Department of English
Université Paris-Diderot - Paris 7
Catalogue of Postgraduate Modules
The postgraduate modules offered at the UFR d’Etudes Anglophones correspond to the classes and
seminars required for the Master Etudes Anglophones. This course is divided into two years of two
semesters each:
 M1 S1 : 1st year, semester 1 (autumn semester)
 M1 S2 : 1st year, semester 2 (spring semester)
 M2 S3 : 2nd year, semester 3 (autumn semester)
 M2 S4 : 2nd year, semester 4 (spring semester)
Postgraduate modules for the M1 are worth 3 ECTS while postgraduate modules for the M2 are
worth 4 ECTS. Modules are offered in the four major fields featured in the Master Etudes
Anglophones: English linguistics and phonetics; Literature of English-speaking countries; history
and civilization of English-speaking countries; visual arts of English-speaking countries.
Timetables for M1 classes are posted online here:
http://www.univ-parisdiderot.fr/CHV/DocumentsFCK/CHVF/File/planning%20des%20coursM1%20S1%20Automne%2
02013.pdf
Timetables for M2 classes are posted online here:
http://www.univ-parisdiderot.fr/CHV/DocumentsFCK/CHVF/File/Planning%20cours%20M2S3%202013-2014.pdf
For registration, (inscription pédagogique), please follow the instructions posted here:
http://www.univ-parisdiderot.fr/CHV/DocumentsFCK/CHVF/File/Horaires%20Scol%20M%20IP.pdf
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M1 S1: M.A. 1ST YEAR, AUTUMN SEMESTER
41ANGU41 Academic Writing
4 ECTS, taught in English
This course is designed for students wishing to improve their academic English – both written and
spoken. The course will address issues such as:
Written English
Development of an argument
Structure and progression of a paragraph
Punctuation
Introductions, transitions, synthesis
Title and sub-headings
Citations and references
Expanding one’s vocabulary
Spoken Expression
Written communication versus spoken communication
Presentation notes
Structure and rhythm of delivery of an oral presentation
Catchphrase
Visual support
Convenors: Martine BEUGNET, martine.beugnet@univ-paris-diderot.fr and François BRUNET,
brunetf@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41ICLA41 American Like US: America and its Representations
3 ECTS, taught in English
Of all countries, the United States is at once the most familiar and one of the most frequently
misunderstood. Due to the unprecedented rise of a mass culture heavily linked to American
interests, and as a result of the country’s political and economic predominance, representations of
American life and culture now play a major role in the collective imagination. Yet it is easy to
forget that these representations are themselves cultural artefacts whose emergence and diffusion
are problematic, and that their fascination is linked not to their truth value, but to the role they play
in a specific international context, itself shaped by a long history whose complexity is bound to
remain hidden if one focuses too exclusively on the most recent developments. The purpose of this
course will be to challenge some received ideas, to examine the factors shaping our European
perceptions of America, and to point out some of their limitations. In addition, other ways of
making American culture, history, and literature into objects of intellectual inquiry will be explored.
In the field of history and social science, a close examination will be made of the American
historiographical and sociological traditions, while in the field of literary studies, attention will be
given to the various ways in which a text can be characterized as “American” and to the critical
procedures best suited to an analysis of this phenomenon. In both cases, emphasis will be laid on
the dangers of taking the seemingly familiar for granted: research is about discovering the
unknown, not about clinging to what we (rightly or wrongly) think we already know.
Convenors: Mathieu DUPLAY, mduplay@club-internet.fr and Paul SCHOR, paul.schor@univparis-diderot.fr
41ICLB41 Revolutions / Evolution
3 ECTS, taught in English
This introductory seminar aims to provide the basics for further training in British studies. Twelve
lectures alternate the perspectives of literature and civilization, from the Renaissance through 1914,
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in order to describe new forms of social life and thought, and the evolution of literary form and
practice. These forms are in turn related to the construction of a national identity, to scientific,
industrial and political modernity, and to Britain’s influence over the world. The class as a whole
attempts to find an answer to a riddling question: how did a rather minor country of medieval
Europe turn into the United Kingdom of the early 20th century?
Convenors: S. Vasset, sophie.vasset@univ-paris-diderot.fr & Maggy Hary, maggy.hary@univparis-diderot.fr
41ILIN41 LangueS/LangageS: A Reflection on linguistic concepts and problems
3 ECTS
Group 1:
This course will consider language from a number of distinct viewpoints: evolutionary, ontogenetic,
and the relation between music and language. We will discuss the nature of a cognitive framework
that can encompass these perspectives.
Selected References
Aniruddh D. Patel 2008 Music, Language, and the Brain, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Alexander Clark and Shalom Lappin 2010 Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus,
Blackwell, Oxford
Convenor: Emilie L’Hôte
Group 2
The aim of this introductory seminar is to replace research in linguistics within the field of Studies
of the English-speaking world. It will show that a reflection on how a language works may cast a
light over a whole range of issues. Themes include: language activity and representation language
acquisition and the building of a language system; linguistics and social sciences.
Bibliography:
Les grandes théories de la linguistique, de la grammaire comparée à la pragmatique, M-A Paveau
et G-E Sarfati, A. Colin, 2003.
Variations sur la linguistique, Antoine Culioli, Entretiens avec Frédéric Fau, Klincksiek, 2002
Convenor: Élisabeth Fabian-Cottier, hangeli@free.fr
41MCI141 History and historiography of of North America
3 ECTS, taught in English
This seminar addresses several important ongoing debates in the History of the United States.
During the first six weeks, Mark Meigs will examine the invention of the institution of segregation
in the context of the Gilded Age; the media and World War One, and finally cultural changes
visible in the 1920s and the reactions they brought about. The second six weeks, under the charge of
François de Chantal will address more contemporary political US History from the New Deal of
President Franklin Roosevelt, through the Great Society of President Lyndon Johnson and finally
the return of conservatism under President Ronald Reagan. In these six weeks the course will fallow
the arc of reaction and resilience to the social programs of the two great decades of reform: the
1930s and the 1960s. François de Chantal will also discuss the irony of conservative rhetoric that
consistently attacks “Big Government” while not hesitating to use the power of the Federal State to
put forward a conservative program.
The course will be organized in the following fashion: a session in which primary documents on a
theme are presented and discussed will be followed by a session in which conflicting
historiographic interpretations of that theme are discussed. The documents and articles and chapters
expressing these various arguments will be available on DIDEL when courses commence.
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Grades will be given according to “contrôle continu.” At the end of each six week period of the
seminar, each student must hand in a paper of 5 to 8 pages discussing two opposing points of view
from the themes under discussion using sources not studied in class.
Students should be conversant with the periods under discussion and it is strongly sugested that they
acquaint themselves with a manual of American History, for example: John M. Blum, et al, The
National Experience, in two volumes (Andover, NH : Cengage Learning, 8ème éd. 1994) Or John
Murrin, Paul Johnson et al, Liberty Equality, Power : a History of the American People
(Wadsworth, 2006).
Convenors: Mark MEIGS, meigs@univ-paris-diderot.fr - François de Chantal,
41MCI241 History of Immigration and theories of ethnicity in the United States
3 ECTS, taught in English
19th and 20th century history of immigration and study of the main characteristics of contemporary
immigration to the US. The methodology seminar will include the study of such themes as
assimilation, ethnicity, gender, labor migrations, transnationalism, through the writing of major
historians. It will also focus on current debates about immigration today: legal and illegal
immigration, immigration policies and security controls as formulated by the federal government
and local administrations.
Convenor: Bénédicte DESCHAMPS, benedicte.deschamps@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41MCI341 History and historiography of Great Britain
3 ECTS, taught in English
WHAT IS HISTORY? An early 21st century perspective on the progress of historical science
Structure and aims of the seminar
It is the purpose of this seminar to offer M 1 students an introduction to the Art and Science of
History by looking at some major trends in the recent historiography. We will be thinking about the
ways of writing history in the past, the present and the future. For example: why are all historians
now going “transnational”? Why has the “cultural turn” become such a widespread feature of so
many historical disciplines and sub-disciplines? Are some historical fields (like labor or
constitutional history) dead? Are some other rising fields (like environmental history) a passing
fad? And what is the sense of a “historical school” in a globalized world where national-oriented
historiographies have become increasingly inappropriate? These are the sort of questions that will
serve as a guide to the readings and the discussion.
