Essentials of How to Write a Term Paper

You can find a complete guide for writing a paper by following this LINK

As I said in class, I am not expecting papers that would be published in a Cultural Studies journal. I understand that most of you are writing a paper for the first time.
I just want you folks to show your personal approach to one topic to be chosen from the Syllabus.

Au Revoir Les Enfants Film, 1987.

This is the story of Jean Bonnet (Kippelstein), a young Jewish boy who has been hidden at a boarding school for wealthy Catholic boys, and befriends Julien Quentin.The film is based on events in the childhood of the director, Louis Malle, who at age 11 was attending a Roman Catholic boarding school near Fontainebleau,France, One day,January 15,1944, he witnessed a Gestapo raid in which three Jewish students and a Jewish teacher were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz and died there. The school's headmaster, Père Jacques, was arrested for harboring them and sent to the concentration camp at Mauthausen. He died shortly after the camp was liberated by the U.S. Army, on May 2, 1945 having refused to leave until the last French prisoner was repatriated. Forty years later Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, granted Père Jacques the title of Righteous Among the Nations.

Hiroshima mon amour

Hiroshima mon amour (French pronunciation: ​[iʁoʃima mɔ̃.n‿amuʁ], Hiroshima My Love; Japanese: 二十四時間の情事 Nijūyojikan'nojōji, Twenty-four-hour affair) is a 1959 French Left Bank romantic drama film directed by French film director Alain Resnais, with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. It is the documentation of an intensely personal conversation between a French-Japanese couple about memory and forgetfulness. It was a major catalyst for the Left Bank Cinema, making use of miniature flashbacks to create a nonlinear storyline.

The Grand Illusion

La Grande Illusion (also known as The Grand Illusion) is a 1937 French war filmdirected by Jean Renoir, who co-wrote the screenplay with Charles Spaak. The story concerns class relationships among a small group of French officers who are prisoners of war during World War I and are plotting an escape. The title of the film comes from the book The Great Illusion by British journalist Norman Angell, which argued that war is futile because of the common economic interests of all European nations. The perspective of the film is generously humanistic to its characters of various nationalities.

La Grande Illusion is regarded by critics and film historians as one of the masterpieces of French cinema^[3] and among the greatest films ever made. Orson Welles named La Grande Illusion as one of the two movies he would take with him "on the ark.

Children of Paradise

Les Enfants du Paradis, released as Children of Paradise in North America, is a 1945 French epic romantic drama film directed by Marcel Carné. It was made during the German occupation of France during World War II. Set against the Parisian theatre scene of the 1820s and 1830s, it tells the story of a beautiful courtesan, Garance, and the four men who love her in their own ways: a mime artist, an actor, a criminal and an aristocrat.

THE SECOND SEX

 The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, is one of the earliest attempts to confront human history from a feminist perspective. Publihed in 1949, it won de Beauvoir many admirers and just as many detractors. 

You can find more information about this book following this LINK. 

Jules and Jim

The film is set before, during, and after the Great War in several different parts of France, Austria, and Germany. Jules (Oskar Werner) is a shy writer from Austria who forges a friendship with the more extroverted Frenchman, Jim (Henri Serre). They share an interest in the world of the arts and the Bohemian lifestyle. At a slide show, they become entranced with a bust of a goddess and her serene smile and travel to see the ancient statue on an island in the Adriatic Sea.

After encounters with several women, they meet the free-spirited, capricious Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), a doppelgänger for the statue with the serene smile. The three hang out together. Although she begins a relationship with Jules, both men are affected by her presence and her attitude toward life. Jim continues to be involved with Gilberte, usually seeing her apart from the others. A few days before war is declared, Jules and Catherine move to Austria to get married. Both men serve during the war, on opposing sides; each fears throughout the conflict the potential for facing the other or learning that he might have killed his friend.

