FREN 4910

Fictions of the Mother Tongue

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2019-2020.

In this course we will focus on a number of writers, d'ici ou d'ailleurs-from here and elsewhere- for whom French remains, beyond their mother tongue, the other tongue.  There is a name for these writers: exophonic.  From the Greek words exo-outside, and phonic-voice.  Writers who, bilingual or multilingual, have deliberately chosen (sometimes forced) to write in French, inventing what Edouard Glissant has qualified as "hybrid writings."  Drawing on three overlapping concepts-language, identity and memory-we will explore furthermore notions such as mother tongue, foreign language, monolingualism, bilingualism, multilingualism, creoleness, hybridity or translation (transfer), self-translation and untranslatable, trying to get a little closer to the crative process at the origin of the act of writing, through textx by Vassilis Alexakis, Samuel Beckett, François Cheng, Gilles Deleuze, Assia Djebar, Jacques Derrida, Marguerite Duras, Abdelfattah Kilito, Lise Gauvin, Julien Green, Nancy Huston, Pascl Quingnard, Zahia Rahmani, and Régine Robin, among others, as well as documentaries by Nurit Aviv, Robert Bober and Georges Perec.

When Offered Fall.

Prerequisites/Corequisites Prerequisite: Fluency in French.

Distribution Category (LA-AS)
Language Requirement Satisfies Option 1.

View Enrollment Information