The structure of this seminar will revolve around 5 questions and 2 case studies:
1- What is cultural history?
2- What is social history?
3- What is intellectual history?
4- What is European history?
5- What is Imperial history?
6- Case study n°1: The Glorious Revolution (1688): national or global event ?
7- Case study n°2: Appeasement: the Geopolitics of War and Peace (1933-1938)
All seven questions are interrelated and should give the students a fairly accurate picture of the
current state of historiography in the English-speaking world. Some important connected fields, like
gender history, will be incorporated into the discussion.
Every weekly class will commence with a 25-mn student presentation, then followed by an approx.
90-mn class discussion on the basis of the selected material. It is a discussion-based seminar and
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emphatically not a lecture class where students sit back, listen and take notes. Student interaction
will be the driving-force behind this class.
The readings are based on a self-sufficient course packet of approx.250 pages. The students who
give a presentation have to read all the relevant articles. The others will be asked to read one or two
articles of approx. 30 pages marked with an asterix (*). The reading is compulsory and forms in fact
a major aspect of every student’s assessment.
Convenor: Charles Edouard LEVILLAIN - charles-edouard.levillain@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41MCI441 How to plan and write a research thesis in civilization/historical studies
3 ECTS, taught in English
This methodology seminar will provide students with the tools they need to advance their research
and write their thesis in historical, social and political studies. The general presentation of the thesis
will be clarified, as well as the methods to locate sources of various types and to analyze them.
Convenor: Stéphanie PRÉVOST, stephprevostsp@gmail.com
41MLI341 British literature: Genres
3 ECTS, taught in English
To ‘enter literature’, be it as an artist or as an audience/reader, implies right away a more or less
conscious positioning vis-à-vis a system of expectations and conventions commonly known as
‘genres’, which branch off from the three main axes of prose, poetry and drama. The scope of our
expectations is not the same when faced with a classical tragedy, a romantic ode, a picaresque novel
or a political essay, and it is often the originality of a work within a certain frame or its departure
from it which produces meaning and aesthetic pleasure.
Our course will focus on a range of generic touchstones and their theorisation, i.e. how they have
been elaborated, criticised and renewed through the ages. The aim will be to familiarise the students
with some common cultural mainstays and help them build their own critical sense, so as to give
full force to the development of personal points of view and the means to express them in a research
work.
The course will be organised along the lines of more or less interactive sessions, each of them
centred on a given genre or critical school and its mechanisms, through a discussion on theoretical
readings prepared at home and the detailed study of one or several illustrative texts distributed in
class.
Several tests will be organised in the course of the semester. These will consist in textual
commentaries on anonymous texts studied through the perspectives of genre and critical theory.
Bibliography :
-H. Adams (ed.), Critical Theory Since Plato. Fort Worth and Philadelphia : Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1992. (Copied extracts will be studied in class.)
-P. Barry, Beginning Theory : An Introduction to Literary and Critical Theory. Manchester :
Manchester University Press, 2009. (This will be our main reader for this course.)
-D. Lodge and N. Wood, Modern Criticism and Theory. A Reader. 2nd edition. London : Longman,
1988. (This book gives useful directions for going further in your own critical readings.)
Convenor: Ladan NIAYESH, niayesh@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41MLI441 How to plan and write a research thesis in literature
3 ECTS, taught in English
This very practical seminar will teach students to build their research thesis around a central guiding
line, to argue and demonstrate their points of view, and to write in an organized and logical manner.
Convenor: Daniel JEAN, dan.jean@wanadoo.fr
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41MLN141 Methods in English linguistics
3 ECTS, taught in English
This seminar will introduce students to the formal dimension of research. They will learn to write
academic articles while respecting stylistic conventions, such as formatting text, bibliographical
conventions, citation norms, etc.
They will also learn to build a central argumentation starting from data and corpora, to manipulate,
create and classify examples; to argue in favour of a given analysis. The seminar will examine to
base argumentation on the theories of enunciative operations.
Convenor: Gérard MELIS, gerard.melis@wanadoo.fr
41MLN241 Scientific argumentation and demonstration in linguistics
3 ECTS, taught in English
This seminar will focus on how to provide valid arguments in favour of hypotheses in linguistics:
What is a coherent and convincing demonstration in linguistics? We will read various documents
paying special attention to the way argumentation is carried out, to the form and coherence of the
demonstration. Students will learn that naming is not explaining, that technical terms can be
misleading and that intuition must be supported by argument. We will see how there is a constant
interplay between theoretical hypotheses and the data, new hypotheses leading to new data and
vice-versa.
A second goal of this seminar will be to help students construct relevant data given a theoretical
problem. They will learn to search electronic corpora and other sources and to manipulate and judge
examples.
We will be focussing on the following empirical domains:
Part 1. (Philip Miller): The dative alternation in English.
Part 2. (Nicolas Ballier) : Phraseological units in English
References
Rappaport Hovav, Malka and Beth Levin. 2008. The English dative alternation: The case for verb
sensitivity. Journal of Linguistics 44, 129–167.
Cruse, D.2010. Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics, Oxford: OUP
(esp. 85-88)
Evaluation: Students will be asked to read a paper and analyse the argumentation. They will collect,
classify and manipulate data using corpus searches.
Convenors: Nicolas BALLIER (nicolas.ballier@univ-paris-diderot.fr) and Philip MILLER
(philip.miller@univ-paris-diderot.fr)
41MAV141 Introduction to Research on Visual Arts: Approaching, locating and
studying still images
3 ECTS, taught in English
This seminar is an introduction to the study of still and moving images – painting, photography,
cinema, television and video art – from the 1920s to the present. It will engage with various
methodologies in the study of visual media, and look at general issues of intertextuality and
intermediality, such as the relationship between text and image, citation, appropriation, parody and
the grotesque. The seminar will explore a broad corpus, ranging from the narrative paintings of the
Pre-Raphaelites to the poetic gardens of Ian Hamilton Finlay, via the political photographs of
Barbara Kruger, appropriation art, contemporary film and television as well as multi-media and
video art.
Convenors: Catherine Marcangelli, marcange@univ-paris-diderot.fr and Martine Beugnet,
martine.beugnet@univ-paris-diderot.fr
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41DCI141 New Social movements in the United States Today.
3 ECTS, taught in English
The seminar will begin by a study of the definitions of social movements as conceptualized by
American historians, sociologists and political scientists. This theoretical approach will then be
applied to the study of specific cases in the US today: anti-globalization, pacifist and
environmentalist movements, living wage campaigns and local community organizations, gay, and
pro-life movements. Special attention will be paid to the sociology and motivations of the
movement activists and to the particular articulation they create between civil society and political
institutions.
Bibliography:
Goodwin, Jeff & Jasper, James M. (eds.) The Social Movement Reader, Londres, Blackwell, 2003
Convenor: François de Chantal
41DCI241 Political and Social History of the United Kingdom 1
3 ECTS, taught in English and French
Suffrage and Citizenship: Class, Sex and Property in Britain 1832-1928
When the Great reform Act (1832) was passed, parliament was ‘reformed; it confirmed that the
English democracy was still property-based even if ‘property’ meant wealth rather than formerly
exclusively land-ownership. The law also spelt it out that only men could be political actors.
Whereas a few males possessed the vote, and so where citizens, various other groups (the majority
of the adult population) campaigned for their voting rights. Since class and/or sex identity defined
political exclusion, the non-enfranchised developed arguments on the lines of their partial
citizenship, partial because they were deprived of the franchise. They thus claimed full citizenship
in which differences of sex and class should be integrated. All adult males over 21 gained the vote
in 1918, all adult females over 21 in 1928.
Bibliography:
Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement 1783-1867, Longman, 1979.
David Cannadine, Class in Britain, Yale University Press, 1998.
Stephen J. Lee, Aspects of British Political History 1815-1914, Routledge, 1996.
Ruth Lister, Citizenship, Feminist Perspectives, New York University Press, 2nd ed. 2003.
Susie Steinbach, Women in England 1760-1914, A Social History, Weidenfeld &Nicolson, 2004.
