This video features one image with voice over.
Image: [Professor Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche sits facing the camera]
Voice-over: Bonjour! The course I will be teaching in the spring, Self-writing in French and Francophone Literature, Film, and Art, deals primarily with a very important strain in contemporary literature written in French, that is, autobiographical writing, writing the self, writing oneself and its many variations, such as for instance, auto-fiction, which is a French term and a French concept. And that will be an important part of the course, but I think just one aspect of the course.
I want to understand self-writing in a larger way, as how do our modern selves fashion and present themselves? How do we write ourselves? in narratives, in photographs, on FaceBook in books, and in life. So that is what I want to explore in this class. And that is why the course has a very important inter-disciplinary component, not only will we read major writers in the French language, such as Patrick Modiano, Albert Cohen, Marguerite Duras, Jean Paul Sartre, we will also look at the photographic work of Claude Cahun who was a surrealist artist and a self-portraitist We will also look at contemporary art with conceptual artist Sophie Calle, and we will watch movies such as for instance the autobiographical film by Agnès Varda, Les Plages d’Agnès.
So, I hope you will join the course, and I wish you a beautiful winter break!]