University of AberdeenSchool of Language & Literature

Department of French

FR3065/4065Literature and Photography: Image-Making Interactions

15 credits; 12 weeks

Course Guide 2011-2012Literature and Photography: Image-Making InteractionsCourse co-ordinator and tutor: Dr Áine LarkinOffice hours: Taylor Building A23, Tuesday 2-3pm and Thursday 10-11amTelephone: 01224 272155Email: a.larkin@abdn.ac.uk

Aims and Learning Outcomes

1. AimsThe relationship between the visual arts and literature has been attracting increasing critical attention over the past twenty years, and photography has been written about and used for a variety of purposes by literary authors since its invention in 1839. Exploring several modern writers’ appropriations of this new image-making system gives us insights into the way they think about writing, as practice and product, as well as their understanding of photography as a distinctive image-making system.

2. Learning OutcomesYou will be able to demonstrate a general understanding of the history of photography, and situate the works studied in relation to the cultural practices connected with photography at the time they were written. You will explore the ways photography is used thematically and stylistically by the writers on the course, and trace the changes which have appeared over 160 years of photographic history.

Like all level-3 option course, this course has the following generic learning outcomes: you will apply critical reading skills to various forms of written French; you will select, evaluate and organize primary and secondary material, demonstrating an ability to synthesize material from disparate sources and to take account of the wider cultural context of the topic under consideration; you will articulate your views in speech and writing using the appropriate discourse for the subject; you will acquire the habits of autonomous learning, independently applying insights gained on the course to unfamiliar material.

In addition, this level-4 module has the following subject-specific learning outcomes: you will draw comparisons between the texts; you will apply the general knowledge and understanding of the main themes and ideas to a more detailed analysis of the individual texts; and you will conduct independent investigations and present the findings in a seminar.

Prescribed TextsCharles Baudelaire ‘Le Public moderne et la photographie’Champfleury ‘La Légende du daguerréotype’ Marcel Proust À la recherche du temps perdu (Gallimard Quarto)Roland Barthes La Chambre claire (Gallimard Seuil)Marguerite Duras L’Amant (Minuit)Patrick Modiano Chien de printemps (Seuil)Annie Ernaux L’Usage de la photo (Folio)

3. Course plan

Week Wednesday, 11am-1pm, room TBC

1 Introduction (lecture) and Baudelaire/Champfleury (seminar)

2 Baudelaire/Champfleury (seminar) and Proust (lecture)

3 Proust (seminar)

4 Proust (seminar) and Barthes (lecture)

5 Barthes (seminar)

6 Duras (lecture and seminar)

7 Duras (seminar) and student presentations

8 ------------- No classes (reading/writing week) ----------------

9 Modiano (lecture and seminar)

10 Modiano (seminar) and Ernaux (lecture)

11 Ernaux (seminar)

12 Student presentations

Senior honours student-led seminars and presentations

Senior Honours students will be asked either to present and lead a discussion of a short secondary text relating to one of the texts; or to research a more general question relating to French literature and photography; or to read and present a non-prescribed text by one of the authors. All level 3 students are expected to prepare and participate fully and actively, and are welcome to do class presentations if they wish.

Monitoring students’ progress

The University operates a system for monitoring students' progress to identify students who may be experiencing difficulties in a particular course and who may be at risk of losing their class certificate. If the Course Co-ordinator has concerns about your attendance and/or performance, the Registry will be informed. The Registry will then write to you (by e-mail in term-time) to ask you to contact their office in the first instance. Depending on your reason for absence, the Registry will either deal directly with your case or will refer you to your Adviser of Studies or a relevant Support Service.   This system is operated to provide support for students who may be experiencing difficulties with their studies. Students are required to attend such meetings with their Adviser of Studies in accordance with General Regulation 8. 

Set criteria are used to determine when a student should be reported in the monitoring system. You will be asked to meet your Adviser if any of the following criteria apply for this course:

‘either (i) if you are absent for a continuous period of two weeks or 25% of the course (whichever is less) without good cause being reported;

or (ii) if you are absent from two teaching sessions without good cause;

or (iii) if you fail to submit a piece of summative or a substantial piece of formative in-course assessment by the stated deadline.'

If you fail to respond within the prescribed timescale (as set out in the e-mail or letter), you will be deemed to have withdrawn from the course concerned and will accordingly be ineligible for assessment by coursework or for the resit. The Registry will write to you (by e-mail in term-time) to inform you of this decision. If you wish consideration to be given to reinstating you in the course you will require to meet with the Convener of the Students' Progress Committee.

