Devoir maison MEEF

Jusqu’à mardi midi c’est bon! Je sais que vous êtes débordés.

Captain Cook agrégation anglais 2020 option civilisation post 35: the musket

It is often forgotten that Cook was a military man. This was his favourite weapon.


http://www.militaryheritage.com/musket26.htm

Evaluation UE L3 Culture populaire au Royaume-Uni depuis 1945

Chers étudiant e s de mon cours de L3 à Rouen. Pour m'aider dans la préparation de cette UE pour l'année suivante, voulez vous bien remplir ce sondage, entièrement anonyme. 

https://fr.surveymonkey.com/r/DGFCN2N

L3 Popular Culture Popular music

You will find here the last class I gave on popular music, in Mp3 form.

This article will also help with some key ideas:
https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/1695

M1 seminar First World War Commemoration

You will find here recordings of the seminars on commemoration!

Part one is here

Part two is here

The PowerPoint is here

This article covers the same ground.

Captain Cook agrégation anglais 2020 option civilisation post 34: Maori commemorations

This short article gives a Maori perspective on the first encounter with Cook, and on the commemoration 250 years later.

https://teaomaori.news/ngati-oneone-re-tell-accurate-history-gisborne

Commenting on the UK election

On m'invite ce soir autour de 23h sur France 24 (français) pour commenter les élections britanniques.

Captain Cook agrégation anglais 2020 option civilisation post 33: réservez ces dates

Si vous préparez l'option B (civilisation) pour l'agrégation externe, il faut réserver ces dates, et tout faire pour être sur Paris

"Captain Cook after 250 years: Re-exploring The Voyages of James Cook" An International Conference on Captain James Cook’s voyages (1768-1779)

7-8 February 2020

Sorbonne Université

There will be 14 short talks on different aspects of Cook, from fireworks to museums, from translation to imperialism.

More details later.

UK election

How has the Uk election been seen on social media?


https://www.euronews.com/2019/12/11/uk-election-2019-how-has-it-played-out-on-social-media

Thème agrégation

1. We were to have worked on the passage from Slimani in class today. A few people have sent me their translation, but I am myself behind schedule and have not yet corrected them. You may, if you have time, send me your translation of Slimani over the next few days. I will correct and return the translations and post my suggested translation on the blog.
2. Next Thursday, I believe, you have your mock exam in translation. I know not everyone will be able to make it, given this busy time of year. If you wish to do the translation into English at home (without a dictionary and within the same time limit applied in the real exam) simply send me an email on the Thursday evening and I will send you the passage to translate. It will not be quite like in the exam because you will be typing your translation.
3. Our next class is on the 8th January and we will be working on Montherlant.
4. Happy Christmas.

Dernières nouvelles

La situation concernant les transports se clarifie. Je ne pourrai pas être présent pour mon cours à 9h.  Je mettrai des informations supplémentaires ici pour le groupe en question.

Par contre, il semble certain que j’y arrive pour les cours de l’après-midi.
À 15h séminaire ww1
A 17h MEEF M1.

History of migration

A fascinating story from the very beginning of the 20th century.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/04/ukip-nigel-farage-immigrants-british-brothers-league?CMP=share_btn_fb

Classes on Wednesday

I have been able to get a train ticket from Paris to Rouen, but it is unclear if I can get from here to Saint Lazare tomorrow Morning.

L3 Important - changement de salles pour DST 17 décembre

Le mardi 17/12, pour la Civilisation GB groupe C, nous serons en salle A411 de 11h à 12h30. 

Puis en salle A107 avec le groupe A de Civilisation GB de 15h30 à 17h.

L3 Popular music: slides on music

1) Make sure you read yesterday's post!
2) You will find here the Powerpoint concerning "Studying popular music".
3) The Mp3 recording of the second class on music will be posted soon
4) Thanks to the person who reminded me.

Captain Cook agrégation 2020 option civilisation britannique post 32: plants

The implications and effects of British colonization are more wide-ranging than we suspect, frequently.

Read this article about plants in Australia

https://www.sgaonline.org.au/indigenous-plants/

Les cours de cette semaine

Mardi, je resterai en région parisienne afin de rejoindre la grève pour défendre les retraites.

Les DST de mes deux groupes de L3 sont reportés d'une semaine.

En ce qui concerne les cours de mercredi, tout dépendra des trains.

Il y aura en tout cas, sur ce blog, des informations et travaux éventuels.

