This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module explores cultural representations of the infrastructural, physiological, virtual, institutional, disciplinary and discursive networks underpinning modernity, and possible theoretical approaches to the connections between them. A range of literary texts from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century will be studied: these include novels which originally appeared in networks or series of texts (Zola's Rougon-Macquart series; Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu); autobiographical writings (Roubaud’s La Boucle), and political detective fiction (Manotti). Seminars will involve discussion of this selection of literary texts, all of which articulate and problematize the notion of the network or the system, particularly as it pertains to the metaphorical representation of discourse and knowledge. The module invites students to identify and analyse the networks at work within the various texts we study, and in some cases between them. What do representations of networks tell us about the organization of knowledge in a given society? In considering this and similar questions, students will be encouraged to reflect on the infrastructural nature of modernity generally, and on the specific infrastructures which inform French literature and culture.
Total contact hours: 20
Essay (5000 words) - 100%
Any edition of the works listed here can be used:
de Balzac, Honoré, La Cousine Bette (1846);
Flaubert, Gustave, Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881);
Houellebecq, Michel, La Carte et le territoire (2010);
Manotti, Dominique, Lorraine Connection (2006);
Perec, Georges, La Vie mode d'emploi (1978);
Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27);
Roubaud, Jacques, La Boucle (1993);
Zola, Émile, Le Docteur Pascal (1893)
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
Students will be able to engage critically with a variety of representations of physical and virtual networks in modern French culture;
Students will be able to explore connections and analogies between physical and virtual networks and the way in which that are represented culturally;
Students will be able to appreciate the connections and analogies between the representation of physical and virtual networks and the ways in which information and knowledge are organized and presented;
Students will be able to explore the ways in which literature and theories of knowledge intersect;
Students will be able to demonstrate the ability to use theoretical and philosophical works as the basis for the analysis of works of cultural production.
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