Teacher-researchers and professional insctructors are in charge of the courses.
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Classes presentation 2019-2020
M1
First Semester
History and fiction theory
Liberalism and fiction – Yoan Vérilhac
The development of a liberal world has led to a profound reconfiguration of the forms of fiction, its functions and its economy. The goal of this seminar is to put in place, at the beginning of the program, the critical questions and tools that will allow us to think about the formal upheavals imposed on fiction by the transition to a regime of freedom of expression, globalised commodification of cultural products and free competition in the media industries.
The work is organized as follows:
| 1 | Laws of fiction, 1 – The most constrained of all games |
| 2 | Laws of fiction, 2 – Transformations of fiction into a liberal regime: freedom of speech |
| 3 | Laws of fiction, 2 – Transformations of fiction into a liberal regime: capitalism and commodification |
| 4 | Formats of fiction, 1 |
| 5 | Formats of fiction, 2 |
| 6 | Remarkable dynamics: juvenilisation and ironisation |
Students carry out a collective research or research-creation project. Here is a list of suggested topics:
- Essay of fiction in a dystopian fiction: how to know the legal systems of imaginary dictatorships? How to imagine a fiction that could be published there? (See V pour Vendetta, Fiction essay within a dystopic fiction)
- Disinterest and commercialisation of fanfiction: what happens to a disinterested, communitarian, immaterial practice when a publisher transforms it into a book with a profitable aim?
- Fiction shelves: in large commercial spaces, how to measure, describe and understand the presence of fiction?
- The weight of the fictions: if the reflections on the “length”, the “duration” or the “size” of the fictions is recurrent, the one on their “weight” is rarer… it is however the main problem posed by books, CDs or VHS when ordinary people moved out between 1960 and 2000.
- Theoretical and imaginative challenge: the smallest possible fiction. How to imagine the minimal unity of fiction?
- The printer’s formats and the formatting of the fictions.
- What is the difference in length between a manuscript and an edited book?
- Televised fiction formats in France during the twentieth century (See La shortcom, Shortcom report).
- “Transform into a quid in a puddle paint to reload your weapon” : fabulous surrealism within videogame worlds ?
- Illustrated fiction derived from Minecraft. (See Mémoire Les fictions illustrées dérivées du jeu Minecraft, Minecraft)
- The flow of comedy that doesn’t make you laugh: while we are constantly exposed to comical statements and images, we don’t “laugh” so much. Strange, right?
- Comical metalepse in comics: comic book authors love metalepses. Strange, right?
Transmedia – Amélie Chabrier
Trans-mediality is the act of combining several media to develop a fictional universe. Although the term is fairly recent, what it refers to is actually rooted in much older practices of Western media culture. This course will therefore consider transmediality in a long history, in order to better characterise its uses and understand the evolutions and particularities of contemporary works both in their construction (narration) and in their production and consumption.
« TIRAGES :A film was made from my novel and then I will make a novel from the film! » Bécan, in Paris-Soir dimanche, 1930’s
Practices : Globalisation
Pop Culture –Hervé Mayer, 20h. TD, [in english]
In this course, we will explore the notion of pop culture through the perspective of popular American cinema and develop skills and vocabulary for the analysis of film sequences in English. With examples ranging from contemporary blockbusters to cult classics, we will focus on the narrative, aesthetic and political complexity of Hollywood productions to understand how pop culture is a site of tension between the individual and the collective, between hegemonic discourses and resistance, between the marginal and the mainstream.
The origins of serial culture in the English-speaking world – Sylvain Belluc, 20h. TD, [in english]
The aim of this course will be to place some of the major issues studied in the Master’s programme in a long-term perspective. More specifically, we will draw on the origins of serial culture in nineteenth-century England. After several courses in which we will highlight the political, social and cultural factors that led to the emergence of the serial genre at that time (emergence of the bourgeois class, democratisation of the education system, rapid growth of the press, great scientific discoveries, etc.), we will look at Bleak House, the novel generally recognised as Charles Dickens’ masterpiece. In particular, we will try to identify the way in which the writing and reading of the work in episodic form have shaped its structure and style, thus opening the way to new methods of producing and consuming fiction that are characteristic of our modernity.
Practices: culture and technology
Mediation, reception: digital practices, Claire Cornillon
This seminar will focus on reception issues, particularly in the field of fan studies. In particular, it will examine the role of digital technology in this field. In a process of initiation to research, we will try to reflect together on a certain number of concrete cases of fan practices by relying on a corpus of theoretical texts.
Web development –Yann Canal, 20 h. TD,
The aim of this course is to provide students with a comprehensive knowledge of the techniques used in the development of websites.
At the end of this course, students will be able to modify HTML and CSS code and to design and build a website using a CMS (Content Management System).
Project-workshop, Grégory Santerre, 10 h. TD.
Workshop 1, Claire Musiol, autrice, 15h. TD.
