Department of French

Paper Fr 6

Innovation and Upheaval: deformation and reformulation in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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

Part IB students may submit a portfolio of essays for this paper - see the Faculty Guidelines for further details.

This paper will allow students to explore key developments in literature, thought, and visual culture from the French-speaking world from the perspectives of innovation, upheaval and renewal. It will take as its central concern the rupture, transformation and reformulation of aesthetic and cultural forms. Questions of historical and social transformation or renewal will be addressed through the motifs of modernity, the avant-garde, and technological innovation. They will also be addressed with regard to literary and theoretical responses to colonialism, decolonization, and the post-colonial. Questions of aesthetic representation or form, its rupture, deformation and reformulation will also be addressed in relation to successive waves of avant-gardism cultural production (in literature, visual culture and theoretical writing). The search for new modes of representational form in response to avant-garde models of rupture and innovation will also be explored. Throughout the paper the issue of representation and its critique will be central as will be the philosophical, ethical, and political implications of such a critique.

Teaching methods

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

Prescribed texts and topics

Note: it is proposed that the exam paper should always contain a mixture of questions relating to prescribed authors and more general or open questions.

1. Apollinaire: Alcools, Calligrammes
2. Surrealism: Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme, Nadja; Éluard, Capitale de la douleur; Desnos, Corps et biens; Bunuel and Dali, Un Chien Andalou.
3. Beckett: En attendant Godot, Fin de partie, Oh les beaux jours, La Dernière bande, L'Innommable
4. Césaire: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Discours sur le colonialisme, La Tragédie du roi Christophe
5. Le Nouveau Roman: Sarraute, L'Ère du soupçon, Les Fruits d'or, Le Planétarium; Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman, La Jalousie, Les Gommes
6. La Nouvelle Vague: Godard, À bout de souffle, Le Mépris; Truffaut, Les quatre cents coups, Jules et Jim; Varda, La Pointe Courte.
7. Retours du récit: Ernaux, La Place, Une Femme; Angot, Sujet Angot; Houellebecq, Les Particules élÉmentaires>
8. Francophone reformulations: Djebar, Les Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement; Ben Jelloun, L'Enfant de sable; Chamoiseau, Solibo magnifique

Examination

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

Further information

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