FRE 1200YL            Séminaire de littérature (P. Perron/R. Le Huenen)
This course examines some of the major methodological practices in the study of literature from a theoretical and practical perspective. The seminar will be divided into two parts: 1. an introduction to specific critical approaches: narratology, semiotics, post-structuralism, sociocritique; 2. a study of some literary texts in the context of the critical approaches studied in the first hald of the course.

FRE 1300H             Chrétien de Troyes (F. Collins)
This course offers an in depth study of the five novels of Chrétien de Troyes (The question of the author Guillaume d'Angleterre will be briefly discussed). On the thematic level, we will focus on the complementary role of love and chivalry in these novels. Larger questions of technique and strategie (authorial voice, point of view, time, meta-textuality, and so on) will be examined in light of formalist and structuralist theoretical approaches.

FRE 2036H             Configurations du genre sexuel dans la prose (B. Havercroft)
Gender is the most important issue in diverse contemporary feminist theories and practices. Gender is generally conceived as a totality of constitutive elements of social relations emerging from the perceived differences between the sexes; it has also become a mode of signifying power relations. There is no consensus with regards to its meaning or its mode of functioning.  A category of thought integral to subjectivity and identity, gender raises many essential questions: sexual differences, the relationship between the biological and the cultural, the contribution of socialization in the development of identity, the critique of social roles (often stereotyped) assigned to individuals, the definition and construction of the category of woman. We will begin by examining and contrasting the various conceptions of gender by French feminist theoreticians (Delphy, Guillaumin, Mathieu, Wittig); as well as their Anglo-American counterparts (Butler, de Lauretis, Scott, Showalter). We will then study contemporary women's writing in order to highlight textual and epistemological strategies that underlie different literary representations of gender; as well as the influence of these strategies on the modalities of construction of the feminine subject. 

FRE 2078H             Altérité: formes et signification (J. Paterson)
What is alterity in a literary text? Or, more precisely, what allows us to consider a character as being “Other”? This course will study these questions from two complementary points of view.  Firstly we will analyze how the text works as it constructs the “Other” in discourse, in order to know spatial configurations, the speech act, the relation between the “I” and the “Other,” and the relations between the “Other” and the doxa.  Secondly we will move to the interpretation of the “Other” in order to discover the bearing of meaning, the power of contestation, the capacity of transformation as well as the function of revelation.

FRE 2092H            La Construction du personnage féminin (J. LeBlanc).       
In the human sciences today there is a renewal of interest in women's autobiographical writing. Yet, there is no shortage of names to designate the numerous autobiographical sub-genres that abound in Quebecois literature for over three decades:  personal or intimate literature, autobiographical story or testimony, life stories, lived documentation. Any concept adopted to designate all these branches easily categorized under the heading “récits autobiographiques au féminin,” responds to a fascination for the “lived.” It marks in the scriptural instant a re-vindication of the subject and of female subjectivity, that appears as a privileged space through which one arrives at an intimate comprehension of the female subject and of the socio-historic and cultural context in which it is inscribed. By privileging epistemological and formal problems presented in canonical and feminist theories of autobiography, we will be able to firstly consider the characteristic traits that underlie the different autobiographical sub-genres that compose our literary corpus: notebook, journal, autobiography, memory. We will then be able to study the texts and their unedited manuscripts of certain female Quebecois authors with the goal of defining narrative and discursive strategies that guard the construction of the female subject.