Second Semester
Fiction history and theory
Globalized fictions, 15 h. CM, Bounthavy Suvilay
In a comparative and constrastive approach, the aim will be to understand what the dynamics of globalisation currently underway on the planet are doing to fiction. We will examine some of the aesthetic devices, forms or privileged narrative strategies that are emerging in the era of globalisation, highlighting the movements of circulation, reappropriation or reterritorialisation that are at work in contemporary fictional productions. Japanese culture will be particularly highlighted.
Seriality, 15 h. CM, Claire Cornillon
This year, this seminar will be dedicated to Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The first three seasons must be viewed before the seminar begins.
Practices : globalisation
American imaginaries, 20 h. TD, Sabine Coudassot-Ramirez
The question of the frontier, which has been widely explored over the last thirty years by various disciplinary approaches, has not been exhausted and seems more topical than ever. In Latin America as a whole, the northern border of Mexico is, historically, a shifting frontier, the result of a war between the two countries (1846-1848), which today remains an open wound for Mexico because it lost more than half of its territory.
A zone of conflict as much as of trade, the border symbolically marks the separation between North and South (understood according to development criteria and not geographical criteria). It will be necessary to question these criteria, which are now dated, because the border between Mexico and the United States, although it is the object of fiction, can also be understood, beyond its materiality, as a fiction in itself. Recent history will be one way of highlighting this. This course will therefore focus on the imaginary of the border and the way in which, beyond stereotypes and caricatures, an “exclusive” space is constructed (which claims to exclude all that is foreign) where national identities are defined, often presented (by whom? why?) as irreducible, and an “inclusive” space, rich in exchanges between these two worlds that feed, inspire and mix, giving shape to original cultural creations against a backdrop of plurilingualism and even third languages (see the powerful novel (2008 Pulitzer Prize) by Junot Díaz (an “American” writer born in Santo Domingo), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Riverhead, 2007).
Road movie space, 20 h. TD, Jean-Louis Brunel
Between the western that he recycles at dusk and the science fiction that revisits it, the road movie is always there, pursuing the same lines of flight, interstate or interstellar, that began at the border. After the trail, the time has come for the road and the networks; it is JFK who suggests when he launches the Apollo programme:
‘What was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space.’ (Rice University, Houston, 12/09/1962)
This is our point of departure and our perspective: the border, which constitutes the territory and contests it, has always been the receptacle of all those desires that invest and subvert the sense of destination: the precellence of the journey over the object, of the vector over the verdict, in spaces ‘set in speed’ (Virilio), ever more fluid and smooth until they become mirages.
Cartographic or computerised, they are the place without place of inevitable disasters, where the ‘purity of movement’ (Kerouac) and the ‘infinite possibility’ of the grid (Kosinski) trace an aesthetic of disappearance.
Works we will study :
John Ford, The Searchers, 1956
Richard Sarafian, Vanishing Point, 1971
Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
Joseph Kosinski, Tron Legacy, 2010
Christopher Nolan, Interstellar, 2014…
Practices : Culture and technologies
Narrative forms and supports, 15 h. CM, Marie-Eve Thérenty
The course will be based on the company launched by Pierre Rosanvallon in 2013, Raconter la vie, a company dedicated to describing the daily life of the French. His project was to establish a democracy of narrative representation where all voices could have access to the narrative and could report on their daily lives. It was based on a digital forum and on a collection at Le Seuil whose small books were written by journalists, researchers and writers (Annie Ernaux, Maylis de Kérangal, François Bégaudeau). Pierre Rosanvallon also designated as models for his project genres of storytelling in a variety of media: the serial novel, the illustrated panoramic book, the naturalist novel, the journalistic report, the photographic investigation, the collection of lives. Within the framework of life stories, the course will invite students to reflect on editorial and media devices, on the different modalities of the relationship between media and narrative forms and on the possibility of thinking about the poetics of the medium.
Archives of the website Raconte la vie :
https://web.archive.org/web/20170521203614/http://raconterlavie.fr/).
Florence Aubenas, Le Quai de Ouistreham, 2010.
Annie Ernaux, Regarde les lumières, mon amour, Seuil, 2013
Maylis de Kérangal, Un chemin de tables, Seuil, 2016
Georges Le Fèvre, Je suis un gueux, 1929.
Albert Londres, Au bagne, 1923.
Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Parlement des invisibles, Seuil, 2014.
Eugène Sue, Les Mystères de Paris, 1842-1843.
DTP, Nicolas Grosmaire
Couse designed to take into account all the ins and outs of desktop publishing (DTP).
Taking into account the standards, criteria and principles of design, production, realisation and broadcasting of communication supports; while using dedicated tools, the course will be directed towards the professionalisation of exchanges with potential partners and service providers.
Writing Workshop 1, 15h. TD, Anne-Laure Bonvalot
The aim will be to practise creative writing by exploring through practice a wide mosaic of available literary forms and genres. In addition to the strengthening and acquisition of formal skills and poetic or rhetorical knowledge, the development of techniques, methods and reflexes necessary for the elaboration of fictional worlds will be encouraged through individual and collective evolutionary exercises. The notions of interaction, co-construction and creative sharing will be at the centre of the practice.
