UCL - Seminar: Literary concepts and texts

[ROM1394]

[15h] 3 credits

Teacher(s): Pierre Piret

Language: French

Level: First

Aims
Main themes
Content and teaching methods
Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Aims

Following on from the ROM 1240 and ROM 1260 Bachelor's courses, which focus on reading and interpretation, this course deals with:

- deciphering and interpreting the literary text, identifying its particular aesthetic and stylistic character and recognising the movements to which it belongs;
- developing theoretical concepts that make it possible to situate this particular character;
- situating the interaction between the methodological tools and the results achieved;
- writing an analysis.

The seminar, thus, offers an introduction to individual research and preparation for the dissertation, in its different phases (analysis, problématisation, validation, and writing).

Main themes

The seminar examines one particular theoretical question. Depending on the issues being studied, the texts are chosen from French literature of the 17th to 20th centuries and from French-speaking literature in Belgium. In the analysis of the works selected, we examine the validity of the models of literary analysis currently in useand look at the relevance of certain paradigms used in the social sciences. Examples : modes of irony (Voltaire, Diderot, Baillon, etc.), the question of the double in contemporary literature, the crisis of performance in interwar theatre, the legacy of Mallarmé in 20th-century poetry, theatricality in Jean Genet's Le Balcon, Stendhal and realism, Camus and the question of melancholy.

Content and teaching methods

This seminar is open to a maximum of twenty students. An inductive and reflective methodological approach is adopted: it is by evaluating students' own interpretative processes and, where applicable, those of specialists who have published analyses of the texts under investigation, that the theoretical and aesthetic issues laid out in the course description are gradually laid bare and resolved. The emphasis is on the conceptualisation of these questions, based on the reading of books, as well as theoretical and critical articles chosen by the teacher. Each text examined requires the student to write a formalised analysis that offers a synthesis of the results achieved and makes it possible to define the particular requirements of writing an analysis.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

- Method of examination:
Assessment is continuous and formative. It focuses on participation in the seminar, on the analyses written during the year, and on a personal piece of work.

- Prerequisite:
ROM 1240 - Explications d'auteurs français des temps modernes (Analysis of modern French authors)

- Programmes offering this activity:
Baccalauréat en langues et littératures romanes (Bachelor's in Romance languages and literature)
Baccalauréat en langues et littératures modernes et anciennes (Bachelor's in modern and ancient languages and literature)
Baccalauréat en langues et littératures modernes (Bachelor's in modern languages and literature)