The French Sub-Faculty offers Special Subject options from across the chronological sweep of French literature, giving you the freedom and flexibility to experience works from different periods, or to specialise according to your interests. In addition, research seminars held at the Maison française d'Oxford will bring you into contact with other postgraduates and researchers from other institutions, the UK and abroad.
These are the Special Subject options available in 2026-27. These are indicative of the course offerings for the sub-faculty, so applicants should note that not all options will run in all years, and some course content might change.
Medieval French
Brief Encounters: Medieval Short Narratives (Michaelmas Term)
Convenor: Prof. Sophie Marnette
Short narrative forms have been much less studied than their longer counterparts (the roman or chanson de geste, for example), but are the locus for significant experimentation with and development of storytelling practice. This course considers a range of genres, in both verse and prose, to explore modes of storytelling, and the specificities of their brevity, across lais, fabliaux, exemplary literature (including fables and miracles), and nouvelles. You will also study the presentation and circulation of tales in manuscript compilations.
Writing Women in the Middle Ages (Hilary Term)
Convenors: Prof. Sophie Marnette and Prof. Helen Swift
Whether as patrons, addressees, characters, or even authors, women were absolutely central to Medieval French and Occitan Literature. The main focus of this course is twofold, considering women as objects of writing, typically in male-authored texts (including writings with a fairly misogynistic bias such as Le Roman de la rose), and women as writing subjects (such as the Trobairitz, Marie de France and Christine de Pizan). It also considers the issue of gender fluidity in comic and courtly narratives such as Trubert and Le Roman de Silence.
It is strongly recommended that students choosing this option have a knowledge of French and that they let the course convenor know as early as possible of their intention to choose the topic in order to access background resources in Medieval French Literature.
Early Modern (1500-1800)
Early Modern Inventions (Hilary Term)
Convenor: Prof. Raphaële Garrod
For this paper, we’ll be working on a wide range of materials (mainly in French) from the 16th and 17th Century: books, maps, mechanical instruments and visual art (drawings and paintings). The term invention denotes both the faculty of devising, finding out, contriving and making up, and the products stemming from these processes. It involves discovery and deceit, creativity and contrivance, inspiration and heresy, theory and fiction. Invention is, in historiographical terms, an actor’s category, which means that it played an important part in the way in which the early moderns themselves conceived of their own age. It remains central the ways in which scholars reflect on, and assess, the many changes that took place in the early modern period.
This seminar takes invention as its guiding thread to understand crucial changes across the early modern period, and winds its way through Renaissance literary theories of copia, wit, and wordplay to the rise of the mechanical ‘arts’ (from architecture through shipbuilding and theatre to warfare); we also track the emergence of the ‘New Science’ (John Donne) born from new techniques of observation and the rise of the experimental method across a wide range of texts and practices. This option should appeal to those who want to work on sixteenth or seventeenth century culture either for the first time or to develop their knowledge of it. Four sessions will take place in the first four weeks of Michaelmas term: 1/Introduction: what was ‘invention’ for the early moderns? 2/ Printing the world 3/Literary invention, 4/Mechanical inventions.
Modern (1800 - Present)
The Birth of Modern Poetry (Michaelmas Term)
Convenor: Dr Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe
The nineteenth century constituted a period of intense and innovative activity in the field of verse poetry, and this course of seminars will focus on selected works from a diverse group of poets, including Desbordes-Valmore, Lamartine, Musset, Vigny, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé. The century also witnessed the emergence of ‘prose poetry’, and during its last three decades in particular the time-honoured conventions of versification — together with the very distinction between poetry and prose — were subverted and overturned. The aim of this course will be to examine and debate, on the basis of close textual readings, the various ways in which poets sought to find a new language and new poetic structures with which to express an increasingly varied and disturbing spectrum of conscious and unconscious perceptions.