Masterclass : Vivien Bessières, novelist (Rouergue editions)
M2
Third Semester
Fictions and counter-fictions
Mass culture et avant-gardes, 15h CM. [in english], Sylvain Belluc
This class picks up where the Master 1 class left off. While the latter focused on the social, economic, and cultural environment which saw the rise of mass serial literature at the dawn of the nineteenth century, this series of lectures is devoted to the study of the mutual influence exerted by advertising and fiction on each other and to the importance of social reading to that nexus. We shall thus highlight the value, but also the limits, of the Victorian model to understand some of the ways in which serial fiction is both produced and consumed today.
Centres and peripheries, Literature, cinema and contemporary centrisms, 15h CM., Anne-Laure Bonvalot
In this course, we will consider what contemporary fictions, particularly those claiming to be from the Global South, but not exclusively, do to the notions of “centre.s” and “periphery.s”. From Afrofuturism to decolonial anticipation fiction, from ecofeminist literature to poetics other than human, there are many currents, aesthetics and devices that seek to bring about a decentering of fiction, both on the imaginary level and on the level of material creation. We will draw on a corpus that is both literary and filmic, conceived as a kind of anthology, sometimes critical, sometimes offbeat or resolutely commercial, of current centrisms and their privileged modalities of fictionalisation in global capitalism.
Globalisation
Media reality – Crisis, anticipation and sensationalism – Yoan Vérilhac
This seminar questions the media representation of reality and the place of fiction in this work. During the year 2019-2020, the reflection was organised around two major projects, based around the notion of sensationalism:
– A work on the fictions of anticipation of the inter-war period and their participation in the media construction of historical time as a permanent crisis. The collective work was presented at the symposium “Les Temps de l’anticipation” in Lyon (https://www.fabula.org/actualites/les-temps-de-l-anticipation_93057.php).
– A work on the processes of media sensationalism (from the novel, the tabloid press, reality TV, attraction). The research-creation work was the analysis and parodic diversion of a sensational object (magazine, programme, etc.).
Infotainment, The representation of politics in infotainment formats, 20h TD. [in english], Salomé La Sala-Urbain
Over the last two decades, infotainment has reshaped the audience’s perception of how politics is dealt with in media. Has the political dialogue been democratized? Is infotainment a postmodern expression of journalism? Or is it leading to the end of unbiased political debate in media? Through the study of American and French TV programs and digital formats we’ll take a look at the mechanisms building this journalistic genre and the ambiguous positioning forced upon a complicit audience.
Culture and technologies
Marketing, 15h. CM Laura Lugand
In this module, we will discuss the general basics of marketing and the specifics of its application to the cultural industry of publishing. Our objective will be to understand how the artistic dimension of these companies influences the way marketing professionals work and how the issue of fiction is paramount. We will also look at the levers of action available to relay their discourse.
This course is designed to be as concrete as possible to enable you to project yourself into a job situation. It aims to give you an overview of the cross-disciplinary professions that exist or will soon exist in publishing and for which the question of storytelling is essential.
At the end of the course, you will be able to understand and analyse an editorial communication plan and build one based on the literary project to be supported. The evaluation methods will be explained during the first session, as well as the work schedule. The course will be delivered in French.
Video Games, 20h. TD Guillaume Baychelier
– This seminar aims to help in understanding the narrative issues specific to the videogame medium. Beyond the question of interactive narration, video games make it possible to question creation as well as the practice of fictional universes according to regimes which, although not necessarily new, appear renewed or magnified. The formal richness of this medium and the diversity of the practices it makes possible, induce the adoption of specific forms of writing that can be expressed as much through the use of text as through images.
– The first part of the seminar will help to get acquainted with the video game medium and to observe the contours of the various playful genres. By looking at specific genres, it will also be a question of observing what is at stake in their conception but also in the gaming experience they offer. This moment will be divided between theoretical presentations and analysis of playful practices.
– The second part of the seminar will be dedicated to a practical application of the reflections carried out through a game design workshop which will allow to work in a collaborative way on narrative design mechanics centred around interactive narration.
Professionnalisation
Project-workshop, 6h TD, Grégory Santerre
Internships
Writing Workshops
Workshop 1 : Choose Your Own Adventure , 15h TD. Claire Cornillon
During this workshop, we will collectively develop a gamebook, similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure series, in order to familiarise ourselves with the issues at stake in this form of multiple-choice narrative and its contemporary variations, particularly digital and multimedia.
Master class: Laurent Queyssi, comic books scenario, 15h. TD
Workshops
Each semester a professional is invited to lead a writing workshop in his or her preferred field, and a teacher organizes a writing workshop.
Meetings
CCI professionals come to meet the students to discuss their career paths.
Stages
The M1 and M2 internships last a minimum of 6 weeks and take place from December to February.
