M2 S4: M.A. 2nd YEAR, SPRING SEMESTER
4 ECTS, taught in French and English
From Haymarket to Wal-Mart: the History of the Labor Question in the United States, 1886-2008.
What is the social and political meaning of social inequality in America? How has it evolved over time? This class will examine the history of the “labor question” in the United States from its emergence in late 19th century to the current debates over the working poor. We will use primary sources and secondary literature to address some of the larger interpretive questions posed by the political and social movements that have sought to transform American capitalism since the late 19th century, including the post-war conservative struggle against the New Deal Sate. Particular emphasis will be put on debates among historians and on showing students how to read and use academic works. Active participation in the discussion of the readings is required.
Student assessment: participation in class 40%, book report 30%, final oral exam 30%.
The list of readings is available on the university website.
Convenor: Jean-Christian VINEL, jeanchristianvinel@free.fr
Autobiography in the 18th century: recording lives and times
The philosopher, historian and man of letters David Hume, the historian Edward Gibbon, and the scientist Joseph Priestley all felt called upon to produce an autobiography. This seminar studies their three works along with the philosophical, political and social contexts in which they were written. We will try to measure the ambitions ascribed to intellectual discourse, the transformations produced in religious and political ideas, and the visions these authors had of how society was changing in the second half of the 18th century.
Convenor: Robert MANKIN, mankin@univ-paris-diderot.fr
4 ECTS, taught in English
Convenors: Clarisse BERTHEZENE, clarisse.berthezene@wanadoo.fr and Jean-Christian VINEL, jeanchristianvinel@free.fr
4 ECTS, taught in French
Langue, formes, territoires : l’expérience littéraire de Samuel Clemens, dit Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Convenor: Philippe JAWORSKI, jaworski@univ-paris-diderot.fr
4 ECTS, taught in English
When we discuss literature we very often have recourse to emblematic moments or key-scenes which often come to represent the whole work. These scenes may be encapsulated in a quotation or in an action or narrative moment; they may be moments of epiphany or repetitious and banal. Whether they are taken from poetry or prose they become the units by which literature and art is apprehended and disseminated. Painting and photography also provide many examples of key-scenes sometimes linked to literature; and in which text and image inspire and indeed create each other mutually. Our corpus will be primarily from the nineteenth-century - a corpus which will allow an understanding of how today media (cinema, internet clips, advertising) still relies on a repertoire of scenes created more than 150 years before. A study of text and image and their interrelations and transcodings will also help us to understand how the key scene functions aesthetically and how the particular poetics of the scene might give spectators and readers access to culture. It will not be forgotten that the scene contributes to the circulation of ideology and is thus highly politicized.
Project to be handed in (10 pages): Find a scene from nineteenth-century literature which might be considered a key scene either in terms of plot, or symbolic/metaphoric weight or all of these. Make a close reading of this scene describing how the scene functions within the work as a whole, how the scene is constructed in terms of its language and why the scene might be chosen as a key-moment according to its potentially visual impact. Then find an example of an adaptation of this moment - an illustration (at the time of the appearance of the work of literature or later), a painting, a film extract or other re-writings or re-uses of the scene in visual terms. Make a close reading of this new version and write a close analysis of how it works and produces meaning. You may also wish to consider the language used if it is a matter of a film adaptation. Lastly, describe in detail the transfer or transcoding which has occurred in re-producing this key scene. What has changed and why? What aesthetic and ideological changes have been made and why? How did the original historical conjuncture produce and indeed consume the nineteenth-century scene and how does the new historical conjuncture play a role in the choices made by the writer, illustrator, painter, photographer or film maker?
Convenor: Sara THORNTON, sara.thornton@univ-paris-diderot.fr
4 ECTS, taught in English
This seminar will focus on verbal ellipsis and verbal anaphora, specifically we will cover (i) Verb phrase ellipsis (I haven't read your paper yet but I promise you I will read your paper), (ii) Pseudo-gapping (I suppose it must have distressed him even more than it did [=distressed] me), (iii) Gapping (John invited Peter and Mary invited Jane), (iv) do so, do it, do this, do that anaphora (He could move very quickly, she knew (although he seldom found occasion to do so [=move very quickly]), but he was more wiry than truly strong; Jim became convinced that an individual can do something constructive in the ideological battle and set out to do it [=do something constructive in the ideiological battle]); (v) Sluicing (John said something about it but I can't remember what he said about it). Other related phenomena will be examined if time permits.
