University of Bordeaux

This course focuses on the emergence of the literary tale, both the scholarly and popular aspects, and the way in which its great models, particularly Giovanni Boccaccio’s THE DECAMERON and Giambattista Basile’s STRAPAROLA, depict the oral origins of the genre. As they relate to a corpus of classic literary tales (Perrault, Grimm), the course studies contemporary cinematic adaptations to examine the plasticity of the genre, including the emphasis of fairy tale in popular culture. It examines how these stories are appropriated and adapted to fit the current social and political discourse and discusses whether these adaptations are part of scholarly or popular culture. Films studied include Pier Paolo Pasolini’s LE DECAMERON (1971), Jacques Demy’s PEAU D’ANE (1970), and Pablo Berger’s BLANCANIEVES (2012).

This course contextualizes Supreme Court decisions by revisiting major societal shifts through the prism of American fiction, from the 19th Century to the present. The course begins with a brief introduction on mimesis and literature’s potential to relate and reflect historical events and, more simply, facts. It then focuses on numerous works of fiction contextualizing and referring to the following topics chronologically following the Supreme Court’s decisions: slavery (Dredd Scott v. Sandford), segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson), the New Deal, interracial marriage and race relations in the United States (Loving V. Virginia), the Pentagon Papers and the freedom of the press (New York Times v. United States), the limits of free speech (Texas v. Johnson), culture and political wars in the contemporary United States (Bush v. Gore/Citizens United v. FEC), same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), and Covid-19 and mask mandates (Lucas Wall, et al. v. Transportation Security Administration). 

This course studies French business with a focus on commercial, communication, and marketing strategies. Topics covered include selection of products, distribution channels, communication and business image, visual and sound identity, communication decisions, and business reputation. The course utilizes local, national, generalized, and specialized mass media.

This course presents the theories of international commerce from a classical and neoclassical perspective. The course covers the Ricardian model of exchange, the Heckscher-Ohlin model, and contemporary theories of international commerce.

This course analyzes anthropological texts and literature. It studies anthropologists including Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Franz Boas, and Bronislaw Malinowski. The course discusses these anthropologists and their writings as a group while comparing and connecting them to others.

This course introduces the ways in which mental health has been studied as an academic discipline across the humanities and the social sciences. It shows that both the definition and the treatment of mental ill-health is not universal but shaped by the society in which people live. The course focuses primarily on the period of time from the closure of the lunatic asylums in Great Britain in the second half of the 20th century to the present day. Through an anthology composed of newspaper articles, political speeches, and party manifestos, the course analyzes some of the factors which influenced mental health policies, such as advances in medical knowledge, changes in social values, political ideals, the influence of the media (including social media), and financial cost. Alongside these factual texts, the course studies short extracts from films and literary works in order to gain an understanding of how changes in society’s attitudes towards the mentally unwell are reflected in cultural works.

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).