FRENCH LITERATURE

This module is especially intended for students enrolled in the LLEAP Master’s degree of the French Studies pathway, but it can also be usefully taken as a free-choice area subject by students of postcolonial (Anglophone or Spanish-speaking) literatures of the other pathways and of the SL Master’s degree.
Through a course structured in graded educational stages, the student will be enabled to deal with complex literary and critical texts in French (to read, analyze, interpret and situate them in their respective historical and cultural contexts) and to master techniques related to literary studies and textual analysis (philology, genre history, poetics, rhetoric, hermeneutics, stylistics, reception, theoretical-literary terminology).

In general, the course aims to introduce students to Francophone literatures.
Through the examination – exemplified in the texts – of issues essential to those cultures, the aim is for students to acquire the ability to understand the covered texts and to discuss them critically.

Good knowledge of the French language, especially in terms of ability to understand academic oral communication (classes are in French) and written text (all study materials are in French).
Required language level: minimum B2, but C1 recommended.

The aim of this course is to look back at the origins of “négritude”, a term that will be clarified and understood in context. We’ll read both the main theoretical and poetic texts (Césiare, Senghor, Damas), from the most lyrical to the most polemical, that helped define a major 20th-century literary movement - which was also an identity as well as a political claim. We’ll be looking in particular at the links between surrealism and negritude, and how the writings of Breton, Desnos, Ponge and Sartre proved decisive (and sometimes problematic) for the early reception of the movement.

Ce cours se propose de revenir sur les origines de la « négritude », terme qu’il s’agira d’éclairer et de comprendre en contexte. Nous lirons aussi bien les textes théoriques que poétiques, des plus lyriques aux plus polémiques, qui ont contribué à définir un courant littéraire – qui fut aussi revendication identitaire et politique – majeur du XXe siècle. Nous nous intéresserons particulièrement aux liens unissant surréalisme et négritude, et en quelle manière les écrits de Breton, de Desnos, de Ponge ou de Sartre se sont révélés déterminants (et parfois problématiques) pour la première réception du mouvement.

Main texts
- Aimé Césaire, Les Armes miraculeuses [1946], Paris, Gallimard, 1970.
- Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [1939-1947], Paris, Présence africaine, 2000.
- Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, suivi de Discours sur la négritude, Paris, Présence africaine, 2000.
- Suzanne Césaire, Le Grand camouflage : Écrits de dissidence (1941-1945), Paris, Seuil, 2015.
- Léon-Gontran Damas, Black-Label et autres poèmes, Paris, Gallimard, 2015.
- Léon-Gontran Damas, Poètes d’expression française [d’Afrique Noire, Madagascar, Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Indochine, Guyane] 1900–1945, Paris, Seuil, 1947.
- Léopold Sédar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française [1948], Paris, PUF, 2015.
- Léopold Sédar Senghor, Œuvre poétique, Paris, Seuil, 2020.

Secondary readings

- Stanislas Spero Adotevi, Négritude et négrologues, Editions Materia Scritta, 2017.
- Vincent Debaene, « Les écrivains contre l’ethnologie ? Ethnographie, ethno- logie et littérature d’Afrique et des Antilles, 1921-1948 », Romanic Review, vol. 104, no 3-4, 2013, p. 353-374.
- Souleymane Bachir Diagne, « Négritude », Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL :
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/negritude/
- M. B. Diop, Le Destin de la négritude, Paris, Les Editions de la Lune, 2010.
- Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2003.
- Frantz Fanon, “Antillais et Africains”, Esprit, n°23, 1955, p. 261-69.
- Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs [1952], Paris, Seuil, 2015.
- Sébastien Heiniger, Décolonisation, fédéralisme et poésie chez Léopold Sédar Senghor, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2022.
- Jean Khalfa, « Naissance de la négritude », Les Temps Modernes, vol. 656, no 5, 2009, p. 38-63.
- Jean Khalfa, « Deux néologismes de Césaire », dans Fabula-LhT, n° 12, « La Langue française n’est pas la langue française », dir. Samia Kassab et Myriam Suchet, mai 2014, URL: http://www.fabula.org/lht/12/khalfa.html .
- Lilyan Kesteloot, Négritude et la situation coloniale, Clé, Yaoundé, 1968.
- Lilyan Kesteloot, Césaire et Senghor. Un pont sur l’Atlantique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2006.
- Christopher L. Miller, “The (Revised) Birth of Negritude: Communist Revolution and ‘the Immanent Negro’ in 1935”, PMLA, vol. 125, n° 3, May 2010, p. 743-749.
- Raisa Rexer, “Black and White and Re(a)d All Over: L'Étudiant noir, Communism, and the Birth of Négritude”, Research in African Literature, vol. 44, n°4, 2013, p. 1-14.

Additional bibliographical information will be provided during the course. Online books will be available on the course Moodle.

The exam is oral and is conducted in French.
The exam begins with a topic of the student’s choice, among those inherent to the exam program (or with an in-depth study agreed upon with the lecturer).
It will ascertain the student’s ability to critically comment the texts by situating them in the historical-cultural framework proper to Francophone literatures: on the one hand, noting and explaining the peculiarities, intrinsic and contextual of the texts examined, and on the other hand, showing an adequate knowledge and understanding of the historical-cultural reality of these literatures in their becoming, with regard to that part of them specifically covered in class or indicated in the examination program.

Frontal lectures in French will be enriched by moments of exchange and shared reflection with students, on the topics covered. All teaching materials (texts and in-depth studies) uploaded during the course on the Moodle platform will be subject of study and their knowledge will be verified at the exam.

More details and additional critical bibliography will be provided in class. The literary corpus analyzed will consist of the main texts mentioned above and a selection of passages indicated in the syllabus or provided by the lecturer.
Lectures will be given in French.
Students who wish to apply for the thesis in Francophone literatures are required, if they have not done so previously, to take the “History of the Culture of Francophone Countries” exam of the three-year course of study (also possible as a free-choice exam).

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This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Poverty and inequalities" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development