Unit name | Journeys Through Poetry |
---|---|
Unit code | FREN20046 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | I/5 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
Unit director | Professor. Ruth Bush |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | Department of French |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
This unit will explore how we read and respond to poetry in French. It will begin by asking ‘what is poetry?’ and will respond to this question through analysis of contrasting poetic voices from the sixteenth century to the present day that engage with the idea of ‘journeys’.
Content will principally include
An underlying concern in the course will be with ideas of poetic craft, form, and language that emerge from particular social, political, and cultural contexts; a recurrent question will be what it meant to write poetry in French (as opposed to Latin, Creole or Wolof) at different points in the history of Francophone culture.
Reflecting research-rich teaching and learning each year, the poets studied might include Joachim du Bellay, Chassignet, Gérard de Nerval, Aimé Césaire, Grand Corps Malade and Didier Awadi.
Successful students will:
2 hour weekly seminar
1 x 2000-word essay (50%) (testing ILO 1 – 5)
1 x 2 hour exam (50%) (testing ILO 1 – 5)
Aimé Césaire. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Bilingual edition (trans. Rosello and Pritchard). Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1995.
Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets, suivis des Antiquitez de Rome et du Songe (Le Livre de Poche: Classiques, 2002)
Jean Baptiste-Chassignet, Le Mépris de la vie et la consolation de la mort (1594) (available online at http://www.gallica.fr in original 16th-century edition)
François Rigolot, Poésie et Renaissance (Poche: 2002)
Timothy Hampton, ‘Representing France at Mid-Century: Du Bellay and the Lyric Invention of National Character’ (Chapter 5), in Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 150-194
Mary Lewis Shaw, The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry. Cambridge: CUP, 2003.
Justine McConnell, Black Odysseys. The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939. Oxford: OUP, 2013.