Class Certificates

A class certificate is defined as “a certificate confirming that a candidate has attended and duly performed the work prescribed for a course”. Students who have been reported as ‘at risk’ through the system for monitoring students’ progress due to their failure to satisfy the minimum criteria (as outlined above) may be refused a class certificate. If you are refused a class certificate, you will receive a letter from the Registry (e-mail in term-time) notifying you of this decision. Students who are refused a class certificate are withdrawn from the course and cannot take the prescribed degree assessment in the current session, nor are eligible to be re-assessed next session, unless and until they qualify for the award of a class certificate by taking the course again in the next session.

If you wish to appeal against the decision to refuse a class certificate should do so in writing to the Head of School within fourteen days of the date of the letter/e-mail notifying you of the decision. If your appeal is unsuccessful, you have the right to lodge an appeal with the relevant Director of Undergraduate Programmes within fourteen days of the date you are informed of the Head of School’s decision.

As this course forms part of an Honours programme, you should be aware that if you are refused a class certificate, you will be awarded the equivalent of a No Paper (NP) for the course, i.e. a CAS mark of zero when applied to the Grade Spectrum used for determining degree classification. This will mean that, normally, you would be unable to gain a higher class of degree than Lower Second Class Honours.

Absence from Classes on Medical Grounds

Candidates who wish to establish that their academic performance has been adversely affected by their health are required to secure medical certificates relating to the relevant periods of ill health (see General Regulation 17.3). The University’s policy on requiring certification for absence on medical grounds or other good cause can be accessed at:

www.abdn.ac.uk/registry/quality/appendix7x5.pdf

You are strongly advised to make yourself fully aware of your responsibilities if you are absent due to illness or other good cause. In particular, you are asked to note that self-certification of absence for periods of absence up to and including eleven weekdays is permissible. However, where absence has prevented attendance at an examination or where it may have affected your performance in an element of assessment or where you have been unable to attend a specified teaching session, you are strongly advised to provide medical certification (see section 3 of the Policy on Certification of Absence for Medical Reasons or Other Good Cause).

4. Assessment

The course is continuously assessed by means of two essays. The first one must be handed in to the Languages Secretariat by 4:30 p.m. on the Thursday of week 8 of the course (week 19 of the academic year, Thursday, 17 November 2011), and the second by 4:30 p.m. on the Thursday of week 13 of the course (week 27 of the academic year, Thursday, 12 January 2012). Each essay will count for 50% of the final CAS mark. Students may not make the same text or topic a significant part of more than one essay. Senior honours students may, with the prior approval of the course co-ordinator, substitute an essay title of their own devising for one of the titles in List 2.

The essays should be around 2000-2500 words long.

Information on plagiarism, referencing, presentation of written assignments, and marking criteria is to be found in the Departmental Handbook. Penalties for late submission of assessed work are detailed in the Departmental Guide for Honours Students. In particular, students should note that unless an extension to the deadline has been granted for medical reasons or other good cause, an essay will lose 2 marks if submitted up to one week late and will receive a mark of zero if submitted more than one week late. Students should also refer to the Modern Languages document on plagiarism. For guidance on conventions of reference and citation, they should refer to the Modern Languages document on writing and presenting essays and dissertations.

As of Academic Year 2011-12, TurnitinUK will be accessed directly through MyAberdeen, the University of Aberdeen’s Virtual Learning Environment. MyAberdeen replaces WebCT as students’ virtual learning environment. This is where you will find learning materials and resources associated with the courses you are studying.

You can log in to MyAberdeen by going to www.abdn.ac.uk/myaberdeen and entering your University username and password (which you use to access the University network). Further information on MyAberdeen including Quick Guides and video tutorials, along with information about TurnitinUK, can be found at: www.abdn.ac.uk/students/myaberdeen.php.

Advice about avoiding plagiarism, the University’s Definition of Plagiarism, a Checklist for Students, Referencing and Citing guidance, and instructions for TurnitinUK, can be found in the following area of the Student Learning Service website www.abdn.ac.uk/sls/plagiarism/.

You must submit two paper copies of each essay, and an electronic copy via Turnitin. Make sure that the pages of your essay are firmly fixed together with a staple (not a paper clip). You must attach a cover-sheet, duly completed, to one of the copies. The cover sheet should have your name on it, but the two copies of the essay proper must be identified only by your student identity number to enable it to be blind-marked. Once marked, one copy of the essay will be returned to you, but remember that you must retain all marked essays until you graduate for possible scrutiny by the external examiners.

