SE2570: French Theory

School English Literature
Department Code ENCAP
Module Code SE2570
External Subject Code 100319
Number of Credits 20
Level L6
Language of Delivery English
Module Leader Dr Laurent Milesi
Semester Autumn Semester
Academic Year 2014/5

Outline Description of Module

This module will introduce some of the main French critical theorists of the second half of the twentieth century (Barthes, Blanchot, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Lacan, Derrida, Cixous, Kristeva, Badiou) that have been influential in renewing our understanding of how literature is written and read. Emphasis will be on the historical and ideological contexts within which these new ideas were developed, in relation to a range of disciplines (philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, semiology, feminism), as well as on the reconceptualization of practices of reading and writing they involved.

On completion of the module a student should be able to

- have a firm grasp on the main concepts seen in the module, including by ‘applying’ them to literary or cultural texts;

- articulate critical-theoretical differences between the various authors studied for the module;

- situate those critical debates within their respective historical and ideological contexts.

How the module will be delivered

This double module will be taught over one semester, using a mixture of formal lecturing (to introduce key thinkers, themes and concepts) and more interactive, hands-on practical seminars devoted to the close examination of crucial passages from the selected texts.

The lectures will provide the students with the necessary critical background to help them grasp concepts in their ideological context. The seminars will help them develop skills in close critical-theoretical reading, taking a comparative approach to the various thinkers and themes seen on the module.

Skills that will be practised and developed

Although no informal presentations will be required, students will be expected to participate actively in seminars, possibly in the form of mini-forums, reporting to the module leader on their readings of specific passages, concepts and ideas. Personal as well as collaborative analytic skills will be developed within a comparative approach to the material.

How the module will be assessed

Type of assessment

Title

Duration (exam) /

Word length (essay)

Approx. date of assessment

Essay

100

 

One 3,200 or two 1,600 words long essays

January

Assessment Breakdown

Type % Title Duration(hrs)
Written Assessment 100 Essay N/A

Syllabus content

The week-by-week schedule based on the indicative bibliography below will be provided as part of the Reader. Themes for study will include but are not limited to: authorship, intertextuality, the notion of literariness, écriture and écriture feminine, the opposition between language and discourse, the relationship of textual production to economics.

Essential Reading and Resource List

Module Reader will be available for purchase at the start of the semester, to be supplemented every week by succinct primary and secondary bibliographies for each theorist seen on the nodule.

Background Reading and Resource List

The Reader’s contents may occasionally vary but are likely to include a substantial part of the following:

— Roland Barthes, ‘What Is Writing?’, Writing Degree Zero (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 9-18 and ‘The Third Meaning’ or ‘From Work to Text’,Image Music Text, ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978): 52-68,, 155-64

— Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez and Alice Jardine (New York: Columbia UP, 1982): 64-91

— Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Disappearance of Literature’ and ‘The Search for Point Zero’, The Book to Come (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003): 195-201, 202-9

— Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, ed. Peter Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991): 101-19

— Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Rewriting Modernity’, or ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, or ‘Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable’, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (Cambridge: Polity, 1993): 24-35, 89-107, 119-28

— Gilles Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’ and ‘He Stuttered’, Essays Critical and Clinical (London: Verso, 1998): 1-6, 107-14, or (with Féllix Guattari)‘What Is a Minor Literature’, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1986): 16-27

— Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition, ed. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2007): 6-49

— Jacques Derrida, from Signsponge, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1991): 344-69

— Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer 1976): 875-93

— Alain Badiou, ‘Language, Thought, Poetry’, Theoretical Writings: Alain Badiou, ed. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2006): 239-47


Copyright Cardiff University. Registered charity no. 1136855