Department of French

Paper Fr 12: Ethics and Experience: Literature, Thought and Visual Culture of the French-speaking World (1900 to the present)

This paper will be offered at Part II from 2012/2013.

Reading list

This paper offers an approach to modern and contemporary literature, thought and visual culture from the French-speaking world that emphasizes the extreme and the 'real'. This will be configured politically and historically with relation to cultural and intellectual responses to genocide and to colonialism in the treatment of topics on the Holocaust and on Algeria. It will be configured in philosophical terms through study of questions of ethics and experience in Modern French Thought, with reference firstly to Existentialism and secondly to broadly Post-Structuralist approaches through Levinas, Nancy, Derrida, Cixous and others. It will be configured in terms of autofiction, self-portraiture and life-writing. Through the paper, questions of testimony, evidence, hospitality, alterity, violence, vulnerability, and intimacy will return in different formulations. The paper is concerned throughout with the capacity of cultural forms, writing, moving image media, installation art, for offering an imprint of experience, for, in Nancy's terms, making sense.

Teaching methods

This paper will be taught in a combination of lectures and research seminars.

Topics to be included

See the reading list for details of sample texts

• The Holocaust
• Algeria
• Eroticism and Intimacy
• Life-writing
• Existentialism
• Ethics

Examination

Please see the specimen exam paper for an example of the current format of the paper.

Further information

Please contact Professor Emma Wilson efw1000@cam.ac.uk or Dr Ian James irj20@cam.ac.uk to discuss the paper further.