Learning Outcomes:
On completion of this module, students should be able to: - analyze and engage in critical discussion of the nature and status of the object in postwar French culture; - analyze and discuss the set texts in relation to their medium of expression and in relation to the problematic of the object; - relate the set texts to a broader historical and intellectual context.
Indicative Module Content:
See general module description text for key issues that are addressed.
Set Works:
Francis Ponge, Le Parti pris des choses
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Jean-Luc Godard, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle
Indicative Bibliography:
General Works
Baudrillard, Jean, Le Système des objets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968)
Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010)
Brown, Bill, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28.1 (2001), pp. 1–22
Connor, Steven, ‘Thinking Things’, Textual Practice, 24.1 (2010), pp. 1–20
Freud, Sigmund, ‘Fetishism’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by James Strachey et al., 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), XXI, pp. 152–57
Latour, Bruno, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: essai d’anthropologie symétrique (Paris: La Découverte, 1991)
____________, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public’, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy , ed. by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 14–41
Marx, Karl, ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof’, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. by Robert C. Tucker (1972; New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 319–29
Pietz, William, ‘The Problem of the Fetish I’, Res, 9 (1985), pp. 5–17
____________, ‘The Problem of the Fetish II’, Res, 13 (1987), pp. 23–47
____________, ‘The Problem of the Fetish IIIa’, Res, 16 (1988), pp. 105–23
Ross, Kristin, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995)
On Ponge:
Genette, Gérard, ‘Le Parti pris des mots’, Romanic Review, 46.4 (1975), pp. 283–87
Harrow, Susan, ‘From Culture Critique to Poetic Capital: Ponge’s Things in Language’, in The Material, The Real and the The Fractured Self: Subjectivity and Representation from Rimbaud to Réda (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004), pp. 113–63
Higgins, Ian, ‘Introduction’, in Francis Ponge, Le Parti pris des choses, ed. by Ian Higgins (London: Athlone Press, 1979), pp. 1–36
Ponge, Francis, Méthodes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961)
____________, Entretiens de Francis Ponge avec Philippe Sollers (Paris: Seuil, 1970)
Riffaterre, Michel, ‘Ponge tautologique ou le fonctionnement du texte’, in Francis Ponge: colloque de Cerisy , ed. by Philippe Bonnefis and Pierre Oster (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1977), pp. 66–84
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, ‘Nature, humanisme, tragédie’ (1956), in Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Minuit, 1961), pp. 45–67
Richard, Jean-Pierre, ‘Francis Ponge’, in Onze études sur la poésie moderne (Paris: Seuil, 1964), pp. 198–224
Sartre, Jean-Paul, ‘L’Homme et les choses’, in Critiques littéraires (Situations I) (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 298–358
On Barthes:
Culler, Jonathan, Roland Barthes (London: Fontana, 1983)
Leak, Andrew, Barthes: Mythologies (London: Grant and Cutler, 1994)
Ross, Kristin, ‘Yesterday’s Critique, Today’s Mythologies’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 12.2 (2008), pp. 231–42
Ungar, Steven, ‘From Event to Memory Site: Thoughts on Rereading Mythologies’, Nottingham French Studies, 36.1 (1997), pp. 24–33
Welch, Edward, ‘Une réconciliation du réel et des hommes: Mythologies and the Politics of Things’, Nottingham French Studies, 47.2 (2008), pp. 19–28
On Godard:
Bergala, Alain, Godard au travail: les années 60 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006)
Björkman, Stig, ‘Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle’, in The Films of Jean-Luc Godard , ed. by Ian Cameron (London: Studio Vista, 1967), pp. 122–28
Branigan, Edward, ‘The Articulation of Color in a Filmic System: Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle’, in Color: The Film Reader, ed. by Angela Della Vacche and Brian Price (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 170–82
Esquenazi, Jean-Pierre, Godard et la société française des années 1960 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2004)
Gelley, Alexander, ‘City Texts: Representation, Semiology, Urbanism’, in Politics, Theory and Contemporary Culture , ed. by Mark Poster (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 237–60
Goldmann, Annie, Cinéma et société moderne: le cinéma de 1958 à 1968: Godard, Antonioni, Resnais Robbe-Grillet (1971; Paris: Gonthier, 1974), pp. 161–66
MacCabe, Colin, ‘The Politics of Separation (on Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle and Tout va bien)’, Screen, 16: 14 (Winter 1975–76), pp. 46–61
Mulvey, Laura (with Colin MacCabe), ‘Images of Woman, Images of Sexuality: Some Films by J.-L. Godard’ (1980), in Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd edn (1989: London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 51–65.
‘Prostitution dans les grands ensembles’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 77 (4 May 1966), pp. 14–17
Sheer, Miriam, ‘The Godard/Beethoven Connection: On the Use of Beethoven’s Quartets in Godard’s Films’, Journal of Musicology, 18: 1 (2001), pp. 170–88
Sontag, Susan, ‘Godard’, in Styles of Radical Will (1969; London; Vintage, 1994), pp. 147–89