spaces that used to be seen as essentially heterogenous. Starting with an examination of the nationalist foundations of history-writing, we will survey the perspectives given by the Atlantic turn and identify complementary levels of historical inquiry at the continental, hemispheric or global levels.

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En ANGLAIS: This course aims to provide students with a detailed knowledge of crime and criminal justice policy in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. It will concentrate on the way in which Victorians and Edwardians sought to make sense of the apparent “crime wave” hitting their country, together with the policies put in place in an effort to bring crime under control. This discussion will be placed in a historiographical context and a varied selection of contemporary documents will be used to illustrate the themes of the course. Among the themes covered will be the “rise” of crime; transportation and the death penalty; Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon and the penitentiary movement; Victorian attitudes to murder; women and crime; policing London; and the “scientific” study of the criminal (phrenology, physiognomy, criminal anthropology and criminology).

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En ANGLAIS: This course consists of an overview of political theory in the twentieth century. It aims at shedding light on the historical context and its evolutions in Britain especially, as well as mastering the basic tenets of the key political debates. Every week one or several texts will be studied along with their context.

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En ANGLAIS: The 19th century literary tradition in Great-Britain is often reduced to the conflicts between Faith in Progress on the one hand (and the emergence of so-called “Victorian values”) and rational scientific investigations that buttress or debunk such a spiritual progress, on the other. Whereas many scientists strove at establishing new criteria and groundbreaking new theories (Darwin's Origins of Species published in 1859 usually serving as a milestone), artists never hesitated to flout the Laws of Nature from the beginning to the very end of that chaotic century. Subversion is never too far under the pens of writers and novelists of the period, although the medium (the published text and the novel format) remains conventionally intact. This course will consider what the term Nature encompasses in the 19th century (very different from the idea of Nature in the 18th century) and how men and women of Letters challenged, probed, deconstructed, uprooted and sometimes denied what is at one particular time or space considered as natural and radical. We will also see how the medium (black letters forming words and sentences printed on a white page to tell a linear story) enriched itself with far more complex iconographical and semiotic ploys towards the fin de siècle.

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En ANGLAIS: This class aims to equip students with an awareness and understanding of the ways in which new words are coined and of the extent to which French and English show contrasts and similarities. It offers a detailed overview of the main processes of word-formation (affixation, compounding, morphostasis, clipping, desuffixation, initialization, blending, replication) and introduces the core concepts of morphology both through weekly reading assignments and through the hands-on analysis of linguistic data.

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En ANGLAIS: The course proposes to look into the new type of fiction that emerged with Modernism, a period during which the short story became a privileged field of experimentation and the novel thoroughly reinvented itself. We will be discussing the specificities of the modernist short story through a number of key writers (mostly Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce) and will examine the lasting influence of a type of short fiction that turned away from the “plotty story” to focus on the exploration of intense inner experiences, startling events and epiphanic moments. While she too found in the fragmentary art of the short story an ideal mode of expression, Virginia Woolf set about to give the novel a new form and a new “life”, striving for a type of prose that aspired to the condition of poetry. Moving further and further away from realist codes, Woolf's art redefines the very stuff of fiction and transforms the novel into a dazzling narrative, formal, and stylistic experience. The course will focus on To the Lighthouse (1927), a novel which Woolf proposed to call an “elegy” whilst foregrounding the act of creation through the key figure of a painter, Lily Briscoe – an invitation to reflect on the connection between modernist writing and the visual arts.

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En ANGLAIS: This class offers a survey of major early American texts that shaped the American literary heritage. After examining some significant works from the Puritan era and the 18th century, as well as major essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, we will focus mainly on 19th-century authors whose works are associated with the American Renaissance, the era when American literature came into its own. The corpus will include emblematic short stories and other prose writings by Washington Irving, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, as well as extracts from Emily Dickinson's and Walt Whitman's poetry. Emphasis will be placed on close reading of individual texts as well as understanding of their philosophical and ideological background.

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En ANGLAIS: This seminar will offer a selection of literary texts belonging to fictional genres (either drama, poetry or prose fiction), borrowed from seventeenth- to nineteenth-century works, which will be translated from English to French (“version”). Stress will be laid on translation techniques as well as on the contextual, lexical and syntactical constraints implied by the translation of early-modern texts.

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En ANGLAIS: The use of vast electronic bodies of text for linguistic description and analysis has emerged in recent decades as the most significant methodological change in the study of language and this lecture will provide a comprehensive introduction to the domain of English corpus linguistics.

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En ANGLAIS: This class is intended as an introduction to major texts in the field of literary and critical theory. We will study how the phenomenon of literariness is approached from a variety of theoretical perspectives and forms an integral part of conceptual elaboration. Those perspectives will include the literary semiotics of Barthes, Kristeva and Riffaterre; Freud's invention of the concept of the uncanny and Lacan's reformulation of Freudian theory through the prism of structuralist linguistics; Heidegger's discussion of the connection between poetry and Being and Adorno's response to his signified-based treatment of poetic texts; Judith Butler's groundbreaking exploration of the concept of gender; Derrida's questioning of the metaphysics of voice and presence implicit in the Saussurean theory of the linguistic sign; and finally, the notions of deterritorialization and minor literature that play a key role in Deleuze's formulation of a philosophy of becoming born out of a constant dialogue with literary texts.

