The French Sub-Faculty offers Special Subject options from across the chronological sweep of French literature, giving you the freedom and flexibility to experience works from different periods, or to specialise according to your interests. In addition, research seminars held at the Maison française d'Oxford will bring you into contact with other postgraduates and researchers from other institutions, the UK and abroad.

These are the Special Subject options available in 2024-25. These are indicative of the course offerings for the sub-faculty, so applicants should note that not all options will run in all years, and some course content might change.  

 

Medieval French

Writing Women in the Middle Ages (Michaelmas Term)

Convenors: Professor Sophie Marnette and Professor Helen Swift 

Whether as patrons, addressees, characters, or even authors, women were absolutely central to Medieval French and Occitan Literature. The main focus of this course is twofold, considering women as objects of writing, typically in male-authored texts (including writings with a fairly misogynistic bias such as Le Roman de la rose), and women as writing subjects (such as the Trobairitz, Marie de France and Christine de Pizan). It also considers the issue of gender fluidity in comic and courtly narratives such as Trubert and Le Roman de Silence.

It is strongly recommended that students choosing this option have a knowledge of French and that they let the course convenor know as early as possible of their intention to choose the topic in order to access background resources in Medieval French Literature.

 

Brief Encounters: Medieval Short Narratives (Hilary Term)

Convenor: Professor Daron Burrows

Short narrative forms have been much less studied than their longer counterparts (the roman or chanson de geste, for example), but are the locus for significant experimentation with and development of storytelling practice. This course considers a range of genres, in both verse and prose, to explore modes of storytelling, and the specificities of their brevity, across lais, fabliaux, exemplary literature (including fables and miracles), and nouvelles. You will also study the presentation and circulation of tales in manuscript compilations.

Early Modern (1500-1800)

Early Modern Inventions (Michaelmas Term)

Convenors: Dr Raphaële Garrod and Prof. Wes Williams

For this paper, we’ll be working on a wide range of materials (mainly in French) from the 16th and 17th Century: books, maps, mechanical instruments and visual art (drawings and paintings). The term invention denotes both the faculty of devising, finding out, contriving and making up, and the products stemming from these processes. It involves discovery and deceit, creativity and contrivance, inspiration and heresy, theory and fiction. Invention is, in historiographical terms, an actor’s category, which means that it played an important part in the way in which the early moderns themselves conceived of their own age. It remains central the ways in which scholars reflect on, and assess, the many changes that took place in the early modern period.

This seminar takes invention as its guiding thread to understand crucial changes across the early modern period, and winds its way through Renaissance literary theories of copia, wit, and wordplay to the rise of the mechanical ‘arts’ (from architecture through shipbuilding and theatre to warfare); we also track the emergence of the ‘New Science’ (John Donne) born from new techniques of observation and the rise of the experimental method across a wide range of texts and practices. This option should appeal to those who want to work on sixteenth or seventeenth century culture either for the first time or to develop their knowledge of it. Four sessions will take place in the first four weeks of Michaelmas term: 1/Introduction: what was ‘invention’ for the early moderns? 2/ Printing the world 3/Literary invention, 4/Mechanical inventions.

Modern (1800 - Present)

The Birth of Modern Poetry (Michaelmas Term)

Convenors: Dr Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe and Prof. Seth Whidden

The nineteenth century constituted a period of intense and innovative activity in the field of verse poetry, and this course of seminars will focus on selected works from a diverse group of poets, including Desbordes-Valmore, Lamartine, Musset, Vigny, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé. The century also witnessed the emergence of ‘prose poetry’, and during its last three decades in particular the time-honoured conventions of versification — together with the very distinction between poetry and prose— were subverted and overturned. The aim of this course will be to examine and debate, on the basis of close textual readings, the various ways in which poets sought to find a new language and new poetic structures with which to express an increasingly varied and disturbing spectrum of conscious and unconscious perceptions.

 

Contemporary French Thought: Paths of Deconstruction (Michaelmas Term)

Convenors: Professor Ian Maclachlan and Dr Emily McLaughlin

This course on key strands in French thought of recent decades focuses particularly on paths to and from the notion of deconstruction associated with Jacques Derrida. Besides Derrida, we will examine texts by Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy and Catherine Malabou, and these readings will raise fundamental issues relating to language, subjectivity, alterity, community, embodiment, materiality, and affect.

 

Francophone Postcolonial Literature (Michaelmas Term)

Convenors: Prof. Cecile Bishop, Prof. Jane Hiddleston and Prof. Jennifer Yee

French colonialism profoundly altered perceptions of national and cultural identity, while decolonization was one of the most momentous upheavals of the twentieth century. In this course, you will explore the impact of France’s changing relationship with her colonies and ex-colonies, as envisioned by writers and intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Exoticist works by writers such as Segalen and Loti will be compared with postcolonial literatures emerging from Africa, North Africa and the Caribbean (possible authors for study include Djebar, Chraïbi, Chamoiseau, Condé, Kourouma, Bâ, Oyono). Emphasis will be placed both on the interaction between literature and history, and on the aesthetic originality of the works themselves.

Poetry & Ethics (Hilary Term)

Convenors: Dr Carole Bourne-Taylor and Dr Emily McLaughlin

Poetry & Ethics brings together various strands of poéthique. In the modern period poets have sought to articulate the relationship between poetry and forms of life (in its widest sense) with a view to foregrounding its ethical potential. Experience is the crux of these various poetic practices whose restrained lyricism reveals a far-reaching agenda centred on a commitment to the world. This course investigates how poets such as Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, Jacques Roubaud, Valérie Rouzeau, Philippe Rahmy, Michel Deguy, Emmanuel Merle, Philippe Jaccottet, Yves Bonnefoy or Patrick Chamoiseau rethink human relationships in exciting new ways, challenging how we've traditionally defined notions like love or community, or re-evaluating ingrained assumptions about human and nonhuman agencies. This course explores the diverse range of innovative formal practices that these poets use to interrogate and to transform our relationships to ourselves, other people, and the physical world. Students will tackle a diverse range of themes - love, death, the body, the natural world, human and nonhuman beings - and will be introduced to a diverse range of poetic and theoretical movements, from New Elegy to Ecopoetics.

 

Reality, Representation and Reflexivity in Nineteenth-Century Prose Writing (Hilary Term)

Convenors: Professors Tim Farrant and Jennifer Yee

This course of seminars will be concerned with examples of prose writing by a wide range of authors (Chateaubriand, Constant, Balzac, Stendhal, Mérimée, Gautier, Sand, Nerval, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans, Rachilde) and will focus on a number of interrelated theoretical and literary- historical issues concerning ‘schools’ (Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism), genres (the fictional memoir, the novel, the short story), relationships (fiction and history, fiction and science, literature and the other arts, prose and poetry), thematic preoccupations (the individual and society, the fantastic, etc.), and narrative techniques (narrative structures, narratorial point of view, imagery, tense usage, etc.). The aim will be to explore the many different ways in which prose writers of the nineteenth century represented the world of human experience and reflected in theory and practice on the means and the implications of their representations.