Life Writing (Michaelmas Term)
Convenors: Professor Marie-Chantal Killeen and Professor Ian Maclachlan
Through the pioneering theoretical work of Philippe Lejeune and others since the 1970s, autobiography has come to be regarded as a key genre at the forefront of literary experimentation. Besides that theoretical reappraisal, the genre was also undergoing transformation by the innovative work of writers such as Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, and Nathalie Sarraute, all of whom feature on this course. We will also read works by writers such as Maurice Blanchot and Louis-René des Forêts where life writing becomes a privileged site in which to explore human limits. More recently, a range of literary practices focused on individual or collective life-histories, and exploring issues of gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, trauma, and social memory, have blurred the distinctions between autobiography, biography, the diary, and the récit intime, producing hybrid works that make life writing one of the most fascinating areas of recent literary production and critical enquiry. Reflecting these developments, 21st-century life-writing studied on this course includes key texts by Annie Ernaux, Ivan Jablonka, Christine Angot, Christophe Boltanski, and others.
Francophone Postcolonial Literature (Michaelmas Term)
Convenors: Prof. Cécile Bishop and Prof. Jane Hiddleston
French colonialism profoundly altered perceptions of national and cultural identity, while decolonization was one of the most momentous upheavals of the twentieth century. In this course, you will explore how writers and intellectuals from sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and North Africa have responded to colonialism and its legacies through movements including Négritude, Antillanité, and Créolité. Authors for study include Césaire, Senghor, Fanon, Chamoiseau, Condé, Djebar, Bouraoui, Sansal, Kourouma, Sembène, and Bâ. Emphasis will be placed both on the interaction between literature and history, and on the aesthetic originality of the works themselves.
Contemporary French Thought: Paths of Deconstruction (Hilary Term)
Convenors: Prof. Ian Maclachlan and Dr Emily McLaughlin
This course on key strands in French thought of recent decades focuses particularly on paths to and from the notion of deconstruction associated with Jacques Derrida. Besides Derrida, we will examine texts by Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy and Catherine Malabou, and these readings will raise fundamental issues relating to language, subjectivity, alterity, community, embodiment, materiality, and affect.
Losing Oneself: Narratives of Alienation (Hilary Term)
Convenors: Prof. Ève Morisi and Prof. Cécile Bishop
Alienation derives from the Latin alienatio, meaning transfer, separation, or estrangement. It evokes the unsettling possibility that what should be one’s own (one’s labour, body, voice, mind, identity, or even life) may instead belong to another. It can capture both historically specific relations of dispossession and domination, and the experiences of estrangement they produce. French and Francophone writers have explored alienation through figures such as prisoners, colonised subjects, racialised minorities, exiles, survivors of political violence, and women enmeshed in unequal power relations.
Through novels, autobiography, testimony, and philosophical writing from 1789 to the present, this course examines how French and Francophone texts have understood and reimagined alienation. How do they represent subjects estranged from themselves, others, or the communities to which they belong? How do class, disability, gender, race, and sexuality shape experiences of alienation and their literary representation? And what literary forms and voices are called upon to tell these stories, to whom, and to what effects?
Reality, Representation and Reflexivity in Nineteenth-Century Prose Writing (Hilary Term)
Convenors: Prof. Tim Farrant and Prof. Andrew Counter
This course of seminars will be concerned with examples of prose writing by a wide range of authors (Chateaubriand, Constant, Balzac, Stendhal, Mérimée, Gautier, Sand, Nerval, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans, Rachilde) and will focus on a number of interrelated theoretical and literary-historical issues concerning ‘schools’ (Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism), genres (the fictional memoir, the novel, the short story), relationships (fiction and history, fiction and science, literature and the other arts, prose and poetry), thematic preoccupations (the individual and society, the fantastic, etc.), and narrative techniques (narrative structures, narratorial point of view, imagery, tense usage, etc.). The aim will be to explore the many different ways in which prose writers of the nineteenth century represented the world of human experience and reflected in theory and practice on the means and the implications of their representations.