French Literature & Culture | MA | Part Time, Full Time | Admissions status: Open

One of the liveliest and most significant aspects of contemporary literature in French is so-called ‘francophone’ literature, a category usually reserved for writers from former French colonies. This area of research has been reinvigorated in recent years through the upsurge in critical interest in ‘postcolonial’ literatures and cultures, as well as through the richness and ambition of the work of the best contemporary francophone writers.
This module offers an overview of certain themes and debates that could be said to characterize francophone and postcolonial literatures, and at the same time calls into question the value of such general categories. The challenge, for the postcolonial/francophone critic, is to grasp texts in their historical context without reducing them to mere ‘reflections’ of it. With these aims in mind, the module focuses on authors from North Africa, of diverse ethnic backgrounds (including Arab, Berber and Jewish), and on two particular periods of literary production. The first half of the course concentrates on seminal texts written between World War II and the Algerian war of independence, whose recurring concerns include anti-colonialism, the forms of oppression and ‘hybrid’ cultures produced by colonial regimes, and the uses of literature as testimony and polemic. The second half of term focuses on texts written in the last two decades, when authors have reconsidered the ‘postcolonial’ legacy and its myths. These texts repeatedly address questions of gender, ethnicity and language, and the relation between individual and collective history; all could be seen as exercises in ‘self writing’, and all extend the processes of literary and formal experimentation already begun by ‘francophone’ writers of the colonial era.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/french/modules/level7/7aafm165.aspx

The module aims to introduce students to a range of leading contemporary French and francophone women writers through a study of their novels. Students will acquire a detailed understanding of the relevant strands of current theoretical thinking, and, through a close analysis of the texts themselves, will examine recurrent themes and forms in recent women's writing, including: the representation of identity; the concept of origins; the intersection of class, race and gender; and the textual strategies underpinning these considerations. Through a detailed examination of a cross-section of works by French and francophone women writers, the course will assess the contribution made by French women's writing to current theoretical debates and to contemporary writing generally.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/french/modules/level7/7aafm164.aspx

In its later developments, French structuralist and post-structuralist theory took as its object of focus a series of questions clustered around the notion of life and the practice of living. For example: how is subjective, sexual or bodily life conditioned by the structures of language and power? Is it possible to ‘extract’ oneself from the modes of life determined by the structures of language, subjectivity and power? If subjectivity is constructed through the reflexive internalisation of modes of discipline, are other lines of ‘subjectivation’ possible? Put crudely: Is a different life possible? In the work of Roland Barthes from the 1970s these questions are explored through a fraught negotiation with the dynamics of meaning in language, seen – paradoxically enough - both as a fascistic imposition of social demand, and a utopian path of potential liberation. This approach is clearly articulated in Barthes’ inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, published as Leçon. Utopia is no less prominent a tendency in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975), in which the ‘life’ of the ‘autobiographical’ subject is considered in a fragmentary form itself resistant to homogenous enclosure or capture as a ‘representation’. }

The module will explore in depth key works by these three writers, and through this prism offer students a grasp of the dominant concerns of French thought of this period. The module will be taught in English, and reading may be done in French or in English translation.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/french/modules/level7/7aafm007.aspx

One 2-hour seminar weekly.

Written presentations of approx 1500 words, (15% of final mark), one 4,000 word essay (80% of final mark) and a participation mark (5%).

This module focuses on avant-garde movements in art and literature in the interwar period in France. We will begin by examining the most characteristic avant-garde form, the manifesto, alongside theories of the avant-garde and its relation to history, to modernity and to modernism. We will then study a variety of its manifestations, notably in the dada and surrealists movements.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/french/modules/level7/7aafm070.aspx

two written presentations of approx. 750-1,000 words (15% of final mark), participation in fortnightly e-discussion (5% of final mark) and one 4,000 word essay (80% of final mark).

In 1850, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve asked, “Qu’est-ce qu’un classique?” Over the course of his short essay, he gives several answers: the classic is that which has become a model of literary value for later writers; that which is at once a self-contained whole and yet part of a greater literary tradition; that which, though originating in a specific time and place, remains contemporary to every age; etc. Thus were the works of Græco-Roman antiquity “classics” for the Early Moderns and thus are Racine, La Fontaine and Mme de Lafayette, like the century that produced them, now “classics” for us. But classicism did not miraculously spring fully-formed from the crucible of Louis XIV’s reign. It is as much product of nineteenth-century literary history as it is of seventeenth-century genius. This module will investigate the twin notions of the "classic" and “classicism” in French literature by looking at the emergence of the famous “classical aesthetic” in the seventeenth century in conjunction with the development of a certain literary history (or histories) in the nineteenth which either privilege that aesthetic as a universal value or alternatively react strongly against it. It will combine the study of primary texts and historical criticism with recent scholarship, and will conclude with a general reflection on the historical nature of literary value..

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/french/modules/level7/7aafm031.aspx