University of Bordeaux

This course focuses on major characteristics of each literary movement (Romanticism, Contemporary, and Avante-Garde) throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in France. Methodology for analyzing literary works is done mainly in a commentary format and dissertation. Furthermore, students present personal research (whether as a presentation or in writing) related to the literary movements. Discussion sections consist of analyzing works of famous French authors during the mentioned literary movements, differing depending on which discussion section is chosen, with complementary, academic readings. 

This course examines the most salient aspects of Occitan and observes how the same linguistic diasystem is realized in the form of dialects with marked tonalities and musicality. This approach makes it possible to implement and extend the phonetic skills acquired for French in the first year as well as some syntax points. This course constitutes a practical introduction to Romantic studies, as Occitan is the autochthonous Romance language covering most of Southern France and the vehicle of an abundant literature.

This course is centered on learning the manners and customs found in the country of France as well as to understand the general workings of its economic and political systems. The study of this country extends to its rich history and geography. Through the wide range of subjects studied, students are able to better understand the French culture, thereby facilitating their integration into the country.

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.