Learning Outcomes:
On full engagement with and successful completion of this module, including regular attendance at lectures and seminars, students will have:
-- become acquainted with some major figures of contemporary French fictional and critical or theoretical reflection on space, the city etc;
-- developed your capacity to read French prose and film both extensively and in depth ('close reading');
-- practised identifying connections, continuities, and contrasts across a range of works and voices;
-- developed your ability to articulate ideas and questions that are explicit and implicit in prose and film extracts discussed in seminars;
-- synthesised these skills of sophisticated reading and critical expression into spoken and written discourse.
Indicative Module Content:
A selection of short texts by contemporary French writers (male/female; fiction/non-fiction) on ideas of place including some of the following:
- Representations of the urban, the suburban, the rural
- Depictions of ways of living in and navigating between contemporary spaces
- Anthropological ideas of place and space
- Fictional versus non-fictional treatments of contemporary life in such spaces
- Writing as a space