We will begin with an overview of the history of the analysis of ellipsis and anaphora in modern formal grammar, both from a syntactic and from a semantic point of view, taking advantage of this to review fundamental concepts. We will then focus the class on the question of whether ellipsis and anaphora should be treated using derivational syntactic mechanisms (deletion in the case of ellipsis and substitution in the case of anaphora, as suggested by the presentation of the examples above) or whether an interpretative theory is more explanatory. Students will be required to read various papers on the topic and to collect relevant examples in electronic corpora.
References (partial list)
Culicover, Peter W and Ray Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Concentrating on chapters 7 and 8, but also the 6 introductory chapters)
Guimier, Claude. 1981. Sur la substitution verbale en anglais. Modèles linguistiques 3.1, 135-161.
Kehler, Andrew. 2002. Coherence, Reference and the Theory of Grammar. Stanford: CSLI.
Merchant, Jason. 2001. The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands and the Theory of Ellipsis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Convenor: Philip MILLER, philip.miller@univ-paris-diderot.fr
4 ECTS, taught in English
A Corpus-based approach to the prosodic hierarchy in English
The seminar will confront theoretical hypotheses and corpus data about the prosodic hierarchy. The assumption is that syntactic constituents should at least partially reflect the phonology. Prosodic correlates therefore should exist to support a whole hierarchical organisation structuring the acoustic signal and, hopefully, correlating with syntax. The notion of "prosodic hierarchy" supports such a conception of constituency.
Beside a presentation of the different levels of the hierarchy (mora, syllables, feet, Clitic Groups, Intonational Phrases, Phonological Utterances) entrenched in a given theory, a descriptive approach is needed to check the facts in actual data. The cornerstones of the literature will be surveyed, with a comparison of various theoretical backgrounds (Selkirk, Nespor & Vogel 1986, Carr 1993). The different units advocated in textbooks will be surveyed and researched in corpora.
Among the crucial units, arguments will be given in favour of the foot and the clitic group. The range and extension of the prosodic utterance will be examined, with a corpus favouring disambiguation strategies. The relevance of IP (Intonational Phrases) as the key unit to segment data will be confronted with basic descriptions of tone units (Wells 2006).
Gussenhoven, C., & Jacobs, H., 1998, Understanding phonology, London : Arnold. (esp. pp. 239-251)
Nespor, M. & Vogel, I., [1986] 2007, Prosodic phonology with a new foreword, Mouton de Gruyter.(esp. 249-268)
Wells, J., 2006, English Intonation: An Introduction, CUP.
Convenor: Nicolas BALLIER, nballier@free.fr
4 ECTS, taught in English
This seminar will focus on the history and logic of modern and contemporary art and on its historiography. In order to understand the logic of aesthetic modernity we will turn first to how modernism was reflected in the field of the visual and on its various modalities in Britain and in the United States. We will successively turn to the rise of abstraction as initiated by Cubism: from British Vorticism and the Bloomsbury Group to American Synchromism.
We will then turn to the successive movements that crystallised the imperative of artistic subversion (Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Land Art, Conceptual Art, Appropriation art, the Young British Artists…) in order to grasp how the ideology of the new profoundly modified the function and missions of art in society.
We will also turn to the way the logic of subversion contributed to the making of collective aesthetic identities both in Britain and in the United States, but also to a political reempowering of the visual.
Bibliography:
A more detailed bibliography will be given at the beginning of term. In the meantime one may turn to the following titles:
— Britt, David, Modern Art. Impressionism to Post-Modernism, Londres : Thames & Hudson, 2008.
— Joselit, David, American Art Since 1945, Londres: Thames & Hudson, 2003.
— Lucie-Smith, Edward, Movements in Art Since 1945, Londres: Thames & Hudson, 2001.
— Prow, Jules, Rose, Barbara, La peinture américaine, Genève: Skira, 1969.
— Spalding, Frances, British Art Since 1900, Londres: Thames & Hudson, 1987.
— Stephens, Chris (ed.), The History of British Art. 1870-Now, Londres: Tate Publishing, 2008.
Assessment:
— A paper in English (word-length: 5000 words) to be handed in at the end of term and that will focus on a topic relating to the issues raised in the seminar.
Convenor: Catherine BERNARD, catherine.bernard@univ-paris-diderot.fr
Office hours: by appointment
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