French Studies BA

Following your time spent living in a French-speaking country this advanced module will be your final step towards fluency. We'll help you continue to improve your oral and written skills using a wide variety of texts.

Your grammar expertise and vocabulary shall be deepened through the production of linguistic commentary and summaries. In addition, we'll help you develop translation skills. Your French writing skills will improve immeasurably as we translate into and out of French creative writing in different registers.

This module aims to develop the skills of comprehension of written French and of translating accurately and elegantly into English. In addition to the above, it aims to develop a self-conscious translation practice.

This module is a practical course which aims to develop advanced skills of comprehension and analysis of a variety of English texts (fiction and non-fiction) and of translating accurately and fluently into French. It aims to enhance accuracy and fluency of written French through attention to the grammar, syntax, vocabulary and register of both languages and to develop a self-conscious translation practice.

You'll examine the range of social, political and philosophical questions raised by mass immigration to France in the post-war period. These questions will be tackled through historical analysis of patterns of migration and changing immigration policies, as well as through the study of relevant films, novels and theoretical texts which engage with questions of citizenship, identity and ethnicity.

This module will study the different ways travel has been used and represented in contemporary French and Francophone texts, arts and films. From tourism to exploration, from exile to migration, from pilgrimage to business travel, we will question the tacit ideologies found in contemporary travel discourses. We will study more specifically how contemporary discourses of travel have been, or not, adapting themselves to a post-colonial awareness and how it has enabled travellers to represent travel differently. The importance of this field has been steadily growing in between disciplines that range from literary studies to ethnography. The module will use these cross-cultural influences to create an arena in which to develop connections between key disciplines and different forms of arts (literature, ethnography, films and photography).

This module aims to introduce you to key aspects of French documentary cinema by considering a range of documentary cinematic techniques, and by looking at the ways in which documentary form has developed over time. The module examines the work of a range of filmmakers and explores the theoretical, socio-cultural and ethical questions raised by documentary cinema.

You will develop analytical tools that can be used to understand the different ways in which documentaries attempt to engage audiences and deal in sophisticated and often challenging ways with a range of issues.

This module looks at various issues relating to the field of language contact, including bilingualism, multilingualism and diglossia.

The module also explores the outcomes of such language contact:

• linguistic borrowing
• code-switching
• language maintenance
• language shift and language death
• the emergence of pidgins and creoles
• the development of language policy and planning
• the shaping of attitudes towards language

These topics will be explored by using examples from several different languages, and by looking at the French language in contact with other languages in France and further afield.

In this module students learn to devise and develop projects and teaching methods appropriate to engage the age and ability group they are working with. The module enables students to gain confidence in communicating their subject, develop strong organisational and interpersonal skills, and to understand how to address the needs of individuals.

This year-long module is based on guided independent study of a chosen topic in the field of French and Francophone Studies for which supervision can be offered by the Department. Topics typically relate to a module taken in the second year, or to a module to be taken in the final year, and it is expected that students have some familiarity with the chosen field.

Dissertation topics in past years have included:

• The feminist and humanist aspects of Christine de Pizan's work.
• How Albert Memmi's philosophy of colonised identity is prefigured in his literary work.
• The representation of women in three novels by Dany Laferrière.
• The representation of women in the films of Jean-Luc Godard.
• The definition of malaise in the context of contemporary socio-economic and political issues in France.
• Presidential Power in the Fifth Republic.
• The urban landscape in surrealism.
• Translating humour from English to French.

Teaching takes place in the form of regular individual meetings with the allocated supervisor, and group meetings with the module convenor, centred more generally on research and writing skills.

Semester 1 is devoted to research, reading and planning, leading to the submission of a dissertation abstract, chapter outline and preliminary bibliography, as well as the presentation of posters. In the second semester, students write up and complete the dissertation under the continued guidance of the supervisor.

This module invites students to critically engage with representations of apparently disruptive and transgressive French and Francophone women from determining moments in French history between 1789 and 1945, including individuals who were violent, who took up arms, were transgressive, broke laws, and were institutionalized, deported, and defamed in the press – all in the name of social justice. Examples include revolutionary Théroigne de Méricourt, who dressed as a man in order to fight for women’s revolutionary involvement and was institutionalised for madness, and Louise Michel, one of the women accused of setting devastating fires that gutted government and cultural institutions during the Semaine Sanglante of the Paris Commune.

Students will analyse case studies in the light of the dominant gender discourses of their time (during the 1789 Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Belle Epoque, and the First and Second World Wars), as manifest in cultural representation, such as press, literary and visual sources. Where possible, they will also study the voice of lived experience, via memoirs and works published by the women in question, in order to explore how their own perspectives interacted with representations of them.

Students will examine the case studies and work on a thematic research project in the second. For this, they will be invited to identify a theme pertinent to at least two of the case studies, in order to comment on the threads that link women’s militancy across centuries, but also to explore the extent to which ‘difficult’ women contributed to lasting change in women’s lives over time. Possible themes might include but are not limited to social class, gender and gender identity, (political) violence, mental ill health and perceptions of madness.

The module will give students the opportunity to consult digitized primary source material such as newspapers, books and imagery via archives such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s collection, gallica.fr.

This module provides final-year students studying French as part of their degree with the opportunity to study in some depth eight contemporary French-language films that deal in different ways with the interaction between personal and political aspects of contemporary life. The module will encourage students to engage with the films both thematically as texts that articulate important contemporary issues, and also formally as films that draw on specific cinematic techniques and make a series of aesthetic choices in order to engage with the personal and the political.

The first four films in the module deal primarily with issues of identity and personal development: Céline Sciamma; ‘Bande de filles’ (2014); Mia Hansen-Løve, ‘L’Avenir’ (2016); Laurent Cantet ‘L’Atelier’ (2017) & Laura Wandel, ‘Un Monde’ (2021). The films in the second half of the module deal primarily with issues around work, economy and political struggle: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, ‘Deux jours, une nuit’ (2014); Stéphane Brizé, ‘En guerre’ (2018); Robin Campillo ‘120 BPM’ (2017) & Julie Lecoustre & Emmanuel Marre, ‘Rien à foutre’ (2021). The module will situate each film with a broader social, political and philosophical context, and consider the distinctive aesthetic and thematic contribution it makes in this field.

The films in the module will allow students to engage at a sophisticated level with the way in which narrative cinema engages with the contemporary world. Weekly online lectures on each of the films will lead into workshop activities, including close reading of film sequences and detailed in-class discussion of selected reading on the films.

This module focuses on the theory and practice of two modes of audio-visual translation: subtitling and dubbing.

The linguistic, technical, and cultural theoretical underpinnings of subtitling and dubbing from French into English will be examined in detail, and students will be able to put the theory into practice using professional dedicated software.