Introduction to the Study of French and Romance Languages and Literature : Trends, Concepts, Methods [ LROM1112 ]

A course website will be available through Icampus and will allow students to access information and documents related to the course.

1) Philology :
- practices and methods of philological and textual critic;
- heuristic tools and methods from the Philological field, also valid for literary and linguistic studies;
- standards of bibliographical description.
 2) Linguistics :
- main types of approaches which can be distinguished in the French (and Romance) linguistic field : synchronic or diachronic approaches, internal or external, formal or "variationists", linguistic or philological, etc.;
- main currents of French and Romance Linguistics (historical Linguistics, Functionalism, "Generativism", Speech Pragmatics and Analysis, Sociolinguistics, automatic treatment of languages, etc.) and their main figures;
- various linguistic concepts fundamental for the student's training (corpuses, standards, systems, variations, Romania, etc.);
- different methods and tools for the linguistic studies, which students will be led to use during their training.
3) Literature :
- main types of approaches of French and Romance Literatures : Philology, History of Literature, compared Literatures, Poetics, Rhetoric, Stylistics, Semiotics, etc.;
- main currents of French and Romance Studies of Literatures since the 19th century;
- main concepts and methodological tools which students will have to manipulate during their training.

At the end of the class, students will be able to :
- apprehend with an overall view French and Romance Languages and Literatures studies : objects of knowledge, important philological, linguistic and literary currents, fundamental concepts and main methodologies;
- use various methods of analysis and methodological tools at their disposal in a relevant way (bibliographical databases, methods of collecting data, methods of philological, linguistic, literary analysis, etc).

The assessment of the course will be based on a written exam and on a bibliographic work.

The course is given by a team of three teachers, each of them being a specialist in one of the course three main disciplines. Tutorials will be given by Mme Stéphanie Delneste.

The course will start with a general presentation of the links between the various research areas within the field of French and Romance studies, and of the epistemological and methodological principles that should guide students' works all along their training. The course part dedicated to linguistics will present a set of contemporary approaches in French and Romance linguistics (structural approach, comparative approach, historical approach, variationist approach, etc.), which will be illustrated by particular case studies. Through the description of each approach, specific concepts and methodological tools will be introduced. Regarding literature, the course will first present a panorama of the main currents of literary criticism from the 19th century to the present days. Three specific approaches of the literary fact will thereafter be developed: formalism and structuralism, sociology of literature and reception theories. Finally, philology will rather be approached as a research method than as a specific discipline. We will study its history, its current trends, its fields of implementation and its relationships with literary studies, linguistics, and historical disciplines (codicology, palaeography, etc.). A greater focus will be given to the use of philological knowledge for the critical edition of medieval and modern texts in Romance languages. Tutorials will be dedicated to the mastering of bibliographic norms and to the methodology of bibliographic research.

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