Reading the Signs: Text and Image in French Culture

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 5
• Convenor: Ann Lewis
• Tutors: Ann Lewis, Damian Catani, Professor Akane Kawakami
• Assessment: two 2000-word essays (30% each) and an in-class examination (40%)

This module will focus on an increasingly important area of research in French studies: visual culture and, more specifically, the relationship between word and image.

The module will introduce a range of frameworks for exploring and analysing this relationship, in different historical, philosophical, literary and artistic contexts, from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.

Following an introductory session, the module will be divided into three major sections. Each will explore interactions between verbal and visual media in the following three ways:

• Considering illustration and its relation to the project of representing knowledge in the major Enlightenment project, the Encyclopédie
• Exploring the interaction between the visual and verbal in 20th-century literature (including poems by Guillaume Apollinaire and a novel by the Surrealist writer André Breton)
• Analysing the relationship between text and photographic images within the genre of life writing
  

Indicative module content

• Diderot's Encyclopédie and its Plates: Embodying Knowledge
• Negotiating Urban Modernity: Text and Image Redefined
• Photo-biography? Textual and Photographic Images of the Self