Written Practice level 3 for FR3009

This course examines images of French society through a selection of four key literary texts and concentrates on how questions of social change, social mobility, success and failure, ambition and honour, oppression and alienation have been portrayed. Delivered by the appropriate specialist in the School of Modern Languages, the classes will offer a taste of the literature of the relevant periods, along with a discussion of its distinguishing features, and an overview of its intellectual, social, and historical background.

This course introduces students to the skills of understanding French source texts and translating French source texts into English. After an introduction to the skills and techniques of translation, the focus will be on translation practice.

Le cours d'oral du module FR1702 est un cours qui permet aux étudiants de s'entraîner à parler français grâce à différents types d'activités interactives et grâce à différents supports audios et vidéos. L'objectif est d'être capable de faire une présentation orale sur un sujet précis sous forme de discours structuré. 

This course is intended to enhance your understanding of and skills in translation from French to English through sustained translation practice as well as through the discussion of translation strategies. 

You explore the kinds of syntactical, stylistic, lexical and culturally-specific problems that arise when translating from French source texts to English target texts in a range of translation scenarios and across a range of text types. Common translation challenges such as transfer, compensation, gloss, exoticism, deceptive cognates, lexical gaps and cultural specificities as well as constraints of house style and character count will be identified and discussed, and you will learn how to develop techniques for dealing with these when translating into English

The course explores the relationship between textual and visual forms of expression from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first. From a variety of critical perspectives, the course focuses on an array of interactions between writers and artists over a century of experimentation. All the key texts will be examined in parallel with the artworks that inspired them, and these primary sources will be considered in their wider socio-cultural and aesthetic contexts.

Since the rise of the feminist and gay movements in France in the early 1970s, many new writers and filmmakers have sought to address the changing erotic relations between the sexes. This has led them to explore the links between gender, sexuality and textuality, particularly from the double perspective of the narrator and reader/spectator. This course will examine key works by some of the most exciting contemporary French writers and filmmakers. It will include formal analysis of literary and cinematographic style, an engagement with important theoretical work on gender, psychoanalysis, autobiography and ’autofiction’, and film spectatorship, as well as a general discussion of social and political themes such as AIDS, queer politics, pornography and censorship. The course aims ultimately to determine whether, as some critics are now arguing, French literature and cinema have entered the era of the ‘post-erotic’. 

The eighteenth century in Europe, often called the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, could just as easily have been called the ‘Age of Theatre’. The theatre played a vital but complex role in the mission to spread Enlightenment ideals of reason, compassion, humanity, and tolerance – ideals that still resonate today. As the century progressed, playwrights increasingly regarded the theatre not merely as entertainment, but also as a vehicle for raising complex questions about society and the various power relations it establishes
between different groups: aristocrats and their subordinates; men and women; colonisers and the colonised; Christians, Jews, and Muslims… Yet the questions about power, society, and intersectionality that Enlightenment theatre raises are rarely – if ever – satisfactorily answered; from a modern theatregoer’s perspective, indeed, apparently progressive aesthetic and ethical ideas often seem to jostle with most conservative impulses. As this module demonstrates, indeed, by its dialogical nature theatre can never offer a single, univocal or unequivocal answer, and even happy endings can come at a cost.
 
Covering a variety of texts from both France and Germany, ranging from one-act comedies to full-length dramas, this module aims to introduce students to the Enlightenment through its theatre, and to the theatre through the Enlightenment. This module thus focuses not only on the philosophical and social themes that preoccupy eighteenth-century playwrights, but also on the theories, practices, conventions, techniques, possibilities, restrictions, and developments of the theatre as a medium. It introduces students to some key figures in Enlightenment theatre, from towering figures such as Beaumarchais and Schiller to lesser-known writers like the feminist and political activist Olympe de Gouges.

The transnational circulation of literary forms, genres, and works and the global movement of people have long gone hand in hand. Drawing on works from a range of languages, genres, places, and periods, this module explores texts and identities in motion. It centres on works that reflect on experiences of exile and migration, as well as journeying for travel and exploration; address the mobility of subject positions and the impact of crossing borders on the self; or explore encounters between cultures and languages – common themes across the study of ‘world literatures’ as a discipline. As works that have, through the process of translation, moved beyond their culture of origin, the materials studied also offer a way to think critically about questions of circulation and reception; translation and rewriting; and about the wider histories of transnational interaction and exchange within which textual production and transmission take place.