Peqod :: Classes - Columbia University Catalog of Classes

In its widest sense, transgression is the violation of cultural, social, religious, and legal norms or laws. Traditionally, transgression is regarded as being unacceptable, objectionable, and even harmful. Certain behaviors, such as cannibalism or incest (Freud 1913; Lévi-Strauss 1949), are transculturally deemed as taboo. From another perspective, however, transgression holds the potential to rupture and radically reshape the status quo, a conviction perhaps most evident in the realm of art. Transgressive art shocks us, it elicits outrage, paralyzes us in horror, it makes our stomachs turn, our knees weak. It shakes the tenets of our morals, challenges our sensibilities, and interrogates our notions of what is offensive, appropriate, and societally acceptable. What is it about a work of art that makes it transgressive? Do we know it when we see it? Is it derived from a work’s content or is it also a question of its form? How does it interface with questions of authorship, sociopolitical context, and reception? What limit must a work go beyond in order to be deemed transgressive? What is the relationship between subversion and transgression? Can we speak of an aesthetics of transgression? 2 These questions will drive our exploration and critical engagement with French and Francophone literature and film. In addition to offering a broad overview of 20th - and 21st -century French and Francophone literary and cinematic production, this course will focus on the shifting cultural, social, and political contexts of these works. We will consider how these contexts – in conjunction with a work’s content and form – shape what constitutes transgression and how or why a work is shocking. To contemplate a more comprehensive understanding of transgression and its specificities and contingencies, we will cover an array of literary and cinematographic genres (prose narrative, autofiction, nouveau roman, noir thriller, new wave, experimental film, horror), and themes (romantic love, desire, sexuality, colonialism, familial relations, cultural norms, religion, censorship). Along with primary source texts and films, we will read selected secondary sources to gain knowledge of influential theories of transgression and raise additional questions related to race, gender, genre, sexuality, violence, and the construction of the self.

MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
Instructor: Andre L Pettman
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3 points

Details

FREN UN3537

Violence, Politics, and the Graphic Nove

Violence Politics Graphic

In the 21st-century, we’re accustomed to seeing historical violence represented in all forms of popular culture, from animated films to TikTok videos. But when Art Spiegelman published
Maus
in the beginning of the 1980s, he worried about the dissonance between form and content: “I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dream. And trying to do it as a comic strip!” Spiegelman is not the only, nor the first artist to rely on this medium to represent politics, history, and violence. In French, Callot denounced the Thirty Year’s War in a series of etchings, while French illustrators of the 19th-century took hold of the art of caricature as a political speech—incarnated by Charles Philipon’s infamous drawing of Louis-Philippe transforming into a pear. Today, we conceive of the comics medium according to a few distinctive characteristics—hand-drawn art, seriality, frames, word bubbles, gutters, among others—but throughout history, artists have experimented with the relationship between image and text. Recall Hokusai’s
manga
and impressionist
japonisme,
Swiss artist’s
littérature en estampes,
or Flemish artist Frans Masereel’s so-called “wordless” novels. In the first half of this course, we will develop together a retrospective history of the medium, considering hand-drawn art books, illustrated magazines, Épinal prints, comic strips, and children’s comic books; we will insist upon the polemic aspect of the
bande dessinée
since its inception, in series like
Tintin
or
Zig et Puce,
so often vehicles for colonial and Vichy propaganda. This retrospective will touch on the international circulation of adult magazines or counter-culture
comix
of the 1960s and ‘70s (
Charlie Hebdo, Métal Hurlant, Raw
), as well as the success of the graphic novel, or narrative album. In the second half of the class, we will focus on French and Francophone graphic novels that treat historical traumas as diverse as the First World War, the Iranian Revolution, the totalitarian state of North Korea, or the Vietnamese diaspora. Turning to some iconic graphic artists (Tardi, Satrapi, Sfar, ou Sattouf), as well as a few that are less well known (Baru, Baloup, Abirached), we will examine why the medium has become such an important site for the work of memory and autobiography. We will conclude with new genres, no