Convenor: Myriam BOUSSAHBA-BRAVARD, myriam.boussahba-bravard@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41DLI241 British Literature in context: Post-colonial literature or ‘outsiders
inside’
3 ECTS, taught in English
In the course of the twentieth century, British literature (already an amalgam of nations and
regions), became a palimpsest of empire, migration, emigration, and immigration. This course will
concentrate on literature written by trans-national migrants in order to interrogate such ideas as
‘diaspora’ and ‘immigrant’, as well as to look at class, race, and gender. Our texts will focus the
writer ‘elsewhere’, outsiders who become insiders--or not; that is, we will look at novels and poetry
which explore the writer as commentator on a culture not obviously his or her own. We will be
testing some of the recent received ideas of post-colonial theory, such as ‘identity’, ‘race’, or
‘hybridity’. As this course will attract numerous visiting students, it will be taught entirely in
English.This class offers, through the study of a corpus of early modern to modern texts, to shed
light on different facets of the literary figure of the ‘Oriental’ and explore the gradual construction
of the ‘Orient’ in prose, poetry and drama. The richness of the corpus invites literary approaches,
but these also intersect with sociological, historical, anthropological and geographical debates.
Through our study of the foundations of postcolonial theory, we will then attempt a foray into some
contemporary literary works produced in eastern Commonwealth countries, particularly in India.
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Assessment: students will make oral presentations and write one essay exploring a writer of their
choice (this may include popular literary genres, e.g. crime writers such as Ngaio Marsh or Mike
Phillips; or film or television, e.g. ‘Goodness Gracious Me’), to be selected under supervision.
Texts for study (after initial discussion of class interests) have included:
J. M. Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg (Vintage, 2004 [1994])
Vintage ISBN: 0099470373
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (Faber, 1989)
Faber and Faber ISBN: 0571225381
Andrea Levy, Fruit of the Lemon (Headline Review 1999)
Headline Review ISBN: 0747261148
V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (Penguin, 1980 [1979])
Picador ISBN: 0330487140
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (Vintage, 2006 [1988])
Vintage ISBN: 0963270702
Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate (Faber, 1986)
Faber and Faber ISBN: 0571200389
Convenor: Ruth MORSE - morse@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41DLI241 American Literature: Literature and the History of Ideas 1
3 ECTS, taught in English
The Romance of Democracy in America
This course will address the issue of democracy, of social revolution in progress envisioned through
the prism of a distinctive American literary genre, the romance. Both The Scarlet Letter and The
Great Gatsby are love stories that have to do with sexual politics and the construction of new
communal identities. In both cases, a love affair ushers in the new historical scene. The adulteress
branded by the Puritan fathers strives to refashion in her own guise the letter that she has been
condemned to wear so as to voice the Antinomian spirit of the age of the Puritan revolution (in
keeping with the reforming spirit of Protestantism). Similarly, Jay Katz, alias Gatsby, is a
successful self-made man with a dubious record who re-enacts the enduring American Dream. He
may be blinded by his fetichistic passion for Daisy, the "golden girl" who stands for the gentrified
upper-middle class from which he is forever excluded on account of his social background, but his
typically American obsession to start anew and make a clean breast of the past testifies to his faith
in a "brave new world" that transcends the corrupt state of the nation as it is. Neither of the two
romances should be reduced to mawkish, wishy-washy love stories since they raise highly political
questions: what part should be ascribed to privacy within the social arena? To what extent does the
illicit couple foreshadow the community to come? How does one move from "You and me" to "We
the People"? The ill-fated romance involving sacrificed lovers in both cases sets the stage for
familial reconfigurations. In both of them, the tragic ending seems to call into question the utopian
ideal of "the pursuit of happiness" in the private sphere.
Works under study :
Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter. Penguin, Thrift edition.
Francis. S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Penguin, Thrift edition.
Convenor: Michel IMBERT, michel.imbert@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41DLN141 Languages in Contrast
3 ECTS, taught in English
This course will focus on English-French contrastive analysis. We will bring to light the interaction
of invariants and differences that underlies cross-language comparison, drawing upon both
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linguistic typology and contrastive linguistics. This comparison will be based on different textual
genres that will also be compared. Three domains will be investigated, namely modality,
conditionals and questions.
References
CELLE, A. 2006. Temps et modalité : l’anglais, le français et l’allemand en contraste. Bern : Peter
Lang.
LAZARD, G. 2001. « La nature des invariants interlangues » in LINX 45, Invariants et variables
dans les langues, Etudes typologiques, 9-17.
PALMER, F. 1986. Mood and Modality. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
Convenor: Agnès CELLE, agnes.celle@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41DLN241 Psycholinguistics of the second language
3 ECTS, taught in English
This seminar will explore the interface between the general processes of comprehension, production
and memorisation at work in one’s mother tongue and the acquisition of a second or additional
language in natural and instructed environments. We will also examine the past and current theories
on bilingualism and particularly the literature of transfer and code-switching as well as new
developments in the field of multilingualism. One part of the seminar will be devoted to the
evolution of the concept of interlanguage and related theory of error analysis and to the impact of
implicit and explicit procedures on second language acquisition. We will also review data collecting
methods and analyse samples of oral and written learner language production(s) in terms of fluency,
accuracy and complexity. A detailed bibliography will be given out in September (also available on
the DIDEL platform).
General references:
Field, John, Psycholinguistics, The Key Concepts, Routledge, 2003, London.
Field, John, Psycholinguistics, A Resource book for students, Routledge English Language
Introductions, Routledge, London, 2003
Doughty, Catherine & Long, Michael, The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, Blackwell,
2003.
Ellis, Rod & Barkhuizen, Gary, Analysing Learner Language, O.U.P. 2005.
Convenor: Pascale GOUTERAUX, pascale.gouteraux@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41DAV141 Studying films, studying texts: the issues of adaptation
3 ECTS, taught in English
This course offers a methodological approach to film adaptations of literary texts. After refreshing
the students’ knowledge of film analysis, we will consider the different ways to study film
adaptation, in the light of the recent books on the question. This course will focus on the different
tools and techniques that we need to work on all kinds of adaptations, and will thus be useful to
students who do research on the text-image relationship, as well as to those who consider becoming
teachers.
We will combine two types of approach:
an aesthetic approach, which will focus on the specificities of film and literary languages, as
well as on the different modes of transfer from one to the other.
an ideological approach which will insist on the political, social, and economic implications
of adaptation.
We will work on a large panel of examples but will also favor two texts – Pride and Prejudice and
Heart of Darkness – and their film adaptations, which the students will be required to read/see in
priority.
Bibliography / Filmography
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Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice (1813) and four adaptations (Robert Z. Leonard, 1940; Simon
Langton & Andrew Davies, 1995; Joe Wright, 2005; and Bride and Prejudice, Gurinder Chadha,
2004)
Cartmell, Deborah and Imelda Whelehan. The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen.
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (1899) and Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola (1979).
Elliot, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006.
Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo, eds. A Companion to Literature and Film. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2004.
For more information: see the Didel page on the university website, ‘Espace Numérique de Travail’.
Convenor: Ariane HUDELET, ariane.h@free.fr
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M1 S2: M.A. 1st YEAR, SPRING SEMESTER
41ANGU42 Academic Writing
4 ECTS, taught in English
This course is designed for students wishing to improve their academic English – both written and
spoken. The course will address issues such as:
Written English
Development of an argument
Structure and progression of a paragraph
Punctuation
Introductions, transitions, synthesis
Title and sub-headings
Citations and references
Expanding one’s vocabulary
Spoken Expression
Written communication versus spoken communication
Presentation notes
Structure and rhythm of delivery of an oral presentation
Catchphrase
Visual support
Convenors: Martine BEUGNET, martine.beugnet@univ-paris-diderot.fr and François BRUNET,
brunetf@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41DCI142 Major Questions in African-American History
3 ECTS, taught in English
“William Wells Brown’s slave narrative, 1847: Questions of Geography, History, and Race”
Runaway slaves wrote numerous narratives of their experience as slaves and fugitives in the first
half of the nineteenth century, providing the American abolitionist movement with vivid
testimonies. The seminar will be focused on William Wells Brown’s narrative as a point of entry to
various key questions in the history of race, slavery, abolition and westward expansion in the
United States. Born a slave in Kentucky in 1814, Brown fled his master in 1834 and later managed
to lead a successful career as a professional abolitionist and an author. The seminar will revolve
around ten questions, all involving major historical and cultural topics. 1/Where did Brown flee in
1834 and why? 2/Why was there slavery in Missouri, a state north of the Mason and Dixon line
(and in Kentucky)? 3/Who helped Brown publish the narrative and why? 4/In which way was the
narrative considered as a document? 5/How can it also be read as a literary text? 6/Why does Brown
insist on the possibility of “white slaves” in his narrative? 7/What is the relationship between
Brown’s narrative and that of Frederick Douglass, published two years before? 8/Why does Brown
oppose Britain to the United States? 9/Why does Brown indict Southern religion in the way he
does? 10/How did this first experience as an author shape Brown’s later career as a novelist and
historian?