Faites circuler ces informations s'il vous plaît.
JM

Thème agrégation

The report from 2011 including a long commentary on the passage we worked on is Here. http://cache.media.education.gouv.fr/file/agreg_ext/70/4/r_agreg_ext_anglais_2011_194704.pdf

Women in British popular music

I was speaking yesterday about male domination in Uk popular music. There are of course a number of exceptions: see here

https://johncmullen.blogspot.com/2018/04/women-in-british-popular-music.html

Thème agrégation Amette

On Wednesday, we will be going through the passage from Amette. I think I have sent back everyone's work, but my organization has been breaking up of late, so if I have not returned your translation of Amette, please send me a mail with your translation again.
JM

Actualité à Londres

L'attentat de vendredi dernier s'est vite politisé

https://www.liberation.fr/planete/2019/12/01/attaque-de-londres-des-heros-et-des-demagos_1766720

La campagne électorale au Royaume-Uni

Campagne électorale? antisémitisme? islamophobie? On m'a interviewé pendant dix minutes à la radio suisse hier sur ces sujets. Le résultat se trouve en ligne ici:

https://www.rts.ch/play/radio/hautes-frequences/audio/lantisemitisme-sinvite-dans-la-campagne-electorale-au-royaume-uni

Reggae!

This article will interest both L3 students thinking about popular music and legitimacy, and MEEF students thinking about "the past in the present".

https://mobile.francetvinfo.fr/economie/emploi/metiers/art-culture-edition/le-reggae-jamaicain-desormais-inscrit-sur-la-liste-du-patrimoine-culturel-de-l-humanite_3077217.html?

Third seminar on historiography

(Note the link to the important article, which I have given you in a separate post, below).

You will find here the Mp3 recording of the third seminar, where the subject was social history, cultural history, and recent trends in history writing, all concerning the First World War.

The recording is here

And the entire powerpoint for the three seminars is here.

Seminar M1 Introduction to historiography and to memory studies: article

In our Wednesday seminar this week, we will begin by looking at this article in some detail. Please read it first.

A view of world war one historiography

L3 Evaluation - How it works

Someone asked me for more information about the final exam in January. Since you do not know, until you arrive in the exam room, whether the question is on the British programme or on the US programme, this can be a little stressful. Naturally, different lecturers emphasize different priorities, though you should remember that we are not out to trap you and all examiners are looking for a good level of English, a grasp of essential facts and the capacity to structure those facts into an argument which replies fairly precisely to the question.

If the question turns out to be on the British programme, it will be in the form of an essay - that is to say a fairly open question. Of course, you need to be able to mobilize appropriate examples to illustrate your answer, but you are free to choose what examples you use. So, naturally, the problem is not to be sure you have memorized every artist we have studied, or every musician. To help, here is an example from last year . The question was as follows:

"Write an essay in English.

“The power of products of popular culture is that they give the people what they want.”

Discuss this quotation, examining what different thinkers have said concerning the demand for popular culture, and looking in particular at how visual artists have found a wide audience for their work. 

There are many different ways of answering this question well. It was essential to be able to explain that "what people want" is complicated, because (as Bourdieu said) people's social origins define what they will probably want and even it has been said that (as Adorno alleged) the industry can make people want things). But otherwise, it is a very open question which allows you to show the three qualities mentioned in the first question above. Here is the feedback I put on the blog after this test.

“The power of products of popular culture is that they give the people what they want.”

Discuss this quotation, examining what different thinkers have said concerning the demand for popular culture, and looking in particular at how visual artists have found a wide audience for their work.

« Discuss this quotation ». This means you must say how far it appears to be true or false, but also what other similar questions are relevant concerning popular culture.

There are many ways to answer the question, while showing the knowledge you have acquired about British culture specifically. Here are some initial notes, which I will add to as I mark your work.

1)   You should note that this is a controversial quotation and you should be able to show that some might tend to agree and some to disagree.

2)   Some of the terms need dismantling. a) who are « the people » (note the importance of the definite article: « le peuple » not « les gens »). Is there a homogeneous « people » in modern society, or are we divided into « generations » or social classes or « affective alliances »? b) Is it possible to know « what the people want »? This is not a simple idea. Why do people want what they want? Etc.

3)   Which thinkers can you write about in connection with the quotation? Adorno is obviously one. Several students summarized quite accurately the introduction to Adorno’s ideas which I presented in class, but the exercise is not to write a summary. His ideas must be compared with the quotation. Adorno was generally opposed to products of popular culture. Far from believing that people (or the people) were being given what they wanted, he maintained that people were being told what they should want, were being almost obliged to want what the market wanted to sell to them. What is more, he believed that people were being given experiences which were bad for them, which made them into children again and stopped them from becoming fully human.

