Rebels and the Restless: Turmoil

and Transgression in French Texts

09 30740

Week 1: Introduction to the Module

Dr Sarah Fishwick
Overview of the programme:
Primary texts:
◦ Nina Bouraoui, Garçon manqué (2000)
◦ Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Monologue’ from La Femme rompue
(1968)
◦ Jean Racine, Phèdre (1677)
multiple genres
diverse historical periods (17th-21st Century)
France’s contribution to ideological and creative
innovation
idea-based rather than fact-based
assessment support embedded (e.g. in Week 7)
Key dimensions of the course:
• How the following might be used to
deepen our understanding of texts:
◦ prominent theoretical approaches (e.g. gender
theory, reader/audience reception)
◦ literary-critical concepts (e.g. intertextuality,
subjectivity, spectatorship)
Not forgetting:
◦ how texts produce their effects (e.g. through
narrative structure, imagery and vocabulary)
Why use ‘theory’?:
 The genre of ‘theory’ includes works of anthropology, art
history, film studies, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy,
political theory, psychoanalysis, science studies, social and
intellectual history and sociology. The works in question are
tied to arguments in these fields, but they become theory
because their visions or arguments have been suggestive or
productive for people who are not studying those disciplines.
Works that become ‘theory’ offer accounts others can use
about meaning, nature, and culture, the functioning of the
psyche, the relations of public to private experience and of
larger historical forces to individual experience.
Culler, Jonathan, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: OUP, 1997), p. 4; my emphasis.
Discussion of theoretical perspectives:
How appropriate are they to particular
texts?
What are their limits?
How do they interact?
How might they be used to expand and
refine your personal approaches to texts
(i.e. your methodology)?
How might they be used to inform and
develop your reflections and conclusions?
Critical Theory: Uses and
Pitfalls:
Something to be exploited (e.g. like a new
‘tool kit’!)
Do not be put off by the language/jargon
View it with suspicion
Avoid becoming slavish to it
Do not allow it to overshadow the
primary text
Avoid being a naïve reader:
Texts are powerful, but not real.
Interpreting is not the same as describing.
The text has a life beyond that of its
creator (Roland Barthes).
No substitute for close reading.
Offer your reader a way of making sense
of textual patterns and codes.
Reflect on the process of
reading/spectatorship.
Histoire vs récit:
 ‘Story’ designates the narrated events, abstracted from
their disposition in the text and reconstructed in their
chronological order, together with the participants in these
events.
Whereas ‘story’ is a succession of events, ‘text’ is a
spoken or written discourse which undertakes their telling.
Put more simply, the text is what we read. In it, the events
do not necessarily appear in chronological order, the
characteristics of the participants are dispersed throughout,
and all the items of the narrative content are filtered
through some prism or perspective (‘focalizer’).
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative Fiction:
Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 1983), p.3.
The role of the reader:
 No tale can be told in its entirety. Indeed, it is only
through inevitable omissions that a story will gain
its dynamism. Thus whenever the flow is interrupted
and we are led off in unexpected directions, the
opportunity is given to us to bring into play our own
faculty for establishing connections – for filling in
gaps left by the text itself.

Iser, Wolfgang, ‘The Reading Process: A

Phenomenological Approach’, in The Implied
Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974), 274-
294 (279).
Common queries:
Q: ‘Do I start reading the theory first or
the primary texts?’
Q: ‘Am I to produce my own ideas, or
follow the lines suggested by different
critics?’
Q: ‘I don’t know how much time I should
spend discussing what a feminist
perspective is and how much time I
should spend analysing the actual text’.
Key secondary resources:
Lectures!
Module Resource List via findit.bham
Dictionaries of literary terms/theoretical
approaches, e.g.:
◦ Baldick, Chris, The Oxford Dictionary of
Literary Terms (Oxford: OUP, 1990)
◦ Buchanan, Ian, The Oxford Dictionary of
Critical Theory (Oxford: OUP, 2010)