University of Bordeaux

This course explores how literature shapes our perspective on the past and identity. By studying Patrick Chamoiseau's LE DIMANCHE AU CACHOT and Josephy Boyden's DANS LE GRAND CERCLE DU MONDE, this course considers how authors can use fiction to reconquer a painful past to better reconstruct an identity and a perspective that has been hidden.

This course explores the architectural and pictorial inheritance of France, including urban and countryside architecture, sculpture, painting, and decorative arts. It focuses on the architecture of Bordeaux and the region of Aquitaine during the 19th century. It presents the remarkable sites of the New Aquitaine region listed as World Heritage by UNESCO by analyzing some works to better understand them. The course discovers the region and its rich heritage through the ages, from prehistory with the parietal caves of the Dordogne to the contemporary era with the city of Fruges by Le Corbusier, passing through the Middle Age and modern times. Various arts are analyzed, including visual art, painting, sculpture, and the art of space which concerns architecture and heritage. Similarly, the course studies several styles, in particular Romanesque art, Gothic art, and classical art to acquire an artistic culture.

This course observes how speech is orchestrated to a choreography of the human body. It examines how meanings, abstract or concrete, are not only produced but actually performed on the interactional stage. The course provides an opportunity to observe facial expressions and co-speech gestures in silent movies and explore how speech production necessarily comes with gestural action. This multimodal course combines formal research seminars, animated classroom discussions, creative workshop sessions, and film screenings.

This course offers a critical examination of the resurgence of “folk horror cinema” in British cinema since the 2000s. Based on cultural references involving neo-pagan cults, witchcraft, and a largely fantasized rewriting of the national past in terms of pre-Christian heritage, this profoundly ambiguous tradition has variously been re-appropriated by feminist as well as masculinist discourses and has given rise to a range of aesthetic propositions, from exploitation cinema to “elevated horror,” and analyzes how British and American horror cinemas have both developed a subgenre based on stories that resort to some folklore deeply engrained in a country’s traditions. Using recurring themes like religion, hostile landscapes, and supernatural creatures, these films rely on man’s deepest fears, and they may also be a means for some artists to criticize the human tendency to act in some superstitious and harmful ways.

This course is comprised of three components: oral comprehension, oral expression, and phonetics. The comprehension part focuses on enhancing student's oral comprehension though radio, video, note-taking, and oral or written reproduction. The expression part of the course provides an opportunity to give oral presentations alone or in groups, with structured argumentation and role-playing. The phonetics part examines basic concepts of articulatory phonetics and French phonology, including perceptual phenomena, segmental and supra-segmental features, linking, neutralization, assimilation, germination, individual and dialectal variations, written and oral systems, and discourse analysis. Emphasis is placed on the acquisition of French pronunciation, as well as oral and gestural expression.

The course focuses on the study of the non-Western European artistic and political scene from the second half of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century. It analyzes and discusses the notions of national and artistic identity through specific examples. At the same time, the course also studies the challenges of globalization.

This course encourages new readings of American literature through the lens of theories that have developed in the field of gender and women’s studies over the last decades. It introduces a wide array of critical perspectives, ranging from early advocates of gynocriticism and theoreticians of “women’s writing,” to champions of intersectionality, queer studies, masculinity studies, and ecofeminism. The course pays special attention to the development of Black and Chicana feminist discourse and to their contribution to gender politics. It uses key concepts such as revision, mestizaje, silence, queering, performance, empowerment, resistance, embodiment, margin, and center to foster a revaluation of certain canonical or lesser-known texts and, sometimes, to uncover hidden layers of meaning beneath more conventional readings. The literary texts included are drawn from different periods and from a variety of genres (novel, short fiction, poetry) and include extracts from works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Alice Walker, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Carmen Tafolla, Paula Gunn Allen, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

This course consists of three segments. The first part focuses on grammar, covering logical analysis, tenses, modes, style, and spelling, accompanied by regular dictation and vocabulary building. The second part focuses on writing skills to develop competence in French written expression. The third part on written comprehension focuses on understanding different type of texts: informative, argumentative, and authoritative.

This course explores how British food has evolved across the centuries. It studies a few of the current food-related issues that are relevant today in the United Kingdom through various analyses of texts, film extracts, menus, maps, and statistics. The course provides the opportunity to reconsider stereotypes to gain a better understanding of British food.

This course studies the psychology of language. It focuses on how language, specifically bilingualism, is psychologically manifested in children.