Jeremy Corbyn

I wrote a review of Alex Nunn's excellent book about the leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. You can find the review here :

Thème agrégation/M2 0918

I have started commenting the translations I have received and am sending them back to their authors. I have used a system of "points faute". Don't worry if you have quite a number of these (For the moment everyone has more than 50). Last year, even people who got their agrégation began the year with quite a lot.

Otherwise I was delighted to find that an absolutely essential and practical book about the use of tense and aspect in English is now available free on the internet. Download it and read it carefully:

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00732793/document

Advanced translation exercise. From LEA M1 exam (retakes)

Here is the passage you were asked to translate in the exam, with my suggested translation. look at it carefully. Actually Le Monde makes a couple of factual mistakes, but that needn't affect your translation.

Le Brexit ébranle vingt années de paix en Irlande (LE MONDE | 10.04.2018)

Sans le Brexit, la commémoration du vingtième anniversaire de l’accord de Belfast qui a mis fin à trois décennies de guerre civile en Irlande du Nord serait probablement passée inaperçue. Après tout, l’accord de paix signé le 10 avril 1998, jour du Vendredi saint, porte bien son nom puisque la violence a quasi disparu dans cette province britannique où plus de 3 600 personnes ont trouvé la mort entre 1969 et 1998, au point que le taux de criminalité y est aujourd’hui plus faible qu’au Royaume-Uni.

Négocié sous les auspices des dirigeants britannique et américain d’alors, Tony Blair et Bill Clinton, l’accord dit du Vendredi saint a instauré le partage du pouvoir régional à Belfast entre les protestants, dont la plupart veulent rester dans le Royaume-Uni (unionistes), et les catholiques, qui s’identifient à la République d’Irlande (républicains).

Approuvé par référendum au nord comme au sud, il est le fruit d’un savant compromis : Dublin a renoncé à revendiquer l’Irlande du Nord tandis que Londres a accepté qu’un vote populaire puisse dans l’avenir mener à la réunification et donc à la perte de sa province. L’IRA et les groupes paramilitaires protestants ont été démantelés des deux côtés.

Mais la première conséquence concrète de l’accord de 1998, la suppression de la frontière militarisée qui balafrait l’île, est aujourd’hui menacée par le Brexit. Le choix de Theresa May de sortir du marché unique européen et de l’union douanière implique le rétablissement de contrôles douaniers à la frontière entre les deux Irlandes devenue frontière extérieure de l’UE.

Suggested translation

Brexit is shaking up twenty years of peace in Ireland (Le Monde 10 April 2018)

Without Brexit, noone might have noticed the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Belfast Agreement, which ended three decades of civil war in Northern Ireland. After all, the peace agreement signed on the 10th April, 1998, on Good Friday, deserves its name since violence has practically disappeared in the British province where more than 3600 people had met their deaths between 1969 and 1998. So much so that even the crime rate is today lower than in the rest of the United Kingdom.

Negotiated under the supervision of the US and UK leaders of thetime – Bill Clinton and Tony Blair – the agreement knownas the Good Friday Agreement set up a regional power-sharing system in Belfast between the Protestants, most of whom want to remain in the United Kingdom (unionists) and the Catholics, who identify with the Republic of Ireland (republicans).

Approved by a referendum both in the North and the South, the agreement is a clever compromise : Dublin gave up its claim on Northern Ireland while London agreed that a popular vote might in the future lead to reunification and thus to the loss of its province. The IRA and the Protestant paramilitary groups were dismantled on both sides.

But the first concrete result of the 1998 agreement, the abolition of the militarized border which scarred the island, is today under threat from Brexit. Theresa May’s choice of leaving the European common market and the customs union implies the setting up of custom barriers again on the border between the two Irelands, now an exterior limit of the European union.

