Figures de l’autre

Catalog description

This course explores otherness in Francophone literature and film by rethinking what a “world literature” and a “world cinema” in French might mean. We will study the vast panoply of modes of contact between cultures, such as voyage, creolization, conquest, colonialism, Orientalism, slavery, resistance, local color, exoticism, decolonization, etc. In doing so, we will neither dismiss the intercultural value of earlier works nor restrict postcolonial writers to being authentic voices of resistance but question the assumptions that underlie who is (the) other and what constitutes “genuine” intercultural contact. Authors and filmmakers will include Montaigne, Montesquieu, Racine, Françoise de Graffigny, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Albert Camus, Claire de Duras, Camara Laye, Aimé Césaire, Saint-John Perse, Chris Marker, Jean Rouch, Ousmane Sembène, Assia Djebar. This course will be taught in French.