After the wartime separation, Jim visits, and later stays with, Jules and Catherine in their house in the Black Forest. Jules and Catherine by then have a young daughter, Sabine. Jules confides the tensions in their marriage. He tells Jim that Catherine torments and punishes him at times with numerous affairs, and she once left him and Sabine for six months.

She flirts with and attempts to seduce Jim, who has never forgotten her. Jules, desperate that Catherine might leave him forever, gives his blessing for Jim to marry Catherine so that he may continue to visit them and see her. For a while, the three adults live happily with Sabine in the same chalet in Austria, until tensions between Jim and Catherine arise because of their inability to have a child.

Jim leaves Catherine and returns to Paris. After several exchanges of letters between Catherine and Jim, they resolve to reunite when she learns that she is pregnant. The reunion does not occur after Jules writes to tell Jim that Catherine suffered a miscarriage.

After a time, Jim runs into Jules in Paris. He learns that Jules and Catherine have returned to France. Catherine tries to win Jim back, but he rebuffs her, saying he is going to marry Gilberte. Furious, she pulls a gun on him, but he wrestles it away and flees. He later encounters Jules and Catherine in a famous (at that time) movie theater, the Studio des Ursulines.

The three of them stop at an outdoor cafe. Catherine asks Jim to get into her car, saying she has something to tell him. She asks Jules to watch them and drives the car off a damaged bridge into the river, killing herself and Jim. Jules is left to deal with the ashes of his friends.^[5]

Story of Women

Under the German military administration in occupied France during World War II. Paul Latour is a prisoner of war in Germany and his wife Marie lives hand-to-mouth with their two children in a squalid flat. A neighbour, whose husband is also in Germany, has fallen pregnant and is trying to lose the baby. Marie helps her, successfully. Other women come to her and she starts charging.

While talking with Paul, following his release, she reveals that a fortune teller saw "nothing but good things" in her future, along with a lot of women, which she wouldn't clarify. Marie confesses to wanting to be a famous singer. She has, however, lost her love for her husband, who has been wounded and struggles to stay in employment, and rejects his crude and abrupt sexual demands.

Although he cannot find work, he rents a bigger flat at her prompting. Marie continues her illicit business and lets prostitutes use their bedrooms during the day. When one of the abortions goes wrong, the woman dies and her despairing husband commits suicide. Marie shrugs off the tragedy and hires a maid to help. She visits a music teacher, who tells her that she has a great voice.

She also starts a daytime affair with a collaborator and offers the maid a pay raise if she sleeps with Paul. Paul is unhappy with this arrangement and, after he returns home early and witnesses Marie and her lover asleep together, he sends an anonymous denunciation to the police, alerting them to her illegal activities.

A recent law of the Vichy régime, determined to enforce morality and stop population decline, has made abortion a treasonable crime. Marie is condemned to death and guillotined.

Chapter 12

Chapter 12: “De Gaulle’s Golden Decade Ends in Tragicomedy.”

Read this chapter, paying special attention to the following themes:

1. De Gaulle as the dominant French state-man of the 20th century. 
2. De Gaulle: a traditionalist, a conservative, a republican. 
3. The movement towards presidentialism (203). 
4. Depoliticize the government. Appointing technocrats. 
5. The problem of Algeria. Referendum: the colonies chose to remain within the Community (except for Guinea).
6. Terrorist attacks (FLN). 
7. The OAS. Massacre of Algerian protesters in Paris (1961). 
8. EEC: 1958. 
9. The “Trente glorieuses”. Reforms (208-209). 
10. The three “international realities” perceived by De Gaulle. 
11. André Malraux as first minister of culture (212); and the cultural revolution of the 60s (213). 
12. Literature (214). Philosophy, between structuralism and Marxism (215-216). 
13. May ‘68. No coherent political project.

Chapter 11

Chapter 11: “The Fourth Republic in Cold War and Colonial Crisis.”