5. Essay topics

One essay must be handed in by 4:30 p.m. on Thursday 17th November 2011.

A second essay must be handed in by 4:30 p.m. on Thursday 12th January 2012.

Students taking FR3065 choose both essay titles from List 1

Students taking FR4065 choose ONE essay from List 1 and ONE essay from List 2

List 1: Specific questions

1. Either (a) Discuss how Baudelaire’s ‘Le Public moderne et la photographie’ and Champfleury’s ‘La Légende du daguerréotype’ engage with fears many early commentators had about photography.Or (b) Discuss Baudelaire’s and Champfleury’s use of humour and irony in their representations of photography.

2. Either (a) Why does Marcel Proust, in your view, choose to evoke photography in several scenes where love, sexual desire and sexuality are the dominant themes?Or (b) How does Marcel Proust exploit photography in the evocation of perception and memory?

3. Either (a) Discuss the relationship between mourning, identity, and photography in Roland Barthes’s La Chambre claire.Or (b) Taking a photograph of your choice, from a personal album, magazine, book, website etc, make a reading of it that draws on Barthes’s notions of studium and punctum. The manner in which Barthes explores these notions in La Chambre claire should be addressed in your essay, as well as the ways in which they are articulated and highlighted in the photo-image you have selected.

4. Either (a) How does Marguerite Duras use photography in L’Amant to address the issue of identity formation?Or (b) Discuss Marguerite Duras’s formal and thematic exploitation of photography as means to assimilate difficult or painful facts about her past.

5. Either (a) Discuss how, in Chien de printemps, Patrick Modiano writes photography into the form of his text, and the relationship between formal and thematic appropriations of photography in the text.Or (b) How successful do you think Chien de printemps is as a response to the challenge the photographer Jansen sets for the young narrator, to ‘réussir à créer le silence avec des mots’ (p. 20)?

6. Either (a) Consider the effect of the presence of photographic images in Annie Ernaux’s L’Usage de la photo, on the reading of both the text and the images themselves.

Or (b) Why, in your view, did Annie Ernaux choose to include only still-life photographs in L’Usage de la photo? In your answer, give some consideration to the theme of illness in Ernaux’s text.

List 2: General questions

1. To what extent are the mimetic powers of the photograph and the written text comparable? Discuss with regard to two texts you have studied on this course.

2. How did the invention and dissemination of photography alter the relationship between visual and textual representation in France? Consider this question with regard to two texts on this course.

3. ‘Rien de proustien dans une photo’, says Barthes (p. 129). Do you agree with this statement, or do you think Barthes is being ironic? Discuss with regard to both Proust’s and Barthes’s work.

4. Discuss with regard to two texts on this course the notion that, in comparison with language, photography has a privileged relationship to the ‘real’.

5. To what extent can photography be seen as having stimulated twentieth-century French authors to experiment with new forms of (life-)writing? Discuss in relation to two texts you have studied on this course.

6. Philippe Dubois notes that :Le principe de la ‘genèse automatique’ qui fonde le statut de la photographie comme empreinte, où c’est le réel qui viendrait de lui-même se marquer sur la plaque sensible, ce principe doit être clairement délimité et posé à son juste niveau, c’est-à-dire comme un simple moment (fût-il central) dans l’ensemble du procès photographique. Il ne faudrait jamais oublier, dans l’analyse, [...] qu’en amont et en aval de ce moment de l’inscription ‘naturelle’ du monde sur la surface sensible (le moment du transfert automatique d’apparences), que de part et d’autre il y a des gestes et des processus, tout à fait ‘culturels’, dépendant entièrement de choix et de décisions humaines, individuelles autant que sociales. (p. 83)

Discuss with regard to two texts you have studied on this course the ways in which the photographic act or process has been used, and the extent to which they engage with the point Dubois makes here.

7. Why and how does the digital revolution in photography alter the status of the photographic image? What, in your view, are the potential consequences for literary writing as a result?

8. Discuss in relation to two texts on this course the relationship between time, perception, and memory, and the ways in which photography informs the representation of this relationship.

