University of Bordeaux

This course discusses North American comic books as an ever-transforming form of popular culture from the mid-19th century to the early 21st century. The approach is mostly chronological, from the “invention” of comics in Europe in the 19th century to the rise of graphic novels in the United States since the turn of the 21st century. It also includes examples of the way comics have served as an inspiration for other media – most notably in the contemporary wave of superhero films – and have conversely adapted or imported content origination in other media, from silent movie stars to literary classics. Beyond specific examples, the course offers theoretical approaches to intermediality, with a special focus on adaptation, and address such key notions as genre and cultural hierarchies. The course explains the interactions between technology, market forces, aesthetic choices, intermedial circulation, and social uses in specific comics. It conducts a range of readings including select examples of comics and theoretical texts before each class.

This seminar studies literary and artistic production during the Modernist era, seen as a period of crisis that is both a moment of rupture and a critical moment in the field of art and literature after the First World War. It covers Picasso’s Cubism; Bartok’s and Stravinsky’s music; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet; and the European literary scene including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence in Great Britain; and Marcel Proust and André Gide in France. The course also examines this new literary “modernity” in American fiction, including Dos Passos’s 1919 (1932), Hemingway’s THE SUN ALSO RISES (1926), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s TENDER IS THE NIGHT (1934). Each novel provides an opportunity to study the tension between satiric representation and formal experimentation, or the “creative violence” characteristic of Modernism. The second part of the course looks at how modernist writers engage with ordinary life and objects, not only from a phenomenological standpoint as they explore the sensible aspect of subject/object relationships, but also from a political one underwritten by gender and economic considerations. The course considers how numerous, sometimes uncanny, encounters with daily matter in modernist fiction are not only critical in the characters’ existence but also of the materialistic and consumerist turn of 20th century society.

This course on marketing covers product life cycles, marketing mixes, brand(ing), market segmentation, positioning, targeting, a case study approach, SWOT/TOWS analysis, Porter’s models (e.g. value chain), sales, globalization and international/global marketing, market studies, strategy, and various matrices.

This course is composed of three parts: grammar and spelling, written comprehension, and written production. Grammar focuses on verbal morphology, morphologies of nouns, adjectives, determinants and pronouns, simple and complex sentence structures, use of the most frequent articulations, lexical spelling, and grammatical spelling. Written comprehension section focuses on written production for linguistic and lexical deepening. From various themes, the learner is led to produce different types of written texts (descriptions, stories, friendly letters, etc.) in relation to the grammar points studied. Finally, reading comprehension enables learners to read direct factual texts on various topics with a satisfactory level of comprehension in order to locate and understand global information, specific information, detailed information, word formation, punctuation, and text structure.

This course provides an overview of imaging methods for the characterization of biological objects at scales ranging from micron to nanometer (light microscopy, epifluorescence microscopy, confocal microscopy, electron microscopy, near-field microscopy) in connection with academic and industrial research. The course covers image analysis and 3D reconstruction.

This course is concerned with how public problems are formed and framed. It considers how public problems become, or do not become, items on the public agenda in order to lead to policy development. After introducing the notion of agenda setting, the course develops the social problem approach, and then exposes leading concepts to explain the character of the agenda in modern times.

This course investigates the Earth’s environment over its geological past. It dives into historical geological timescales to better understand the climate and geography of the planet and its interactions with organisms.