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En ANGLAIS: This course focuses on recent feminist research in English-speaking critical thought. More specifically it concentrates on the renewal of Social Sciences caused by feminist critical thought. Every week students are given a text along with a few questions to prepare for the next session. Authors include Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler, Kimberle Crenshaw, Susan Moller Okin.

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En ANGLAIS: This class is an introduction to New Western History and to the notion of settler colonialism, that is currently taking American history by storm. The aims are 1. to familiarize students with the different phases of American expansion (their chronology, particularities, and social and cultural impact on American society and culture), and 2. to equip them with the key concepts, references and notions of settler colonialism, as both a particular form of colonialist expansion and as a critical historiographic concept that challenges the classic, exceptionalist narrative of American history and its particular western mythology. We will learn to define the United States as a settler nation and explore the work of scholars who seek alternatives to the erasure of indigenous history and agency in the US curriculum. We will alternate between lectures, class discussions based on readings provided on the class Moodle page at the beginning of term, and group work to prepare the papers for assessment.

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En ANGLAIS: During the eight decades between 1780 and 1860, attitudes towards the human body changed radically, as new ideas in science and medicine interacted with the rapidly changing society and politics of industrialising Britain. New fields of scientific and pseudoscientific expertise emerged, along with new professions, all competing (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) with older ideas and practices. Debate was vigorous, sometimes heated, and controversy was never far away. Among the topics to be tackled will be: Anatomy teaching and bodysnatching, the rise of the asylum, (mis)understanding epidemic disease, the criminal body, medical and ethnographic museums and exhibitions, and the medicalisation of the female body.

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En ANGLAIS: This seminar will focus on Shakespeare's Macbeth and David Greig's sequel Dunsinane. We will examine how the contemporary playwright, taking up where Shakespeare left off, engages in a creative dialogue, characteristic of postmodern aesthetics, with Shakespeare's tragedy. Taking its cue from Malcolm's self-deprecating speech in a notoriously puzzling scene, and building on hints from Shakespeare's text to fill in ellipses, Dunsinane explores the consequences of the tyrant's death in terms of contemporary political, social, and cultural issues.

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En ANGLAIS: The existence of an ‘object' called Standard English seems uncontroversial - after all, it is what most students have been learning for many years, it is what all teachers refer to and impose as a model, it is often the yardstick against which variation in English is measured. But... what is it? IS there really such a thing? If so, where does it come from, who decides, what purpose does it serve, should we be so willing to give it special status, is it a natural variety, are there parallels between standard English and other standard languages, how many standards are there are and are some standards more equal than others, do standards change, are we living in the post-standard age, and does it really matter so much if you cannot spell...? These are the kinds of questions that we will address in this class, which is intended to offer a socio-historical perspective on the emergence of standard English(es), the linguistic and discursive tools needed to debunk claims of language superiority, and a new look at how norms (standards?) emerge in communities of practice: graffiti, fan fiction, computer-mediated language, etc. In short, why standard English is weird, and why spelling mistakes are kool.

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En ANGLAIS: By examining how American modernist practices defy our reading habits we will attempt to delineate what new hermeneutic strategies those texts urge us to explore. The high modernist tradition coincides with major changes in the writing of poetry. The analysis of individual works and styles will reveal the innovative, disruptive and lyrical nature of modernist poetics as well as the political and theoretical challenges at stake. American poetry questions and unravels the very notion of literature and writing present throughout the Western tradition. Post-structuralist critical notions may thus prove central to our understanding of American modernism.

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En ANGLAIS: Marked by a history of colonial appropriation and forced deracination, postcolonial fiction has long been preoccupied with places and “non-places”. Whether they address the violence and voids of history or scan a contemporary world where migrations and globalisation produce their own forms of uprooting and unbelonging, postcolonial narratives can be regarded as a site of resistance against invisibility and erasure. This seminar proposes to examine the representation of different forms of dis-location in writers who also concern themselves with the displacement their own gesture implies: the desire to reclaim place and the need to inscribe oneself in a specific location does not prevent the fictional text from foregrounding its own problematic inscription and connection with a historical referent. We will be looking at placelessness as the experience involved through the loss or negation of place, but also as a disruptive force that challenges fixed identities and locations – a “making it strange” of place that posits it as the product of constantly shifting relations.

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En ANGLAIS: This seminar focuses on non-literary translation especially of social science articles or extracts. Most texts are from English to French, but occasionally students will get a bit of thème practice.

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En ANGLAIS: This course aims to introduce students to the theories and methodology of the social sciences, as used in civilisation studies. The theoretical and methodological questions faced by all social researchers (which, to some degree, are those faced by all researchers) will be raised. These issues will be explored by looking in detail at the traditions inspired by the pioneering work of Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The practical problems involved in fieldwork in the social sciences (including by M2 students!) will also be considered, through a study of how sociologists, historians and anthropologists approach their chosen field of inquiry. Finally, a range of recent approaches to social research will be examined, including postmodernism and feminism.Students will be required to prepare a set of documents each week linked to the theme to be discussed in class. All of these documents, along with a wide range of supplementary resources, will be made available to students at the beginning of the semester on the Moodle page devoted to this class.

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En ANGLAIS: Translation studies from English into French