MASTER 2 ETUDES ANGLOPHONE

TD

En ANGLAIS: This seminar is an introduction to Critical Race Theory and the emerging field of whiteness studies. We will first discuss the paradigmatic shift created by the recent history of transatlantic and American slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, that sees structural racism as the backbone of American development (week 1-4); we will then learn the ways structural racism functions and its multiple ramifications across American society (week 5-7); lastly we will discuss the current movements of anti-racist resistance and the emerging field of whiteness studies, that seeks alternative, critical, and more inclusive narratives of American history. We will use a variety of primary sources and references throughout, available on the class Moodle page at the beginning of term. Students will acquire general knowledge about race as a social and cultural construct in the US context, and tools to mobilize this highly political construct in their understanding of American history or for their own research projects.

TD

En ANGLAIS: This class, spread over ten weeks, examines different aspects of British political, social and intellectual history since the beginning of the 19th century. For each session, students will be required to prepare a number of documents (available in advance on the Moodle page for the class), comprising both primary sources deriving from the period studied, and also secondary sources, in the form of and one or more modern scholarly articles or book chapters. The first five sessions (N. Davie) will explore a number of key themes linked to British social and cultural history between 1800 and 1914, including popular protest, gender and Empire. The second set of five sessions (F. Orazi) will consider debates around the idea of nationalism from its incipit to today. Each session will study a number of texts by authors who share a critical stance towards nationalism and/or try to define it.

TD

En ANGLAIS: History, with a capital or small “h”, is a cultural convention at any given time despite intangible documented facts which are picked and selected from the phenomenological world. This sieving operation has a strong political and cultural dimension which must be constantly reassessed. Today, as more archives and first-hand testimonies and artefacts are stored in digital clouds, history becomes – to use Rosalind Krauss”s concept – formless. In the field of Art and Letters, we might switch for instance from history to hertory, and consider literary creation with other paradigms in mind, and focus – for a while, why not, who cares? L'université est le dernier espace social où il y a du jeu (Jacques Derrida) – on female artists from the mid 19th century to today and see whether their artistic experiences change our vision and conception of what art history/hertory might be about. Poetry, Secrecy, Concealment, Coming Out, Out of What?

TD

En ANGLAIS: This class aims to introduce students to a variety of types of change at different levels of linguistic structure so that they can gain a general understanding of language as an ever-changing system. The core concepts of the fields of grammaticalization and language change will be introduced through weekly reading assignments.

TD

En ANGLAIS: “No man is an island” – Donne's famous line could serve as a defining feature of Richard II's equally famous “scepter'd isle”, “bound in with the triumphant sea” and yet connected with the world at large, in a back and forth movement between self and other. The desire to know, discover or conquer the rest of the world that led the British Empire to become in 1919 the largest empire of all times is often seen to be coupled in the English with a desire to preserve an identity and a specificity strengthened by the imaginary implications of geographic insularity. It is the tension between the insular and the cosmopolitan, but also the complexities and ambivalence of this polarity that this seminar would like to address – through some of its representations in the 16th and 17th centuries as well as in some of the forms it came to take in the 20th century.

TD

En ANGLAIS: This class is intended as a continuation of the first-year seminar on American Modernist poetry. We will examine the works of poets who came after the High Modernist generation of Pound, Eliot, and Williams. The corpus will include the later works of Wallace Stevens as well as authors who, while sometimes placed under the banner of “confessional” poetry—such as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell—nonetheless radicalized the decentering of lyrical subjectivity initiated by their modernist forebears. We will also examine the more experimental poetics of George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley, and members of the New York School, notably Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery whose “one-size-fits-all” form of ironic lyricism paved the way for the avant-garde poetics of suspicion which coalesced around the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement.

TD

En ANGLAIS: Translation from French into English