University of Lyon 2

This course is specialized for international students. It presents French history and its political institutions and provides a general knowledge of the French political and legal system. The course covers the history of French construction until 1789; constitutional history of France since 1789; the system of the Fifth Republic; executive power (President, Government) territorial organization; legislative power (the National Assembly, the Senate); judicial power (courts of private and public law, constitutional council); the territorial system (decentralization, local authorities); the distinction between private law, public law, mixed rights; and the hierarchy of norms.

This course is specialized for international students and designed specifically for native English speakers to practice advanced literary translation from and into French. It works on a corpus of short texts chiefly from the 19th and 20th centuries. The “prose” section of the course provides a chance to test and improve knowledge of French syntax and idioms, and become familiar with the stylistic requirements of written French. The French texts that are translated into English are by major French authors. The course also explores the various mechanisms involved in translation (such as modulation and transposition), working from the hypothesis that translation and literary analysis are indissociable.

This course highlights the dynamic intersection of art and commerce in the world of cinema and audiovisual production.  It examines the economic forces that shape the global film and audiovisual industries through studies of history, film markets, and examples of the film economy. The course also examines the roles of the studio and producers to learn how money is obtained, in the past and today.

This course focuses on the state and evolution of photography in the wake of the second World War. It treats the following topics: humanist photography (1945-1968) and its origins; subjective photography in Europe and the United States (1950-1970); renewal of the American documentary after 1945; revival of the landscape in contemporary photography; photojournalism; contemporary photography and art from conceptual photography to visual photography; quotes, reinterpretations, and reappropriations of modern photography; experimental photography; and post photography. 

This course provides a conceptual and historical approach of nations, states, and nationalism in Europe from the late 19th century to the present. It examines the transnational dimension of European political frameworks and considers current political issues in the light of European history. The course fosters analytical distance and questions the nation-centered view of the world, familiarizes with the academic debates on nation-building and nationalism, and examines the historical processes and steps that have led to the success of the national category.

This course studies French-Spanish filmmaker of Luis Buñuel, in particular his final and probably most productive period which was mainly French. Accompanied by screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, his faithful sidekick, the father of Spanish cinema drew his inspiration from several of the great French novels of the preceding decade. This course explores one of them, LE JOURNAL D’UNE FEMME DE CHAMBRE, to reflect on the specific work of adaptation characterized by varying degrees of difference from the original.

This course focuses on the analysis of 19th century American poetry from poets such as Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, and Walt Whitman.

This course focuses on speech act theories, language behavior, context of speech in conversation, and transmission of meaning in regards to the grammatical and lexical knowledge of the listener and speaker. It considers how language acquires meaning in context and discusses formal models to explain how these meanings are conveyed between cooperative interlocutors. The course focuses on exploring a range of theoretical and experimental research on topics in pragmatics, applies these concepts to word learning, and introduces notable researchers who have made contributions to this area.

This course involves the writing and analysis of screenplays. It discusses the fundamentals involved in writing a film and explores how to analyze a screenplay to build a working vocabulary for communication in the film industry.

This course offers a chronological presentation of French literature from the 19th through the 20th centuries. It focuses on genres, major works, and authors, grounding them in significant events in French history.