MCLCA215 - Littérature et Espace Américain II

Informations générales

Discipline(s)	Anglais
Grade	Master
ECTS	3
Langue(s) d'enseignement	Anglais
Volume horaire total	12h
Volume horaire CM	12h

Responsable(s) de l'UE

Jacques Pothier
Courriel : jacques.pothier@sudam.uvsq.fr

Descriptif

Ce séminaire explore les liens entre espaces et écriture, à travers l'exemple privilégié mais non exclusif du Sud des Etats-Unis. Après les lieux, explorés au premier semestre nous ouvrirons la perspective aux territoires de la littérature: dans quelle mesure celle-ci se définit-elle aux niveaux mondial, national, transnational, régional, local? Qu'est-ce qui distingue la littérature du document anthropologique, du témoignage? La littérature ne commencerait-elle pas là où bougent les lignes, où se brouillent les identités, où se "déterritorialise" (cf Deleuze, Mille Plateaux) l'imaginaire--le territoire de l'écriture?

UE requise(s)

__Littérature et Espace Américain I

Contenu

(General description: see MCLCA123)

Following up on the fall semester, the spring semester will endeavor to open up the perspective to more contemporary works, or to works dealing with other regional traditions, which students will be encouraged to explore in their own research papers (guidelines and suggestions gladly provided), and throuogh the presentations they will be asked to give. What is the status of space in literature? What roles do territoriality, memory, tradition, nationalism play in the defintion of a literary identity? In what way does literature's way of bearing witness to the human conditions differ from the lessons of documentary evidence, of the press, of testimonies? What, ultimately, is the territory of literature, which Gilles Deleuze singled out as "une sorte de langue étrangère"?

This seminar, as all seminars, is not devised as just a series of lectures, but as a clearing house, a crossroads where individual pursuits meet to exchange, and where curiosity for other forms of arts will be encouraged. It is, for instance, impossible to talk about space in American culture without mentioning the visual arts. The complementary nature of visual arts and literature is celebrated in the Southern masterpieces by James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as well as in the photographic and literary works of Eudora Welty.