Bibliography:
Claire Parfait et Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, traduction, introduction et notes. Le Récit de William
Wells Brown, esclave fugitive, écrit par lui-même. Rouen : Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du
Havre, 2012.
It is a prerequisite to the class that you read William Wells Brown’s narrative on the following
website: http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/brownw/brown.html
Also to be read is Frederick Douglass’s narrative:
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html
A full bibliography will be made available on the first day of class.
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Convenor: Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, rossignol@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41DCI242 France in America: from Quebec to Louisiana, 17th-19th centuries
3 ECTS, taught in English
We will study the history of French colonization in North America and the Caribbean, from the
foundation of Quebec in 1608 to the sale of Louisiana in 1803, and the independence of Haiti in
1804. Our chronology will end with the creation of an American “model” through the writings of
Alexis de Tocqueville and Edouard Laboulaye in the nineteenth century. By the middle of the
eighteenth century, the expanse of the French colonies in America was greater than that of English
or Spanish colonization. The decline of the French influence after the Treaty of Paris (1763)
effaced the historical memory of France in America – which this seminar hopes to rectify. For,
another aspect of France in America is the singular heritage of both nations in western history: their
modern political cultures were born nearly simultaneously in a revolutionary tradition. This
seminar will also examine the reciprocal influences between the two great Atlantic revolutions at
the end of the eighteenth century. The themes to be treated include the impact of the Enlightenment
on the anti-colonial movement against the English, as well as the debates around the meaning of the
American Revolution by the Enlightenment philosophes. In various texts and in course discussions
we will study the images and mutual influences of the two revolutions, as well as the constitutional
theories, the republican institutions, the impact of the French Terror of 1793-4, the debate over
slavery in the English, Spanish, and French parts of the New World. Finally, the seminar will
highlight the relations between the Indians and Europeans in a comparative perspective.
Bibliography
Benot, Yves, la Révolution française et la fin des colonies, 1789-1794, Paris, la Découverte, 1987.
Dorigny, Marcel, éd., Dix-Huitième siècle, numéro spécial, L’Atlantique (n° 33 in 2001).
Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Cambridge,
Harvard University Press, 2004. (Traduit, Les Vengeurs du Nouveau Monde: Histoire de la
révolution haïtienne, Rennes : Les Perséides, 2005.)
Duchet, Michelle, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières, Paris, Maspero, 1971.
Palmer, Robert R., The Age of Democratic Revolutions 1760-1800, A Political History of Europe
and America, 1760-1800, 2 vols. (I: "The Challenge;" II: "The Struggle"), Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1959 and 1964. (Traduit en français, mais en version abrégée de l'ouvrage paru en
1968) : 1789, les révolutions de la liberté et de l'égalité, Paris : Calmann-Lévy, 1968.
Rossignol, Marie-Jeanne, Le ferment nationaliste: aux origines de la politique extérieure des EtatsUnis, 1789-1812 (Paris: Belin, 1994).
Convenor: Allan POTOFSKY, allan.potofsky@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41DCI342 History of moral and political ideas: Fanaticism in the 17th and 18th
centuries
This seminar will examine the history and theories of fanaticism in the early modern period,
through a consideration of religious and political cases. Readings will include narratives of events,
chapters from period works of history or more contemporary studies, as well as attempts by early
modern philosophers and journalists to measure these phenomena (discourses of the passions, the
imagination, etc.).
Evaluation will be based on written work and a class presentation.
Convenor: Robert Mankin- mankin@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41DCI442 Political and Social history of the United Kingdom 2
3 ECTS, taught in English and French
Thinking the process of reconstruction in the aftermath of the two world wars.
A comparative perspective.
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The aim of this class is to examine and compare the two post-war periods in 20th century Britain
and France. We will focus on the transition from war to peace and build on recent studies of cultural
and political demobilisations after WWI to combine the history of sorties de guerre with a renewed
approach to reconstruction. We will reflect on the specificities of each post-war period and on the
process of demobilisation in both countries. The themes will include rebuilding lives, rebuilding
cities, rebuilding the nation and rebuilding markets. We will also examine the creation of specific
memories of each after-war period.
A bibliography will be given at the beginning of the term.
Convenors: Clarisse Berthezène, clarisse.berthezene@gmail.com; Marc Olivier Baruch, directeur
d'études à l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales
41DLI142 American Literature: Crises in identity
3 ECTS, taught in English
Identity Crises in Contemporary American Opera: The Case of John Adams
In addition to being a musical genre and a form of theatrical expression which heavily relies on
literary references, contemporary opera tends to interact more and more with cinema and television
as well as the latest audio-visual technologies, as many recent works have shown. Thus, opera finds
itself in an interesting position, at the point of contact between the performing arts and
contemporary multimedia practices and astride the boundary that traditionally separates “tradition”
from the “avant-garde” or “high” from “popular” culture. This is especially the case in the United
States where, for specific historical reasons, opera tends to pay close attention to major social issues
of interest to large sections of the population.
The purpose of this course will be to examine the ways in which contemporary American opera
takes advantage of this peculiar situation in order to shed light on various identity crises
characterizing the current era. This applies, in the first place, to social and political crises, as
illustrated by the so-called “CNN operas” whose librettos deal with the traumas that have shaped
contemporary history. However, the crises in question are also aesthetic: since opera, by definition,
blends music, literature, and drama, it is particularly attuned to contemporary perplexities about the
nature and interaction of these art forms, whose boundaries are no longer taken for granted. The
course will focus more particularly on the works of John Adams (born in 1947), a composer whose
operas call on a wide array of cultural references and artistic practices in order to deal with the
mysterious violence of the real.
Close attention will be paid to four operas by John Adams (all four are available on CD or DVD):
- Nixon in China (1987, libretto by Alice Goodman)
- The Death of Klinghoffer (1991, libretto by Alice Goodman)
- El Niño (2000, libretto by Peter Sellars after various authors : Gabriela Mistral, Rosario
Castellanos, Hildegard of Bingen, the Apocryphal Gospels...)
- Doctor Atomic (2005, libretto by Peter Sellars after Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Baudelaire, the
Bhagavad Gita...)
Convenor: Matthieu DUPLAY, mduplay@club-internet.fr
41DLI342 The Golden Age of British Literature: the 16th and 17th centuries
3 ECTS, taught in English
“Transgressive Women in Early Modern England”
We will read (poetry, plays, romances, and essays) and examine images (emblems, painting,
engravings) from mid-16th century to mid-17th century England in order to understand the place of
women and the power relations between the sexes in English society of the period. The course will
examine what constituted “transgressive” behavior in women and the dangers this behavior was
believed to pose to early modern society. We will also consider Renaissance beliefs concerning
women’s anatomy and physiology which placed women on the margins of what was considered the
ideal or the normal. Themes include: the figure of the Amazon, the hermaphrodite, Queen Elizabeth
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I and the power of chastity, performing gender on stage (cross-dressing and transvestism),
patriarchal authority versus women’s submission or rebellion, the monstrous maternal imagination,
women and ecstatic prophecy, male speech versus female silence, the woman as “Author”.
Suggested Reading:
 Huet, Marie-Hélène, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993). See
Part I. A wonderful book that answers the question of where monsters come from and describes
the pseudo-medical belief in the Renaissance that a pregnant mother’s imagination could leave
its “imprint” on her unborn child.
 Hutson, Lorna. Oxford Readings in Feminism: Feminism and Renaissance Studies (OUP, 1999).
