Aims

Skills: Reading, in other words, the elaboration of a knowledge that can be at least partially reproduced, despite the singularity of the texts. 1. To know how to analyse and interpret, from an aesthetic and ethical perspective, a short text of rich poetic and significative value. 2. To understand the conditions of a rigorous reading and to situate the interaction between the methodological tools used and the results obtained. 3. To know how to write an analysis.

Knowledge: To know the great poetic works of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the trends of which they were a part.

Main themes

The course proposes and constructs the analysis of poems, studied chronologically, in order to uncover the great schools and trends of which they were a part: texts from Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Valéry, Claudel, Cendrars, Eluard, Aragon, Artaud, Ponge, Queneau, Lambersy, Danemark. In each case, we deal with poets at the origin of a new aesthetic.
The course presents a number of theoretical propositions allowing us to uncover and evaluate the operations brought about by the reader - most often, without his/her knowledge - and thus to situate the reader in the interpretive relation. In other words, we will questions the linguistic process by which a text is transformed into its interpretation.
During the tutorials, students are encouraged to experiment with their own reading capacities and to independently confront and evaluate the different readings proposed. The writing of well-argued, analytic texts aims at the clear communication of the work carried out.

Content and teaching methods

Inductive Method: the course presents analyses that attempt to take into account the smallest semantic, syntactic, lexical, rhythmic, sound, and graphic details of the texts.
This presentation:
- brings to the fore the reading operations brought about and questions their theoretical validity;
- situates the important aesthetic characteristics brought to light through analysis and places them back in context.
The tutorials deal with different texts than those covered in class, but from poets belonging to the same aesthetic trends, limited to the 19th and 20th centuries. With the help of the lecturer/assistant, students should elaborate a reading that is not to be considered as the only possible interpretation, but which should realize one of the important potentialities of the text.

Other credits in programs