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Semester 2

Picturing the Self: Contemporary French and Francophone Life Writing (Ordinary) (ELCF09039)

Subject

European Languages and Cultures - French

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

3

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

In order to be eligible to take 3rd/4th Year Options, Visiting Students should have the equivalent of at least two years of study at University level of the appropriate language(s) and culture(s).

Course Summary

This course explores some of the main trends of French and Francophone life writing since the beginning of the twenty-first century, and evaluates in what ways these trends (and the authorial strategies associated with them) offer new perspectives on the traditional concerns of the literary genre of autobiography, reflecting the increasing gender and ethnic diversity apparent amongst contemporary authors of French and Francophone literature. Questions of personal identity will be at the centre of this course, with a particular focus on (ethnically) hybrid identities. The course centres on the role of images in contemporary French and Francophone life-writing in order to interrogate the tendency in such works to use images in diverse ways to explore the complexities of identity. Accordingly, key themes for study on the course include: intermedial interactions (especially between image and text), and their relation to the perception and representation of the self; technologies of the self, especially photography (analogue or digital) as a technology of self; language and identity formation, especially as these relate to gendered, translingual, or postcolonial identities; generic boundaries in contemporary French and Francophone literature.

Course Description

Who am I? How much have others made me who I am? What importance does where I come from have for my sense of self? These are just some of the questions which we aim to explore in this course, which will be taught in French. The answers to these questions may often appear unknowable to those who ask them, and therefore we will also look at the strategies that the authors of our selected texts use to signal the difficulty and uncertainty that they face as they attempt to find answers. Often, our authors use innovative forms of presenting their lives and selfhoods in order to try to provide a picture of the complexity that surrounds their identity. Hence the popularity in recent self-writings in French of using photographs, or even audio recordings, alongside the textual narrative that we conventionally associate with autobiographical writing. These studies of the self are also studies in intermediality (relations between different art forms or mediums), as well as studies in migration and (post)colonial belonging. The primary texts studied on this course also bear witness to major societal, historical and technological evolutions that are shaping twenty-first-century France and Francophone world. The set texts will be analysed both as individual works that are set in dialogue with the critical discourses of the fields of autobiography, photobiography, and life-writing studies, and in a comparative mode that allows primary texts to be evaluated alongside each other. This comparative approach allows for a focussed interrogation of the explicit or implicit claims of these works' authors in regard to the uniqueness of their narrated (and imaged) selves, and the texts that they produce. The main focus of the student learning experience will be a weekly seminar, for which stimulus material and/or topics for discussion will be set in advance. Students will be expected to have read each primary text prior to the first seminar devoted to it, so that a high-quality seminar discussion can take place. Preparation for the seminars will also periodically include activities to be undertaken by Autonomous Learning Groups, which will arrange to meet outwith the seminar to carry out groupwork. The language of discussion in the seminars will be French. Primary texts will be the subject of assessed weekly class presentations by individual students, which must be given in French, but most of the seminar will be centred on workshop-based discussion.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

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