A very useful compilation of classic and more recent essays (from 1977 onwards). Selections
have been taken from works by top scholars in the field. See especially several influential essays
included in the volume: Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top”, Joan Kelly, “Did Women
Have a Renaissance?”, Ian McClean, “The Notion of Woman in Medicine, Anatomy, and
Physiology” and Patricia Parker, “Literary Fat Ladies and the Generation of the Text”.
 Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Cornell,
Cornell UP, 1990). An erudite consideration of topics such as women warriors, the Tudor
queens and the genre of catalogues of “good women” using a range of early modern documents.
 Mendelson, Sara and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720 (OUP,
2000). Written by two historians this book provides readers with, according to the Oxford
University Press publicity: “a comprehensive survey of life as it was experienced by most
Englishwomen during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”.
 Newman, Karen. Fashioning Feminity and English Renaissance Drama. (Chicago, University
of Chicago, 1991). A now classic text on the women on the Renaissance stage.
 Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations, The Performance of Gender in Early Modern England (CUP,
1997). Written in a readable style, this short book, according to one reviewer, “ranges over the
many questions that have been raised in the last decade or so concerning the boy actors, crossdressing, homoeroticism, anti-theatricalism and the social position of women within
"patriarchy," offering fresh readings of familiar problems.”
 Rackin, Phyllis. Shakespeare and Women. Oxford Shakespeare Topics (OUP, 2005). This
short, 90-page book is part of an excellent series of introductory “lectures” on various topics
written in a readable style by one of the foremost scholars in the field.
Convenors: Laetitia COUSSEMENT-BOILLOT, coussement@univ-paris-diderot.fr and Lynn
Meskill, sermin.meskill@free.fr
41DLI442 What makes a text a ‘classic’?
3 ECTS, taught in English
Tradition in English poetry.
The seminar intends to question the construction and relevance of the very idea of tradition in
English Poetry. To do so we shall focus on a specific notion, aspect or work of the poetic tradition
and submit it to relentless scrutiny. The topics of the previous years were : T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste
Land” as a canonical text (2011-12) and the notion of “collection” (2012-13).
Grading will based on an oral presentation and its written revision.
Convenor: Daniel JEAN, dan.jean@wanadoo.fr
41DLI542 American Literature: Prose and poetry 1
3 ECTS, taught in English
Issues of performance
The seminar pursues its exploration of poetry in relation to neighboring genres. After studying the
interactions between poetry and prose (sentence vs. verse, narrative, essay), the seminar proposes to
consider the relationships between poetry and performance. The origins of poetry are notoriously
oral and performative (mousikê, rituals). But even after the invention of print, poetry has continued
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to foreground sound and voice, and even performance (prosody, recitation). Evolutions in media
and technology since the late XIXth century have encouraged new forms of orality and
performance. Since the 1950s, many poets and practitioners have shifted their emphasis from object
to process and foregrounded the event, the here and now. The revival of the poetry reading in
California in the 1950s has spread far and wide with the consequence that many contemporary
poems exist in two public guises, print and audio (cf. online archives such as PennSound and
Ubuweb). In the wake of Dada and the surge of intermedia works in the 1960s, many poets work
across borders of genre and media. The ambition of the seminar is to explore issues of performance
in relation to poetry, tapping a broad critical spectrum while focusing more particularly on modern
and contemporary American poetry.
Keywords: performance, orality, aurality, poetry-reading, audio-archive, close listening, intermedia,
ethnopoetics, poet’s theater, voice, body, gender, behavior, community, rhetoric, object vs. process;
being vs. doing; repetition vs. improvisation.
Students will be encouraged to respond both critically and performatively.
Tuesdays 2-4pm – room 340
Convenor: Abigail LANG, abigail.lang@wanadoo.fr
41DLN142 Enunciative (Utterer-centered) Linguistics
3 ECTS, taught in English
This course will develop the link between grammatical and syntactic constructions and the
information structures of textual sequences. We will consider the notions of topic and focus in
canonical and non-canonical structures in English using notions such as thematic progression
(information packaging, information processing), cohesion and presupposition.
Convenor: Gérard MELIS, gmelis@orange.fr
41DLN242 English Phonology and Corpora
3 ECTS, taught in English
This seminar will present a whole set of possible corpora to study English phonology in its different
subfields. Methodology and tools will be explained and demonstrated, to show that empirical data
can foster theoretical questions.
Nicolas Ballier (week 1-6) will detail some spoken corpora in English, explaining how connected
speech processes can be studied in relation to grammatical properties or phonological contexts.
Some existing corpora will be investigated and recent software will be used to question the
phonology/phonetics interface.
Ives Trevian (week 7-12) will focus on spelling-to-sounds (“grapho-phonemic”) relations, stresspatterns and existing databases. He will present electronic dictionaries and corpora, showing how
morpho-phonological regularities can be found for stress assignment or vowel reduction.
Rose, Yvan (et al.), The PHONBANK Project, URL (06/09):
http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/phon/
Trevian, Ives, 2003, Morphoaccentologie et processus d'affixation de l'anglais, Peter Lang.
Wells, J.C., 2008, Longman Pronouncing Dictionary, Longman. [=LPD]. CD-ROM edition
Convenors: Ives TREVIAN, trevian@univ-paris-diderot.fr and Nicolas BALLIER,
nballier@free.fr)
41DAV142 Introduction to the history of painting in Great-Britain
3 ECTS, taught in English
In this seminar, we will examine the various themes and issues that informed the history of art in
Britain.
In particular we will look at :
- portraiture and its role in the representation of individuals within the social and political economy
of visual signs throughout history;
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- landscape painting as one of the most significant expressions of man’s changing relation to nature
- the history of the major aesthetic movements and writings on art, from the Tudors to the present
day (Royal Academy, Pré-Raphaëlites, Arts & Crafts Movement, the Modernists, the Young British
Artists, etc.) and their interface with the social and political context.
Required reading :
Vaughan, William, British Painting. The Golden Age from Hogarth to Turner, London: Thames &
Hudson , 1999
Wilton, Andrew, Five Centuries of British Painting. From Holbein to Hodgkin, London: Thames &
Hudson, 2001
Convenor: Frédéric OGEE, frederic.ogee@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41DAV242 Introduction to the history of images in the United States
3 ECTS, taught in English
The seminar will examine the place of the cinematic medium within the history of art and images in
the US. We will establish links between the cinematic, graphic, pictorial and photographic arts. We
will discuss the commodification of the image and the attempt at cultural legitimacy and explore the
tensions between the popular sources of the medium and the efforts to uplift and legitimize film
content and exhibition practices. We will also assess the impact of social sciences and censorship
crusades upon film production during Hollywood’s classical era.
Bibliography :
Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 1961
Garth Jowett, Film: the Democratic Art, 1973
L. Levine, Highbrow, lowbrow: the emergence of a cultural hierarchy in America, 1988
Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 1939
Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, 1955
Frances Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art, 2002
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 2001
Convenor: Véronique ELEFTERIOU-PERRIN, elefteriou@wanadoo.fr
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M2 S3: M.A. 2nd YEAR, AUTUMN SEMESTER
41CIV153 American Cultural History
4 ECTS, taught in English
This class approaches American Cultural History by investigating the accumulation and display of
patrimony in the United States. We will look at American culture along several axes: memory vs.
history; highbrow vs. lowbrow; the search for authenticity vs. the production of similacra; the need
for a consensual culture vs. the need for minority identity.
Convenor: Mark MEIGS, meigs@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41CIV453 History of moral and political ideas: The ‘Essays’ of David Hume
4 ECTS, taught in English and French
This seminar will examine the eighteenth century in Britain, Europe and the world by studying a
single volume written by the great Scottish author David Hume (1711-1776). In setting out to
produce the ‘Essays Moral Political and Literary’, Hume had come to the conclusion that his
philosophical endeavors had failed; and it would be some years before he would discover a new
calling as the historian of England. Hume’s ‘Essays’ (1742-1758) are at once an attempt at engaging
journalism and deep reflections on themes from politics, economy, public opinion, art and taste,
manners, the sexes, progress of societies, etc. A recent critic has aptly called them' contemporary
history’.
We will study the essays in a variety of contexts, including the political journalism of Addison and
Bolingbroke, the nascent ‘science’ of political economy (and we should remember that the most
attentive of all readers of these works was Hume’s friend Adam Smith, the future author of the
‘Wealth of Nations’) and discourses on men and women, demographics, happiness, etc. in society.