 

LLCE M2 cours de thème

Les cours de thème pour les M2 ( qui vont sous l'intitulé "lecture de textes scientifiques") auront lieu les mercredi à 9h, mais les dates sont été un peu modifiées. Ils auront lieu le
 
19 septembre
03 octobre
10 octobre

17 octobre
24 octobre
et le 7 novembre

Seminar M1 LLCE Introduction to historiography: Britain and the First World War

My M1 seminar starts on the 29th September. If you are part of it, you need to read this book:

https://www.puf.com/content/Lhistoriographie

It is not very expensive,  and can be found second hand for 5 euros or so.

LEA QES anglophones

Si vous avez besoin de passer l'examen de la deuxième session (dite de rattrapages), notez qu'il y a deux notes. L'examen écrit à Rouen début septembre, et aussi une note orale. 

Pour la note orale vous devez fabriquer un petit video de deux à trois minutes, dans lequel vous expliquerez en anglais ce que vous avez compris du processus de Brexit en cours. Vous l'enverrez avant le 15 septembre à john.mullen@univ-rouen.fr

jm

Préparation à l'agrégation 2019. Thème. Passages to translate

Welcome.

Our thème class will be starting up in September, but it is never too early to begin. The more time you have, in particular to study grammatical difficulties in the passages, the better you will be at the translating.

You will find here in PDF form the passages we will be working on in the first semester, as well as all the details about how the class will work. I tend to avoid using paper, so please bring these passages to class along with your translation.

If you wish, you may send me, at the mail address indicated in the booklet, your considered translation of the first passage, at least a week before the first class. If you only have time to do a rough translation, do not send it to me.

M2 students will be with us, too, for the first six weeks. None of these passages were studied last year, so anyone trying the agrégation for a second time will not be disadvantaged.

 
Just click here:

Passages to translate, first semester

British history, cinema and education

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/16/peterloo-director-mike-leigh-calls-for-1819-massacre-to-be-taught-in-uk-schools?CMP=share_btn_fb

Archaeology in sunny Britain

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/uk-weather-heatwave-archaeology-historic-england-history-a8491516.html

A European museum of history

The new European house of history is sparking debate among historians and visitors:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/12/museum-past-critics-divided-house-european-history

Literary news

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/aug/11/how-amateur-sleuths-finally-tracked-down-burial-place-william-blake?CMP=share_btn_fb

Irish Home rule in cartoons

It is important to remember the very strong emotions roused by the Home Rule question. Here you have a cartoon from the British journal Punch in the 1880s, after the Irish National League had been formed, and a reply from the Irish nationalists. Thanks to Martine Spensky for the photo of the second.

News from Stonehenge

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/aug/02/revealed-stonehenge-buried-welsh

Women in the USA

News from New York: first statue of a woman in central park

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/aug/02/its-about-time-central-parks-first-historical-female-monument-to-arrive-in-2020

Holidays

It's holiday time in the UK, and you can hear the old classics here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHpQzbebuJQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbdWQd6dEbQ

But not all the news is cheerful:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/feb/16/council-free-school-meals-year-holiday-hunger-north-lanarkshire

A vintage documentary on the Home Rule crisis

This documentary from the 1960s presents the Home Rule crisis of just before the First World War. Worth a critical look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjaRqfki8PA

Agrégation Irish history

To understand the Home Rule question, it will be useful to know some of the main political figures in Ireland at the time. Quite recently an Irish television channel asked people to vote for "Ireland's Greatest Figure". Supporters of different candidates were commissioned to write a documentary on the life of their hero. Here is the one made about James Connolly.

If you are busy people, I recommend converting the video into an Mp3 ( https://www.telechargerunevideo.com/en/ ) so that you can listen to it while you do your shopping.

Here is the documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWGIOIbhOHk

How traditional are British people's attitudes?

We all know that James Bond was a traditional English gentlemen (in the early films the racism was also very visible). But what of Brits today. A very thorough "British Social attitudes survey" tells us which way the wind is blowing:

Click here

Dead Ringers

Practice for English comprehension, and political satire from the BBC.
Dead Ringers, fierce satire, here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06cflkr

Don't miss it

The latest issue of Etudes Anglaises, with an article by your humble servant.

https://www.klincksieck.com/livre/3453-etudes-anglaises-n12018