French 3
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.
Individual and Society
On this module we will look at the changing relationship between individuals and society in a French context. Key sociological concepts relating to the social construction of the individual are explored in order to analyse fiction and non-fiction texts that deal with work and social organisation in contemporary France.
The theoretical starting point of the module is Michel Foucault’s analysis of the emergence of ‘disciplinary’ societies.
Key fictional works include Laurent Cantet’s film L’emploi du temps and Thierry Beinstingel’s novel Retour aux mots sauvages.
Contemporary Representations of Travel
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).
French Documentary Cinema
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.
La République Gaullienne: 1958 to 1969
This module explores how the Fifth Republic came into being and examines the problems of bedding in a regime that revolutionised French political culture without jettisoning the key features of the 'modèle républicain'.
We follow a chronological narrative of French politics between 1958 and 1969, and will also examine themes such as the ‘écriture de la constitution’, the clash of political visions and bipolarisation and its tensions. We conclude with de Gaulle's apparent act of 'political suicide' in 1969.
Francophone Writing in Canada
This module studies a selection of texts which have played a significant part in establishing a tradition of Canadian writing in French. The module includes texts by both Québécois and non-Québécois writers. The texts are studied in the context of the specific cultures to which they belong and of the reception they found.
Dissertation in French Studies
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.
Visual Culture
The major theoretical approaches to understanding images have included art history analysis, semiotics, psychoanalysis and discourse analysis, and the module explores each of these theoretical ways of 'decoding' images. We will ask asks how making affects meaning and how images can be seen as tools of critical theory in media culture. The module looks at a wide range of images from fine art, photography, print media, television and film, science and advertising. Student cover many themes, such as 'what is an image?', 'what is the relation between language and images?', 'what is the relation between image and thought?' The module ends on the open question of what visual literacy might be and mean in a visual culture.
Contesting Culture
This module examines the contested nature of culture in a variety of contexts. Beginning with a definition of culture that includes the arts and media, but broadening out to consider cultural practices in a range of situations, the module asks the key questions: who defines and controls culture and for what purposes and, conversely, what kinds of opportunities exist for cultural and creative resistance?
Auditory Cultures: Sound, Listening and Everyday Life in the Modern World
This module introduces students to the cultural and social role of sound and listening in everyday life. Scholars have argued that, since the Enlightenment, modern societies have privileged sight over the other senses in their desire to know and control the world. But what of hearing? Until recently, the role of sound in everyday life was a neglected field of study. Yet Jonathan Sterne argues that the emergence of new sound media technologies in the nineteenth century - from the stethoscope to the phonograph - amounted to an 'ensoniment' in modern culture in which listening took centre stage.
Beginning with an examination of the relationship between visual and auditory culture in everyday life, this module introduces a variety of cultural contexts in which sound played an important role, including:
- how people interact with the sounds of their cities
- how new sound technologies allowed people to intervene in everyday experience
- why some sounds (such as music) have been valued over others (such as noise)
- the role of sound in making and breaking communities
- the role of sounds in conflict and warfare
- the importance of sound in film and television from the silent era onwards.
We use a variety of sound sources, such as music and archival sound recordings, in order to understand the significance of sound in everyday life from the late eighteenth century to the present.
Self, Sign and Society
This module equips students you with the theoretical tools needed to explore how social identity is both asserted and challenged through the deployment of signs broadly conceived. 'Sign' is understood here primarily with reference to Saussurean linguistics, and the impact of the structuralist and then poststructuralist movements on disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, postcolonial theory, cultural studies and visual culture.
- How does our accent function as a sign of our class origins or cultural sympathies?
- Does skin colour always function as a social sign?
- How do the clothes we wear align us with particular lifestyles and ideological positions and how is this transgressed?
- How has the phenomenon of self-branding colonised our everyday lives?
- What does our Facebook profile say about how we would like to be read by the wider world? Does the logic of the sign itself exceed what we intend to do with it?
- How do the signs that construct a social 'self' circulate in the context of new media?
- Are there psychological costs associated with living in this society of the sign?
This module will address these and other related questions by introducing students to the approaches of thinkers such as Freud and Lacan, Saussure and Greimas, Barthes and Baudrillard, Levi-Strauss and Geertz, Derrida and Bhabha, and Mirzoeff and Mitchell among others.
Global Cinema
Almost every country has a cinema industry. Yet what’s shown, and why, varies wildly.
We’ll look at how films outside Hollywood are made, distributed and received globally, and how these reflect local, regional and international trends.
We’ll ask how these cinemas:
- reflect past and current international film industries setups and audiences’ tastes
- are driven by local cultural specifics and global changes
- might benefit different institutions and structures in society
We will also try to untangle categories such as national cinema, transnational cinema and world cinema, as well as to make sense of different filmic traditions, genres and modes around the world. Who creates these categories and who do they serve?
With an entire global cinema to draw from, the focus will narrow in any year to particular regions, filmic genres or movements.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Public Cultures: Protest, Participation and Power
Explore the relationship between public space, politics and technology using overlapping and interdisciplinary fields, including:
- cultural studies
- cultural geography
- digital studies
- urban sociology
- cultural politics
You will engage in debates about the changing nature and uses of public space, with an emphasis on urban environments and digital space.
A range of protest movements will also provide case-study material and offer a central focus for your theoretical and practical explorations of the role of new technologies in:
- controlling space
- resisting control
- enabling new forms of civic participation.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Gender, Sexuality and Media
Examine how issues of gender and sexuality relate to media and popular culture.
Using the intersectional fields of feminism, queer theory, and media and cultural studies we'll ask some crucial questions such as:
- How are gender and sexuality represented in media and popular culture?
- How do media and cultural industries structure gender and sexual inequalities?
- How are identities and practices of media audiences and users gendered and sexualised?
- How can gender and sexual norms be challenged in creative and radical ways?
This module is worth 20 credits.
Teaching Film and Media Studies for Undergraduate Ambassadors
This module is part of the nationwide Undergraduate Ambassadors Scheme, which works with universities to provide academic modules that enable students to go into local schools to act as inspiring role models. You will split your time between the university-based seminar and your allocated school, where you will be placed in an appropriate department as a teaching assistant. You will design and deliver a teaching project aimed at improving pupil understanding of selected aspects of media studies. You will be supported by the module convenor, the education specialist on campus, and the school's contact teacher. The module typically includes fortnightly seminars and seven half-days spent in school. Placements are in secondary schools and Sixth Form or FE colleges.
Theories and Practices of Translation
You'll explore the different theoretical approaches to translation that have been prominent in the Western world. We will examine the history of translation and different translation models across a range of genres: novel, drama, audiovisual media and poetry.
For each theory of translation, a number of case studies will be examined: either French and Francophone texts translated into English or English texts into French. The focus of the module is largely practical, and you are encouraged to develop a critical and reflective approach to translation practice.
The Everyday in Modern French Fiction
The module looks at the various ways in which the novel has evolved and adapted to "the contemporary" by responding to the "everyday". Giving an overview of the various approaches to the everyday in the contemporary novel from the 60s to the present, this module will explore how key authors negotiate, through their writing, the indeterminacy of everyday and the unstable space it occupies between the social and the individual.