Students enrolled in the seminar should immediately purchase the edition of the Essays edited by
Eugene F. Miller (Liberty Fund, 2nd ed., 1985).
Evaluation will be based on written work and a class presentation.
Convenor: Robert MANKIN, mankin@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41CIV353 Anglo-American historiography: An epistemological perspective
4 ECTS, taught in English
This seminar will study the specific features and the evolution of historical practice in Britain and
the US.
Regarding British history, we will focus on the emergence of the discipline in universities in the
19th century; the political dimension of historical narratives (the rule of law in Maitland, liberty in
Lord Acton); the evolution towards social history and the history of the present time (Laslett,
Butterfield); the specific problem of narrating a strictly British history. For American history, the
subjects to be studied will be: the concepts of class, race and gender; key intellectual movements
affecting the social sciences in the US, such as the new social history of the 1960s, new cultural
history and the linguistic turn in the 1980s and 90s, the renewal of political history and the history
of the State in the 1990s, and the history of science and techniques. The dialogue between history
and sociology will also be studied.
Convenors: Allan POTOFSKY, allan.potofsky@univ-paris-diderot.fr and Robert MANKIN,
mankin@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41LIT153: American Literature : prose et poetry 2
4 ECTS, taught in English
Poetic Materiality
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What are the material forms and objects in which American poetry is incarnated? To what extent
may these incarnations be said to be specifically American? This seminar focuses on the role and
importance of the various materials of American poetry: the publishing medium, from Emily
Dickinson’s manuscripts to electronic media in the 21st century; typography and page lay-out, such
as in E. E. Cummings’s inventive word composition or Susan Howe’s scrambled lines; the use of
various extralinguistic, visual and auditory, elements in poetry. From the reading and analysis of
several poets’ works, we will consider the historical and cultural importance of a kind of poetic
materialism characterizing American poetry, as illustrated in particular by the Objectivist poets of
the 1930s-1950s, the Language poets from the 1970s onwards, and more generally the artistic
avant-garde.
This seminar aims to give students a background in the history of American poetry, to increase their
knowledge of 20th- and 21st-century American poetry and poetics, and to give them critical and
theoretical tools for writing about the artistic avant-garde.
Students are required to participate in class with presentations of texts, as well as to write an essay
(7,500 to 10,000 words)
Works Studied :
Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ralph Franklin, ed. Cambridge, MA : Harvard
UP, 1998.
Cummings, Edward Estlin. Complete Poems 1904-1962. George J. Firmage, ed. Liveright, 1994.
Williams, William Carlos. Spring and All (1923), in The Collected Poems of William Carlos
Williams, vol. I, 1909-1939. A. Walton Litz & C. MacGowan, eds. New York : New Directions,
1986.
Cage, John. Empty Words. Writings ’73-’78. Middletown, CT : Wesleyan UP, 1979.
Bernstein, Charles, & Susan Bee. The Nude Formalism. Los Angeles : Sun & Moon Press, 1989.
Howe, Susan. The Midnight. New York : New Directions, 2003.
Sikelianos, Eleni. The California Poem. Coffee House Press, 2004.
Howe, Susan. That This. New York : New Directions, 2010.
Carson, Anne. Nox. New York : New Directions, 2010.
Cayley, John. Works available at http://programmatology.shadoof.net/
Critical Reading (selection):
Drucker, Johanna. The Visible Word : Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923.
Chicago : The U of Chicago P, 1997.
McGann, Jerome. Black Riders : The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton : Princeton UP,
1993.
Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Moment : From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown,
CT : Wesleyan UP, 2003.
Convenor: Antoine CAZE, antcaze@wanadoo.fr
41LIT253 The Cultural Constructs of British literature: The Invention of
Romanticism
4 ECTS, taught in English
Convenor: Jean-Marie FOURNIER, jean-marie.fournier@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41LNA153 Semantics and Pragmatics
4 ECTS, taught in English
This course will explore the semantics-pragmatics interface. We will attempt to answer the
following questions: Where do semantics and pragmatics meet? What is the impact of language use
on meaning? Is it possible for pragmatics to flout semantics? What is the hearer’s pragmatic
import? We will first assess the influence of pragmatics on the semantics of modality - special
attention will be paid to future time reference. We will then examine the role played by discourse
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(dialogue, journalistic discourse) in the use and argumentative function of adverbs and connectives.
The concepts of epistemic modality, speaker’s commitment and modal remoteness will be defined.
References
Celle A. & Huart R. (eds) 2007. Connectives as Discourse Landmarks. Amsterdam, Philadelphia:
John
Benjamins.
Horn L. and Ward G. (eds) 2004. The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nuyts, J. 2001. Epistemic Modality, Language and Conceptualization. A Cognitive-Pragmatic
Perspective.Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Simon-Vandenbergen A.-M. & Aijmer K. 2007. The Semantic Field of Modal Certainty, A CorpusBased Study of English Adverbs. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Convenor: Agnès CELLE, agnes.celle@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41LNA253: English Linguistics and Variation
4 ECTS, taught in English
The seminar will focus on different aspects of the notion of variation (quantitative analysis,
grammatical dimensions).
The first part of the seminar will be devoted to the quantitative analysis of linguistic data using free
software R. Students are expected to come to the seminar with their own laptop computer, R
software and the R Commander package must be installed before the first session.
The second part of the seminar will deal the notions of invariance and variations of grammatical
forms in a semantic and discursive perspective.
Bibliography
Baayen, R.H., 2008, Analyzing Linguistic Data, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Collins, P., C., 1991, Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Constructions in English, Londres, New York:
Routledge.
Corre, E., 2009, De l'aspect sémantique à la structure de l'événement : les verbes anglais et russe,
Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle.
Croft, W., A., 2001, Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Duffley, P.J., 1992, The English Infinitive, Londres, New York: Longman.
Everitt, B.S., & Hothorn, T., 2010, A Handbook of Statistical Analyses Using R, Boca Raton:
Taylor & Francis.
Goldberg, A., 1995, Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goldberg, A., 1995, Constructions at Work: the nature of generalization in language. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Loock, R., 2010, Appositive Relative Clauses in English: Discourse Functions and Competing
Structures, Amsterdam, Philadelphie: J. Benjamins.
Malan, N., La Proposition relative en anglais contemporain : une approche pragmatique, Gap,
Paris : Ophrys.
Mair, C., 1990, Infinitival Complement Clauses in English: a Study of Syntax in Discourse,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
R Core Team, 2013, R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing, http://www.Rproject.org
Woods, A., Fletcher, P., & Hughes, A., 1986, Statistics in Language Studies, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Convenors: Emmanuel FERRAGNE, emmanuel.ferragne@univ-paris-diderot.fr & Gérard Mélis,
gmelis@orange.fr
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41ACV153 Art and society in Great-Britain
4 ECTS, taught in English
“Portraiture and Landscape: genres and idioms in British art”
This seminar will offer an examination of the various reasons—aesthetic, ideological, social,
philosophical, practical—which have led to the predominance of portraiture and landscape as the
major genres in British art. We will explore how the rise of an “English school of art” evolved with
society and context, how this rise was shaped by considerations of genres and idioms seen within a
national context, and how art and images in general were financed, produced and disseminated. The
course will in particular examine the birth of “exhibitions” and art museums dedicated to British art,
the “elevation” of portraiture and landscape as "modern" (and English) contributions to history
painting, and their links with the evolution of the British idea of nation.
This seminar is also open to students taking other specialties in the Master.
Bibliography:
References in bold type are required reading
History of British Art (chronological order)
Hilton, Timothy, The Pre-Raphaelites, London: Thames & Hudson , 1970
Spalding, Frances, British Art Since 1900, London: Thames & Hudson , 1987
Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, La peinture anglaise. De Hogarth aux Pré-Raphaélites, 1972 ; Paris:
Skira/Flammarion, 1988
Solkin, David H., Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in EighteenthCentury
England, Yale UP, 1993
Rosenthal, Norman et al., Sensation. Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, London:
Thames & Hudson,1998
Barringer, Tim, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites. Yale University Press, 1999
Vaughan, William, British Painting. The Golden Age from Hogarth to Turner, London: Thames &
Hudson , 1999
Wilton, Andrew, Five Centuries of British Painting. From Holbein to Hodgkin, London: Thames &
Hudson, 2001
Bindman, David, ed. The History of British Art, 3 vols. London: Tate Publishing, 2008
Cultural History
Allen, Brian, ed. Towards a Modern Art World in Britain, c.1715-c.1880, Studies in British Art 1,
Yale UP,1995
Barrell, John, ed., Painting and the Politics of Culture. New Essays on British Art, 1700-1850,
Oxford 1992
Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Harper
Collins, 1997)
Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, Yale UP, 1992
Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990
Hemingway, Andrew and William Vaughan , eds. Art in Bourgeois Society 1790-1850, Cambridge
UP, 199.
