UCL - Discours de l'oeuvre et discours du temps

[ROM2720]

[22.5h] 5 credits

This course is taught in the 1st semester.

Teacher(s): Agnes Guiderdoni, Agnes Guiderdoni

Language: French

Level: Second

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

Aims

The objective of this course is to interrogate the particular link that bonds the literary work with the history to which it belongs. The aims is to find out the specific function of literature, which, through its aesthetical forms, analyses the discourses of history and brings singular answers to the diseases suffered by civilisation.
At the end of this course, students will be able to explain, thanks to the analysing tools used by the teacher and with an argumentation, the relation which links the singular discourse of a literary work with the other discourses that cross the period of its creation.

Main themes

At the master level, the literary formation prioritises the theoretical and methodological orientations. Therefore, there is no constraints regarding to the studied periods, but the questions envisaged are very precisely delimited, and the examples are chosen in order to prove concretely the efficiency of the theoretical tools which are used. The possible exportation of these tools to other corpuses will also be explained.
This course focuses on the fundamental dialogical dimension of the literary discourse : writing is not only about communicating information, it is about using the words of the Other and answering to him, about decoding what in his words was coded, unknown. Starting from this hypothesis, it will be underlined how texts are crossed by philosophical, religious, scientific, moral, political and aesthetical debates, but also which particular forms of answers they bring to the discourses of their time. The study of these interactions will rely on the history of literatures, ideas, mentalities and institutions, and will use Human Sciences which renew the research on these.

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

Prerequisite : to be able to decode in a precise and argumentative way a literary text (objective of the courses of Modern Authors from the first cycle); to know the history of French literature.