| Unit name | Representations of War |
|---|---|
| Unit code | FREN30091 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | H/6 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Professor. Hurcombe |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of French |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
This unit traces the problematic depiction of both world wars in a number of French novelistic and cinematic accounts. It combines the study of contemporaneous and subsequent post-war representations of both conflicts, examining each account in relation to the myths and ideologies it seeks to overturn and/or to establish. Beginning with a contemporaneous eye-witness account of the Great War (Barbusse), it will then examine the relationship in this text and in the film La Grande illusion between cultural representations of conflict and pacifism. Subsequently, it will study the attempts made by Sartre and Melville to understand the Second World War in terms of their respective ideologies (existentialism and Gaullism) and the relationship of both novel and film to the emergence of the myth of a France r�sistante. Finally, the unit will examine recent reassessments of those myths surrounding the memory of war and the search for individual identity amidst the maelstrom of history in the works of Modiano and Japrisot. Whilst making particular reference to the depiction of war, this unit will also address the broader issues of perspective, the interaction of the collective and the individual, of history and fiction, and explore the problematic relationship of cultural representations of war to the expression of a particular ideological understanding of that conflict. In addition to studying the problem of understanding war in the present, it will also examine the equally difficult attempts of post-war generations to evoke and to exorcise the memory of war.