Hoock, Holger, The King's Artists. The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture,
1760-1840, Oxford University Press, 2003
Porter, Roy, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, Penguin, 1982
Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, London, 2000)
Roston, Murray. Changing Perspective in Literature and the Visual Arts, 1650-1820, Princeton
U.P., 1992.
Solkin, David H., ed. Art on the Line. The Royal Academy Exhibition at Somerset House 17801836, Yale UP, 2001
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Portraiture
Brilliant, Richard, Portraiture (Essays in art & culture), London, Reaktion Books, 1991
Coombs, Katherine, The Portrait Miniature in England, London, V & A Publications, 1998
Cumming, Laura, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits, London, HarperPress, 2010
Fowkes Tobin, Beth, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-century British
Painting, Durham, Duke University Press, 1999
Hearn, Karen, Van Dyck and Britain, London, Tate Publishing, 2009
Howard, Maurice, The Tudor Image, London, Tate Gallery, 1995
Mullins, Charlotte, Painting People: The State of the Art, London, Thames & Hudson, 2008
Retford, Kate, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-century England
New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2006
Rideal, Liz, Self-portraits (National Portrait Gallery Insights), London, National Portrait Gallery
Publications, 2006
Shawe-Taylor, Desmond, The Conversation Piece: Scenes of Fashionable Life, London, Royal
Collection Enterprises Ltd, 2009
West, Shearer, Portraiture (Oxford History of Art), Oxford : Oxford University Press,2004
Woodall, Joanna, Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Critical Introductions to Art), Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 1997
Landscapes and gardens
Appleton, Jay. The Experience of Landscape. London: Wiley, 1975.
Baridon, Michel. Jardins: Paysagistes, jardiniers et poètes. Paris : Laffont, 1998.
Hunt , John Dixon. The Genius of the Place . London: Elek, 1975. réédition chez MIT Press.
----------------------. Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination
16001750. (1986), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
----------------------. Gardens and the Picturesque . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1992, 1994.
Jackson-Stops, Gervase. An English Arcadia 1600-1990. London: National Trust, 1992.
Jellicoe, S & G. The Landscape of Man. London: Thames & Hudson, 1975, rééditions.
Martinet, Marie-Madeleine. Art et nature en Grande-Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle. Paris : Aubier,
1980.
Ouvrage collectif, Lire le paysage / lire les paysages. Saint-Etienne : CIEREC, 1984.
Robinson, J.M. Temples of Delight: Stowe Landscape Gardens. London, 1990.
Roger, Alain. Court Traité du paysage. Paris : Gallimard, 1997.
Steenberger, Clemens. Architecture and the Landscape. Montreal, 1989.
Watkin, David. The English Vision: The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden
Design. London: Murray, 1982
Williamson, Tom, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England. Stroud:
Allan Sutton,1995
To see the artworks: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/
See also the collections of the following institutions:
Yale Center for British Art: http://britishart.yale.edu
Tate Britain: http://www.tate.org.uk/
Convenor: Frédéric OGEE, frederic.ogee@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41ACV253 Theories and practices of images in the United States
4 ECTS, taught in English
Theme for 2013-2014: “Photography and history: imaging cities and citizens”
This seminar considers the history of images in the US, envisioned as an evolving construction of
practices interacting with theories or theorizations (philosophical, historiographical, literary…).
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Issues of representation are central here, but they do not exhaust the meanings involved in visual
practices — including the larger question of the mutation of American culture into a “culture of
images”. Reading is essential in this seminar, which is held in English.
This year, the seminar will conduct case studies in American photography and its relationships to
topics of national and transatlantic history.
The seminar will begin with a presentation of a new encyclopedia of American visual history and
culture (F. Brunet, ed., L'Amérique des images, histoire et culture visuelles des Etats-Unis).
In October, the seminar will be co-taught by Dr. Gary Van Zante, Curator of architecture and
photography at the MIT Museum, and a specialist of the links of photography and urban culture.
We will discuss the rise of photographic iconographies of American cities in the 19th century.
Topics will include: the relationship between photography and the city building process; the role of
commercial photography in civic boosterism; stereography as the primary medium of the city.
Several 19th-c. city photographers will be examined (John Moran, George Fardon, Eadweard
Muybridge, Theodore Lilienthal) in relation to later artists such as Berenice Abbott, Gabriele
Basilico, Stephen Shore.
In November, we will shift to the photographic illustration of citizens through the portrait. We will
discuss the rise of commercial portrait photography, portrait galleries and archives, and the political
implications of the portrait in American society, such as the dynamics of celebrity and democracy.
This theme will be illustrated by two exhibitions of American 19th-c. portrait photography on view
near Paris. It will be introduced, in the end of September, with a lecture by Bill Becker, collector,
and director of the online American Museum of Photography.
Basic bibliography
- F. Brunet, ed., L'Amérique des images: histoire et culture visuelles des Etats-Unis (to appear,
Sept. 2013)
- E. W. Earle, ed., Points of View: The Stereograph in America, A Cultural History (1979)
- V. Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed our Lives (1993)
- P. Hales, Silver Cities: Photographing American Urbanization, 1839-1939 (2005)
- A. Higgott and T. Wray, ed., Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City
(2012)
- W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (2006)
- R. Taft, Photography and the American Scene (1938)
- A. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographis, Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker
Evans (1989); Lincoln's Smile and Other Essays (2008)
- http://www.photographymuseum.com/
Convenor: François BRUNET, brunetf@univ-paris-diderot.fr
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M2 S4: M.A. 2nd YEAR, SPRING SEMESTER
41CIV154 Political and Social History of the United States, 20th century
4 ECTS, taught in French and English
From Haymarket to Wal-Mart: the History of the Labor Question in the United States, 18862008.
What is the social and political meaning of social inequality in America? How has it evolved over
time? This class will examine the history of the “labor question” in the United States from its
emergence in late 19th century to the current debates over the working poor. We will use primary
sources and secondary literature to address some of the larger interpretive questions posed by the
political and social movements that have sought to transform American capitalism since the late
19th century, including the post-war conservative struggle against the New Deal Sate. Particular
emphasis will be put on debates among historians and on showing students how to read and use
academic works. Active participation in the discussion of the readings is required.
Student assessment: participation in class 40%, book report 30%, final oral exam 30%.
The list of readings is available on the university website.
Convenor: Jean-Christian VINEL, jeanchristianvinel@free.fr
41CIV454 Identities in Great Britain
4 ECTS, taught in English and French
Women and Work in Britain, 1840-1940
Convenor: Myriam BOUSSAHBA-BRAVARD, myriam.boussahba-bravard@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41CIV354 The Writing of History : Professional history and Historiography in
Great-Britain and the United States from the eighteenth to the twentieth century
4 ECTS, taught in English
Thursdays 4.00 p.m to 6.00 p.m spring semester
The seminar presents the historiographical themes that dominate historical research in Britain and
the United States (cultural and political history, history of science, or imperial history). In order to
discuss contemporary historiography, we shall first focus on how the discipline of history emerged
as a profession and a science: a “literary” genre in the eighteenth century, history turned into a
professional discipline in the nineteenth century. How was the nature of historical research and
writing progressively defined (sources, archives, notes) and which fields were privileged? A second
stage in the seminar will bear on the notion of historiographical “discussion”. What is a
historiographical controversy? Why do historians write about a period or an event in different ways
from one century to the next? What are the specificities of Anglo-American historiography as
opposed to French historiography (methods, scholarly societies and journals, fields and objects)?
Using concrete examples, we shall examine the great historiographical disputes, as well as the tools
available to the historian at the end of the twentieth century.
