This paper is available for the academic year 2025-26.

This paper focuses on four topics, ‘History and Memory’, ‘Ethics’, ‘Life-writing’, and ‘Intimacy’, used to offer perspectives on literature, thought and visual culture from all areas of the French-speaking world. The timespan runs from the start of the twentieth-century to the present. Students are encouraged, if they wish, to draw on areas in visual culture, film, photography, installation art, dance, as well as literary texts and areas of modern and contemporary thought.   The choice of our four topics represents a view that there is a particular interest and urgency in paying attention to: representations of postcolonial struggles for independence, as well as histories of genocide, migration and trauma; questions of ethics as they relate to the other, to race, to community, to care, to ecologies; questions of the self, class, the everyday, and literary genre; questions of intimacy, the erotic, attachment, consent, gender, queer and trans experience. 

There are no set texts, and any relevant material in French from the period may be used to address the topics and respond to questions (including authors and filmmakers who have appeared on the reading list in the past). Note that it is possible to work on texts that are not included on the reading list. This new reading list offers a guide to possible areas of reading and inquiry. There is no expectation that students will read all the works listed, or cover all four topics in depth, although it is hoped that material from all topics will be approached in lectures and supervisions, as students work out with their supervisors their main areas of interest for the paper. It is also the case that some texts may be relvant to more than one topic and students are invited to use material from the list across topics as relevant. It is expected that across their examination answers students will show knowledge of material in relation to more than one topic. Topics will not be named explicitly on the exam paper.  Where students are asked to answer on ‘a range of material’, the response should include reference to work by more than one writer or artist. This may be drawn from one topic area or more than one, as appropriate to the question. Where students are asked to answer on the work of just one writer or artist, they should make reference to at least two works by that writer or artist. 

Feel free to contact the paper convenor Emma Wilson (efw1000@cam.ac.uk) for any queries in relation to reading, content notes, the paper, the examination, or choice of supervisor. Supervision is not centrally organised.