6. Recommended Reading

General works of criticism and theory:

David Bate, Photography: The Key ConceptsGeoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, HistoryAndré Bazin, ‘L’Ontologie de l’image photographique’Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow ArtGraham Clarke, The PhotographPhilippe Dubois, ‘L’Acte photographique’Daniel Grojnowski, Photographie et langageMarianne Hirsch, Family FramesScott McQuire, Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the CameraBeaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present DayPhilippe Ortel, La Littérature à l’ère de la photographie : enquête sur une révolution invisibleJane M. Rabb, Literature and Photography: Interactions 1840-1990Susan Sontag, On PhotographyAlan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays on PhotographyLiz Wells (ed.), Photography: A Critical Introduction

Charles Baudelaire

Other Works:

Le Fanfarlo (1847)Les Fleurs du mal (1857)‘Salon de 1859’ (1859)‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ (1863)Le Spleen de Paris (1869)

Secondary Material:

Rosemary Lloyd (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to BaudelairePatricia A. Ward (ed.), Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity Pierre Taminiaux, The Paradox of Photography

Champfleury

Other Works:

Le Réalisme (1857)Les Bourgeois de Molinchart (1855)Chien-Caillou (1847)

Secondary Material:

Lawrence R. Schehr, Rendering French Realism

Marcel Proust

Other Works:

Les Plaisirs et les jours (1896)Jean Santeuil (1952)Contre Sainte-Beuve (1954)

Secondary Material:

Adam Watt, The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel ProustMalcolm Bowie, ‘Art’ in Proust Among the StarsMargaret Topping, ‘Photographic Vision(s) in Marcel Proust’s and Raoul Ruiz’s Le Temps retrouvé’ in Le Temps retrouvé Eighty Years After / 80 ans après: Critical Essays / Essais critiquesGabrielle Townsend, Proust’s Imaginary Museum: Reproductions and Reproduction in ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’Áine Larkin, Proust Writing Photography : Fixing the Fugitive in ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’

Roland Barthes

Other Works:Mythologies (1957)L’Empire des signes (1970)Image-musique-texte (1977)‘L’Obvie et l’obtus’ (1982)

Secondary Material:

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Writing the Image after Roland BarthesJean-Pierre Richard, Roland Barthes, Dernier paysage: essaiAndrew Leak, Barthes: MythologiesNancy M. Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography: The Critical Tradition in PerspectiveSeán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida

Marguerite Duras

Other Works:

Le Marin de Gibraltar (1952)Moderato cantabile (1958)Hiroshima mon amour (1960)Détruire, dit-elle (1969)La mer écrite (1996)

Secondary Material:

Bethany Ladimer, Colette, Beauvoir, and Duras : Age and Women WritersCarol J. Murphy, Alienation and Absence in the Novels of Marguerite DurasRenate Gunther, ‘Fluid Boundaries: The Violence of Non-Identity in Marguerite Duras’s Representations of Female Relationships’ (Accessible on JSTOR)Nina S. Hellerstein, ‘“Image” and Absence in Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant’ (Accessible on JSTOR)Janice Morgan, ‘Fiction and Autobiography/Language and Silence: L'Amant by Duras’ (Accessible on JSTOR)Karen Ruddy, ‘The Ambivalence of Colonial Desire in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover’ (Accessible on JSTOR)James S. Williams (ed.), Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex Jane Bradley Winston, Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France Leslie Hill, Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires

Patrick Modiano

Other Works:

La Place de l’Étoile (1968)Rue des boutiques obscures (1978)Quartier perdu (1984)Voyage de noces (1990)Des inconnues (1999)La Petite bijou (2001)

Secondary Material:

John E. Flower (ed.), Patrick ModianoAlan Morris, Patrick Modiano---, Un Chien (de) perdu, deux de retrouvés: Patrick Modiano’s Chien de printemps and Joseph Losey’s Mr. KleinAkane Kawakami, A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions

Annie Ernaux

Other Works:

Les Armoires vides (1974)Ce qu’ils disent ou rien (1977)La Femme gelée (1981)La Place (1983)Une Femme (1987)La Honte (1997)L’Évènement (2000)Les Années (2008)

Secondary Material:

Siobhán McIlvanney, Annie Ernaux: The Return to OriginsClaire-Lise Tondeur, Annie Ernaux, ou, L’Exil intérieur

Lyn Thomas and Emma Webb, ‘Writing from Experience: The Place of the Personal in French Feminist Writing’ (Accessible on JSTOR)Chloe Taylor Merleau, ‘The Confessions of Annie Ernaux: Autobiography, Truth, and Repetition’ (Accessible on JSTOR)Akane Kawakami, ‘Annie Ernaux’s “Proof of Life”: L’Usage de la photo’ (Accessible on JSTOR)