This seminar will rely on the active participation of students and will be based on a number of case
studies.We will focus on the notions of revolution, empire and nation in the writing of history. A
bibliography will be made available at the beginning of the seminar, and posted on the seminar’s
Didel website. At the end of the semester, one or two scholars will be invited to present their
methods and debate with students.
Convenors: Marie-Jeanne ROSSIGNOL, marie-jeanne.rossignol@univ-paris-diderot.fr
Charles-Edouard LEVILLAIN, charles-edouard.levillain@univ-paris-diderot.fr
and
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41LIT154 Literature and History of Ideas 2
4 ECTS, taught in French
Convenor: Philippe JAWORSKI, jaworski@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41LIT254 Literature and Aesthetics: the circulation and transfer of the key scenes
of literature
4 ECTS, taught in English
When we discuss literature we very often have recourse to emblematic moments or key-scenes
which often come to represent the whole work. These scenes may be encapsulated in a quotation or
in an action or narrative moment; they may be moments of epiphany or repetitious and banal.
Whether they are taken from poetry or prose they become the units by which literature and art is
apprehended and disseminated. Painting and photography also provide many examples of keyscenes sometimes linked to literature; and in which text and image inspire and indeed create each
other mutually. Our corpus will be primarily from the nineteenth-century - a corpus which will
allow an understanding of how today media (cinema, internet clips, advertising) still relies on a
repertoire of scenes created more than 150 years before. A study of text and image and their
interrelations and transcodings will also help us to understand how the key scene functions
aesthetically and how the particular poetics of the scene might give spectators and readers access to
culture. It will not be forgotten that the scene contributes to the circulation of ideology and is thus
highly politicized.
Project to be handed in (10 pages): Find a scene from nineteenth-century literature which might be
considered a key scene either in terms of plot, or symbolic/metaphoric weight or all of these. Make
a close reading of this scene describing how the scene functions within the work as a whole, how
the scene is constructed in terms of its language and why the scene might be chosen as a keymoment according to its potentially visual impact. Then find an example of an adaptation of this
moment - an illustration (at the time of the appearance of the work of literature or later), a painting,
a film extract or other re-writings or re-uses of the scene in visual terms. Make a close reading of
this new version and write a close analysis of how it works and produces meaning. You may also
wish to consider the language used if it is a matter of a film adaptation. Lastly, describe in detail the
transfer or transcoding which has occurred in re-producing this key scene. What has changed and
why? What aesthetic and ideological changes have been made and why? How did the original
historical conjuncture produce and indeed consume the nineteenth-century scene and how does the
new historical conjuncture play a role in the choices made by the writer, illustrator, painter,
photographer or film maker?
Convenor: Sara THORNTON, sara.thornton@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41LNA154 Syntax and Semantics
4 ECTS, taught in English
This seminar will focus on verbal ellipsis and verbal anaphora, specifically we will cover (i) Verb
phrase ellipsis (I haven't read your paper yet but I promise you I will read your paper), (ii) Pseudogapping (I suppose it must have distressed him even more than it did [=distressed] me), (iii)
Gapping (John invited Peter and Mary invited Jane), (iv) do so, do it, do this, do that anaphora (He
could move very quickly, she knew (although he seldom found occasion to do so [=move very
quickly]), but he was more wiry than truly strong; Jim became convinced that an individual can do
something constructive in the ideological battle and set out to do it [=do something constructive in
the ideiological battle]); (v) Sluicing (John said something about it but I can't remember what he
said about it). Other related phenomena will be examined if time permits.
We will begin with an overview of the history of the analysis of ellipsis and anaphora in modern
formal grammar, both from a syntactic and from a semantic point of view, taking advantage of this
to review fundamental concepts. We will then focus the class on the question of the choice between
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these various types of anaphora in discrouse Students will be required to read various papers on the
topic and to collect relevant examples in electronic corpora.
References (partial list)
Culicover, Peter W and Ray Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(Concentrating on chapters 7 and 8, but also the 6 introductory chapters)
Hankamer Jorge and Ivan Sag. 1976. Deep and Surface Anaphora. Linguistic Inquiry 7.3, 491-326.
Kehler, Andrew. 2002. Coherence, Reference and the Theory of Grammar. Stanford: CSLI.
Miller, Philip. 2011. The choice between verbal anaphors in discourse. In I. Hendrickx, S. Lalitha
Devi, A. Branco and R. Mitkov, eds., Anaphora Processing and Applications: 8th Discourse
Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium, DAARC 2011, Volume 7099 of Lecture Notes in
Artificial Intelligence, 82-95. Berlin: Springer.
Convenor: Philip MILLER, philip.miller@univ-paris-diderot.fr
41LNA254 Phono-Syntax
4 ECTS, taught in English
A Corpus-based approach to syllables in English
The seminar will confront theoretical hypotheses and corpus data about syllables in English. The
syllable division in English dictionaries will be investigated from Sheridan’s General Dictionary of
the English Language (1780) to the latest editions of the Longman Pronouncing Dictionary. The
principles of syllable division expounded in Wells 1990 will be compared to competing views. The
traditional opposition between syllable-timed and stressed-time rhythm will be discussed from
Ramus et al. 1999 seminal paper for the investigation “rhythm metrics”. A CV-patterned vs. CVCpatterned set of varieties of English will be hypothesized, drawing from Dauer 1983 and
observations by Kurath 1964.
Dauer, R.M., 1983, ‘Stress-timing and syllable-timing reanalyzed’, in Journal of Phonetics, Vol.11
p.51-62.
Kurath, H., 1964, A Phonology and Prosody of Modern English, Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Ramus, F. Nespor M. Mehler M. 1999, ‘Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech of signal’, in
Cognition, p. 265-292.
Roach, P. 1982, ‘On the distinction between ‘stress-timed’ and ‘syllable-timed’ languages, in
Linguistics Controversies, London: Arnold p. 73-79.
Wells, J.C. 1990, ‘Syllabification and allophony’, in Ramsaran (ed.) Studies in the Pronunciation of
English, Arnold, p.76-86.
Wright, R. (2004). ‘A review of perceptual cues and cue robustness’ in Hayes , Kirchner and
Steriade (eds) Phonetically based phonology, Cambridge : CUP, 34-57.
Convenor: Nicolas BALLIER, nballier@free.fr
41ACV154 Aspects of modern and contemporary art
4 ECTS, taught in English
'Black Box/White Cube': cinema, art, institution
In this seminar we will look at the relationship between cinema and the art world, exploring its
aesthetic, cultural and political facets. In the past, cinema has often used the spaces offered by art
institutions as setting or backdrop, and the artefacts and art works on display in the museum and the
gallery as objects of investigation or as props. Conversely, and even if artists have always been
drawn to the medium of the moving image, art institutions have long remained indifferent to the
‘seventh art’.
The advent of the digital however, has had a profound impact on the status and practice of the
cinema and its relationship to the contemporary art world. Though many film historians disagree,
for some observers the shift from analog to digital rendered the medium of the moving image
obsolete. Indeed, for many an art critic and ‘new media’ theorist, it meant the death cinema as we
know it, and art institutions responded accordingly: film now has its place in the museum, and
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contemporary artists plunder cinema’s infinite archive, appropriating (as foundfootage, or through
compilation, remix and sampling techniques) the medium’s forms as well as its audiovisual content.
We will look at the ways in which the status, reception and form of the medium of the moving
image evolve as it migrates from the darkened space of the film theatre to the white walls of the
gallery.
In doing so, we will explore the work of an eclectic group of video artists as well as filmmakers,
moving from classic fiction film to multimedia art work. If pertinent, the course will include a
gallery or museum visit.
— Jacobs, Steven, Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts, Edimbourg: E.U.P, 2010
— Joselit, David, American Art Since 1945, Londres: Thames & Hudson, 2003.
— Marchessault & Lord, editors, Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2007
— Connolly Maeve, The Place of Artists’ Cinema. Space, Site and Screen, Londres: Intellect, 2009.
— Leighton Tania, Art and the Moving Image: A critical Reader, Londres: Tate, 2008.
— Stephens, Chris (ed.), The History of British Art. 1870-Now, Londres: Tate Publishing, 2008.
Convenor: Martine BEUGNET, martine.beugnet@univ-paris-diderot.fr
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