Cours Magistral de Sandrine ORIEZ
This class on 20th c. American (US) fiction is dedicated to African American fiction by women writers.
The texts studied will include: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982); Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters (1982); Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987).
TD 4 w/ Maëlle Jeanniard du Dot

This module sets out to explore how the themes and issues raised by a major text of English literature, E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End, resonate throughout the literature of the 20th century as illustrated by any one of the indicated “companion texts” which take Forster’s classic novel as their intertext.

Core set text: FORSTER, E.M., Howards End (1910), Penguin Classics, with an introduction by David Lodge

Companion texts (instructors’ choice):
HOLLINGHURST, Alan, The Line of Beauty (2004), Picador, 2004 or;
LODGE, David, Nice Work (1988), Vintage 2011 or;
SMITH, Zadie, On Beauty (2005), Penguin, 2020.

-> This group studies On Beauty by Zadie Smith.
This course will examine the events and social phenomena that have transformed British society since WW2 and contributed to shape its contemporary identity: post-war reconstruction and “consensus”, the setting up and subsequent reform of the Welfare State, decolonisation and the successive waves of immigration from former colonies, the challenge to traditional class and/or gender (collective) identities and categorisations, etc. These themes will be tackled through the study of various primary sources (texts, images, audiovisual documents) and students will be asked to produce written and oral analyses.
The publication in 2020 of A Promised Land, the first volume of Barack Obama’s presidential memoirs, gives us the opportunity to study the presidency of the first African-American president in the history of the United States of America. His election was hailed by most political pundits as the start of a major transformation of America. First of all, some argued that his presidency was going to pave the way for the emergence of a post-racial America. However, the fact that he had to deliver a speech on race in Philadelphia during the campaign was an indication that racial issues remained highly sensitive. Once he was elected, he was faced with very serious problems, starting with the economic crisis which hit the country in 2007 and the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The purpose of this course is to study the landmark moments of Obama’s presidency to evaluate whether he was a transformative president or merely a pragmatic one.
The aim of this class will be to question Ireland’s status vis-à-vis Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth century: was it an integral part of the United Kingdom or a colony of the Empire? With the 1800 Act of Union and the arrival of many Irish immigrants in the great industrial towns of the North of England and the South of Scotland, Ireland was partly integrated into the metropole. Moreover, in the nineteenth century, the Irish took an active part in shaping the Empire as migrants, soldiers or members of the colonial civil service. However, the Crown’s Irish policy greatly differed from the one enforced in Scotland or Wales and many historians have contended that Ireland was used as a laboratory which allowed the British to test colonial policies before duplicating them elsewhere in the Empire. On the other hand, Irish history in the nineteenth century is characterized by the growth of various nationalist movements who, notwithstanding their diverging aims and methods, sought to emancipate Ireland from British domination. How did Irish nationalists justify their fight? How did they define the Irish nation? How were their demands perceived by the British? Here are a few examples of the questions that will be addressed throughout the semester to gain a better understanding of Ireland’s struggle to become a nation of its own.
TD de linguistique anglaise de Mme Besnard (Groupe 2).
Compléments de cours et corrigés.