Read this chapter, paying special attention to the following themes:

1. Beginning of the Fourth Republic. Fragmented electorate.
2. Dimension of the damages provoked by the WWII.
3. Impact on the colonies: Vietnam, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco.
4. The Soviet Russia as a dominant presence. Rise of the Communist Party in France. 
5. De Gaulle’s measures for the post-war France (page 188). 
6. Executivism versus Parliamentarism. 
7. The Cold War begins: 1947. 
8. The Marshall Plan. And the americanization of France. 
9. Marxism among the intellectuals and in the French universities. 
10. The differences between Sartre and Camus. 
11. Jean Monnet: the counterpart of De Gaulle. 
12. Monnet’s economic plan. Pragmatic reconstruction. 
13. Requirements of the Marshall Plan: open up the French market to American products. 
14. Conflict with Germany. The production of iron and steel, 
15. Monnet’s method: to create concrete realities on the ground. 
16. The Schuman plan. The idea of European integration, and the European Defence Community. 
17. Defeat at Dien Bien Phu. 
18. European Economic Community: 1957. 
19. The Algerian Problem.
20. The Battle of Algiers, and the question about torture. 

Artaud - The Nerve Meter. Poem

Part of the poem can be found  in this LINK.

Artaud - The Nerve Meter

SARTRE: EXISTENTIALISM IS A HUMANISM

The lecture The Existentialism is a humanism of Sartre is one of the best-selling French philosophy book.

Pronounced at the Sorbonne (well known university in Paris) in 1946, two years after Being and Nothingness (his theory of ontology theory) being published, the lecture aims to remove misunderstandings and criticisms directed to this book, especially marxists and catholics ones.

The thesis of the conference is : my philosophy is a humanist philosophy, which places human freedom above all. In summary: “existence precedes essence.”

Get the full document following this LINK

Shoah - Movie

Shoah - Movie

Concentration Camps

In a memorable and much cited passage in Cultural Criticism and Society (1949), Theodor Adorno, the eminent German philosopher who spent a good portion of his life in the US following the Nazi takeover of his homeland, famously said: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.”

Antonin Artaud Documentary (English subtitles) - 1 of 2

An Andalusian Dog 1929

About the Final Paper

The student will submit a paper about 10-12 pages in length (Times new roman 12, double spaced). The topic will analyze one concept studied in class, incorporating elements from our readings, videos and class discussions. At this level, the students must be able to create and support an argument about French Culture and Civilization. The paper should have an introduction and a conclusion. The paper must cite at least 3 of the sources studied in class.

Chapter 9.

Chapter 9: “1919-1940.”

Read this chapter, paying special attention to the following themes:

1. The “Mad years” (151). 
2. The new cultural landscape after the war (152-153). 
3. The split of the Left, between communism and socialism (154). 
4. The big depression (156). 
5. Who was Maurras? Ultra-right and para-military organizations (157). 
6. The main characteristics of Leon Blum’s presidential period (160-162). 
7. France as a divided country (162). 
8. Germany takes over (163-165).

Avant-gardes.

Avant-gardes. 

Several writers have attempted to map the parameters of avant-garde activity. The Italian essayist Renato Poggioli provides one of the earliest analyses of vanguardism as a cultural phenomenon in his 1962 book Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia (The Theory of the Avant-Garde). Surveying the historical, social, psychological and philosophical aspects of vanguardism, Poggioli reaches beyond individual instances of art, poetry, and music to show that vanguardists may share certain ideals or values which manifest themselves in the non-conformist lifestyles they adopt: He sees vanguard culture as a variety or subcategory of Bohemianism. Other authors have attempted both to clarify and to extend Poggioli's study. The German literary critic Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) looks at the Establishment's embrace of socially critical works of art and suggests that in complicity with capitalism, "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work".

Bürger's essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art-historians such as the German Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (born 1941). Buchloh, in the collection of essays Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry (2000) critically argues for a dialectical approach to these positions.