FREN 366 - Francophone Literature and Cultures

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2016/17a: Ciné-vérité? French & Francophone Documentary Filmmaking. (Same as MEDS 366 ) The Francophone world has a rich and varied documentary film tradition ranging from René Vautier’s Afrique 50 (1956), the first anticolonial film, to Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (1955), Marcel Ophüls’ Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969), Nicolas Philibert’s Etre et avoir (2002), Agnès Varda’s Les Plages d’Agnès (2008), Moussa Sene Absa’s Yoole, le sacrifice (2010), and Nadia El Fani’s Même Pas Mal (2012). This seminar explores different genres of Francophone short- and feature-length documentaries including works of the historical, social and political varieties, the ‘essai documentaire’, the ‘auto-documentaire’ as well as Web and radio documentaries, and television Web-series. We use this palette of audio-visual essays as a springboard both to examine the specificities of this genre’s form and the ways they interrogate the burning issues they seek to analyze, and to gauge the extent to which they frame - and perhaps even define - the French and Francophone cultures they depict. Patricia-Pia Célérier.

Topic for 2016/17b: L’Ecole et la République : Public Education and Nation-building in (Post)colonial Francophone contexts. In this seminar, the theme of education in its various forms – indigenous, colonial, republican, postcolonial, formal, informal – serves as a focal point around which we can develop a discussion of the complex rapport that numerous cultures that have built with the French language. In examining presentations of different modes in which children and young adults are nurtured in the (post)colonial Republican school, the course elaborates on the intricate relationship between ideology (colonial or other), culture (French/Francophone) and the nation. Possible authors include Azouz Begag, Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, Frantz Fanon, Soraya Nini, Leïla Sebbar and Y.B. Vinay Swamy.

One 2-hour period.