University of Bordeaux

The time separating the Declaration of Sentiments (1848) from the nineteenth amendment that granted American women the right of vote (1920) marked a turning point in the history of women in the US. Although a number of women rose to prominence in the male-dominated literary world of the second half of the nineteenth century, most of them have long been forgotten. The recovery work to which feminist criticism gave an impulse in the 1970s and is still ongoing today has drawn attention to the pivotal role played by some of these writers in the redefinition of women's place in American society. This course initiates a reflection on the way in which these women dealt with such issues as slavery, domesticity, industrialization, and the rise of a visual culture in the fast-developing society of their times. Due attention is paid to the Gothic genre that allowed them to express their most intimate concerns and anxieties under the cover of supernatural fiction, as well as to the regional sketch, a supposedly minor genre that some of them turned into an instrument of resistance to the dominant patriarchal ideology.

This translation course is taught at the first-year level. This course focuses translating both the tone and grammar of Francophone and Anglophone literature, and provides abstracts from English and French writers, mostly from the latter half of the twentieth century. The course first practices translating from English to French, and then from French to English. Students can choose to take one or two parts, whether English to French or French to English.

The course focuses on the constituents of the simple sentence and their categorization (the different classes of words), as well as on the morphosyntactic relations within the simple sentence. The nominal group and its constituents are studied more particularly. It is about learning to identify words from their characteristics in terms of their form (morphology), their meaning (semantics), and their combinatorial possibility (distribution).

This course provides an approach to the study of neuroscience. It covers the major issues addressed by the discipline and the fundamental bases of the functioning of the nervous system.

This course consists of three segments: oral comprehension, oral production and expression, and phonetics. Oral comprehension focuses on listening and understanding conversations, radio shows, and interviews; taking notes; and writing a summary. Oral production and expression develops oral skills through discussions and presentations. Finally, phonetics emphasizes rhythm and intonation, articulation, phonetic notation, elocution, pronunciation, and oral and gestural expression.

This seminar explores the relations between Transcendentalism and various reform movements and utopian projects of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, in the areas of religion, education, women's rights, socialism, pacifism, and abolitionism. It places special emphasis on three themes: the religious and philosophical roots of the idea of human perfectibility; the self-image of the age (the nineteenth-century as the Age of Progress), and its critics; and the tension between individual and collective ideals of reform.

This course consists of intensive instruction in written and oral French, taught through audio-visual method and group work with an instructor. The course strengthens comprehension and expression skills through exercises. Oral French focuses on difficult cases of spelling, vocabulary of selected fields, and sentence structure. Written work includes advanced grammar, syntax, and spelling, with a focus on academic writing for French universities. Materials used in class present contemporary regional topics.