This paper is available for the academic year 2025-26.
This paper offers an approach to modern and contemporary literature, thought and visual culture from the French-speaking world that emphasizes the extreme and the 'real'. This will be configured politically and historically with relation to cultural and intellectual responses to genocide and to colonialism in the treatment of topics on the Holocaust and on Algeria. It will be configured in philosophical terms through study of questions of ethics and experience in Modern French Thought, with reference firstly to Existentialism and secondly to broadly Post-Structuralist approaches through Levinas, Nancy, Derrida, Cixous and others. It will be configured in terms of autofiction, self-portraiture and life-writing. Through the paper, questions of testimony, evidence, hospitality, alterity, violence, vulnerability, and intimacy will return in different formulations. The paper is concerned throughout with the capacity of cultural forms, writing, moving image media, installation art, for offering an imprint of experience, for, in Nancy's terms, making sense.
- The Holocaust
- Algeria
- Eroticism and Intimacy
- Life-writing
- Existentialism
- Ethics
Full Reading List:
See the reading list.
A wealth of articles about material featured on the paper may be found here.
This paper will be taught in a combination of lectures and supervisions.
For the Fr.12 Moodle site, please see here.
The paper is assessed by coursework and exam.
Coursework: one essay in response to a comparative question set at the end of Lent Term, to be completed by the beginning of Easter Term.
Exam: a three-hour written paper, answering one question from each of the two sections. Section A questions are answered with reference to two or more works by one writer or filmmaker; Section B offers a selection of passages for commentary.
Alternatively, students can choose to submit an Optional Dissertation.
Professor Emma Wilson |
