French Orientalisms

This subject is not offered in 2008.

This course explores major developments in French representations of the Orient of the last 150 years from a new millennium perspective. The Exotic beckons and seduces, inspiring desire and stimulating the imagination, yet fictional accounts can be construed as complicit with totalitarian regimes. The authors treated in the course, including Pierre Loti, Paul Claudel, Victor Segalen, Andre Malraux, Marguerite Duras, and Roland Barthes, each experienced a deep dissatisfaction with modern European values, followed by a turn toward the East. However, due to different class, gender, and personal backgrounds, they entertained diverse and complex relationships to (post)colonial ideology, which they both served and subverted at the same time. By examining techniques of representation and the authors' ambiguous constructions of the Orient, the course challenges the dichotomy that is frequently drawn between the Western colonial Self and the Eastern exotic Other. New fictional and critical texts take us into the era of the post-exotic.

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This subject is not available as a breadth subject.

• Research: through frequent and systematic use of the library and other information sources, the definition of areas of inquiry and familiarisation with research methods;

• Critical thinking and analysis: through required and recommended reading, essay writing and tutorial discussion, and by assessing the strength of arguments;

• Thinking in theoretical and analytical terms: through lectures, tutorial discussion, essay writing and engagement in the methodologies of the humanities and social sciences;

• Understanding of social, political, historical and cultural contexts and international awareness/openness to the world: through the contextualisation of judgements and knowledge, developing a critical self-awareness, being open to new ideas and new aspects of French and Italian culture, and by formulating arguments;

• Communicating knowledge intelligibly and economically: through essay and assignment writing, tutorial discussion and class presentations;

• Written communication: through essay and assignment preparation and writing;

• Public speaking and confidence in self-expression: through tutorial participation and class presentations;

• Attention to detail: through close reading and textual analysis, essay preparation and writing, and examination revision;

• Time management and planning: through managing and organizing workloads for required and recommended reading, essay and assignment completion and revision for examinations.