4)   Several other thinkers could be mentioned, but one obvious one is Hebdige and his work on the meaning of style. He looked at what was provided for young people by rock and roll, punk or reggae subcultures. He does not exactly say that they give people what they want, but that they are useful in people’s lives, because they help to structure (sometimes imaginary) resistance to official capitalist, elitist views of the world. Jyst to tale one example, the lover of reggae, living in a world where white bourgeois or nationalistic thought is taught and valued can with others create a small community where black language and music, peace loving ideas and back to Africa dreams can be put at the centre of life.

You might also want to mention Grossberg, and his idea that people use popular culture to build affective alliances, imagined communities which allow them to deal with the world. This approach again emphasizes mass participation in popular culture, and does not present popular culture as simply something produced for passive consumers by a market hoping to make a profit.

For the second part on visual art we are still looking at the same question: are people receiving « what they want », but there is an added complication : visual art is not necessarily popular culture. Artists are often trained at elite institutions, for example. This is not always the case: one might term street art as popular culture: anyone can do it, and people can become well known without the intervention of established museums and galleries (often with a little help from the internet), in the way that pop stars might. Banksy is the obvious example, producing accessible, thought provoking work available to everyone, even those who do not feel art galleries are for them. Other artists such as L. S. Lowry have become tremendously popular ( he even has a pop song about him). Photographers such as Martin Parr also seem to be trying to make their work accessible, and land artists such as Goldsworthy take their work out of the galleries and out of the towns. [each time you mention, an artist, it is good to give one example of their work, which I am not doing here]. Public sculpture projects such as the fourth plinth are also placed in contexts which make them open to everyone.

On the other hand, a lot of visual art remains reserved to the initiated. Recent winners of the prestigious Turner prize cannot be said to be producing art for everyone.

The question of publicly funded art galleries is linked to the idea of giving people what they want. The fact that galleries are free in the UK, are no longer concentrated only in London, and receive millions of visitors, are vectors of popularity, yet the dynamic is mostly top-down, and the galleries do not correspond to most criteria of popular culture.

HEDGING

Because popular culture is ever changing and extremely heterogeneous, it is very difficult to make strong affirmative statements about it. This means you need to know how to hedge, and this more difficult in a foreign language.

For example, it is better not to say “popular culture is just to entertain people and have fun”. You should say one of the following:

"Many commentators feel that popular culture is only concerned with entertainment and fun."

"Popular culture may be seen as mainly a question of entertainment and fun."

And then you can give some counter example which adds nuance. For example, if pop music is very much concerned with fun, it seems clear that it can sometimes be aiming at making people think, expressing political demands or denouncing injustice. 

This was in fact the classroom test - the principle for the final exam is exactly the same, but it is longer. For the classroom test above, two thirds of students got a mark of ten or over.

I hope this helps!

L3 popular culture - resources on popular music

Here is an article on British popular music in the 1970s. It is entitled

"What Has Popular Music Ever Done for Us? Pleasure, Identity and Role Play in UK Pop Music in the 1970s" and tries to examine some questions which are not easy.  If we look at the history, we know that punk arrived in the 1970s, rap arrived in Britain 15 years or so later. But is it possible to say why?

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01966875/document


And this very important documentary traces the history of the genre "progressive rock" in Britain. This is an important genre because it tended to challenge the distinction between popular culture and high culture. (About 15% of the documentary is not visible on Youtube, but you can see enough to follow the main points).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eHXus7ZszI&list=PLA911C12EC45DCF4A

Finally, a note about the links I put on this blog. Over the semester I have put about fifteen links to articles and videos. these will be useful for you to find examples to illustrate your answers in the exam. To repeat what I said about tests and exams - both the classroom test in December, and the January exam (if it turns out to be about British civilisation) will ask very general questions,  so that you have quite a bit of freedom as to how to illustrate and justify your answer. Of course, if you have more and better examples than everyone else, you will get a good mark.

L3 Popular culture - first class on 20th century British popular music

You will find here the MP3 recording of the first class on 20th century popular music genres.

The slides will be available on this blog later, when I have got through more of them in class.

There will be more popular music reading and links later today on this blog.

The past in the present

Every single day there seems to be an example in the https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/nov/27/bronze-cockerel-to-be-returned-to-nigeria-by-cambridge-college

réunion d'information

Pour les étudiants de L3,  Master, agrégation:

Partir à l'étranger pour travailler en tant que lecteur:

Réunion d'information

Mercredi 4 décembre 2019 à 12h30 en salle A316

Contact: cecile.fouache@univ-rouen.fr

Important

1) Attention. A l’approche de l’hiver il y a de très méchantes gastros qui se promènent.
2) A cause de 1) je serai absent demain et mercredi.
3) Pour qu’on continue à avancer, Je mettrai sur ce blog de la lecture etc concernant chacun des cours.
4) Faites passer l’information.