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This chapter considers the specific challenge posed to previous conceptions of French Studies by the field's engagement with the specific ‘transnational’ form of questioning involved in the development of postcolonial teaching and research. It explores whether the development of francophone postcolonial studies represents the demise or the rebirth of the French department. It suggests that while it is possible that French Studies engagement with the postcolonial will open up exciting research trajectories, changes in teaching and the curriculum may be harder to achieve in some institutions.

This chapter considers the reasons why modern languages continue to be seen as more of an undergraduate subject than many other humanities disciplines. It considers the associated risks faced by modern languages, specifically by French Studies, as a result of various practicalities: as with other humanities subjects, the potential for grant capture among modern linguists can never compete with STEM areas; unlike many other humanities disciplines, modern languages have declined at GCSE and A Level; and practitioners in the field are challenged, moreover, to be particularly innovative when it comes to attracting overseas students who are more inclined to study in countries where target languages are spoken and where fees are often a fraction of those charged in the English-speaking world.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of French Studies in the UK. It shows that French established itself in the first two decades of the twentieth century as an intellectually respectable humanities discipline, within which language was central not only as a skill, but as an object of study. Thereafter, French was present in just about all universities (and, between the late 1960s and 1992, polytechnics), until very recently. It argues that the intellectual project of French Studies has diversified and been enriched by new disciplinary perspectives and by challenges to certain hegemonic assumptions and exclusions that inform French culture itself, postcolonial and feminist perspectives being the most obvious examples.

French Studies in the UK has responded rather quickly to queer theory and its questioning of sexuality compared to related disciplines in France, in part through increased dialogue with French Studies in the US, and in part through the productive interaction between academia and political activism in the wake of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. This chapter examines how this work looks beyond binaries of straight and queer, while respecting diversity and political positioning, as well as the ways in which such work makes a concerted case for the seriousness and impact of engagement with discourses of sexuality in our understanding of narrative and interpretation, of ethics and the relation to the other, of identity politics, and of what it means to be human. It is argued that that the treatment of these questions in literary and cultural production in French has been significantly critiqued and illuminated in UK French Studies.

This chapter discusses the research and teaching of French linguistics in UK higher education institutions. It covers the history of the French language; sociolinguistics; phonology and syntax; pragmatics; research on French second language acquisition; research outside French departments; the marriage of European and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ intellectual traditions; and the international impact of UK French linguistics and its subject associations.

This chapter discusses the development of a new type of language degree by the staff of the School of Languages and Area Studies (SLAS) at Portsmouth Polytechnic. In the 1970s, the traditional model was the ‘lang and lit’ degree programme. Students who wanted to study languages were more or less obliged to combine the study of their chosen language(s) with the study of (mostly) the literary classics of that country. Portsmouth along with a small number of other UK higher education institutions sought to break away from the traditional model and develop a new type of language degree — the ‘language and area studies’ degree programme — that would combine language study with the study of the history, politics, economy, society, and culture of the country, or countries, in question. The new approach was to be resolutely multi-disciplinary and was essentially, but not exclusively, rooted in the social sciences.

This chapter examines how the study of France has played a pivotal role in the development of ‘war and culture studies’ in the UK. It first considers more generally the ‘cultural turn’ in war studies in recent decades, and then looks specifically at the work of the Group for War and Culture Studies (GWACS) and its contributing scholars in developing a particular approach to the relationship between war and culture during conflict and its aftermath in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It asks: Why should the study of war be of such interest to scholars in the humanities and to students and researchers in French and Francophone Studies in particular?

This introductory chapter briefly sets out the book's purpose, which is to paint a picture of French Studies in the UK. It then cites the main challenge faced by modern language education, namely the lack of financial support from the government. It argues that the modern languages community must take a lead in advocacy, explaining and demonstrating why and how languages are vital to every higher education experience, be it in the UK or elsewhere in the world. In this work, French Studies has a particularly important leadership role to play, since French remains the most widely studied and researched language in the UK.

This chapter addresses the question of where French Studies should go in the current era of financial constraints and cut-backs. It argues that twenty-first-century French Studies must foreground their interdisciplinary nature and remain open to examining and questioning their own inclusiveness. One suggestion is for French departments to turn their attention back to the origins of French identity and the French state, and simultaneously look at how those definitions have both limited and expanded that sense of identity and inclusiveness. In other words, they should look at the evolution of the notion of ‘Frenchness’ and how it has developed over the past 1000 years before turning to the contemporary, postcolonial period in which notions of Frenchness sometimes depend more on language use than on nationalism and on places far beyond the reach of Paris and the French state.

This chapter evaluates the capacity of French Studies to evolve in the near future. It considers the challenges for student and staff recruitment and curriculum development, as French loses its traditional preponderance within modern foreign languages in British education. It asks whether the discipline's diversity is threatened by larger processes of change, or enables UK departments to deal with those processes more effectively. It calls on university departments to take the French-speaking world and defamiliarise it, designing and delivering curricula that can inspire through the unexpected.

This chapter focuses on the Contemporary Women's Writing in French (CWWF) seminar and research network, together with its related activities. Through its activities, events, and publication outputs, CWWF has made a strong contribution to French Studies in the UK, and over the past ten years has helped raise the profile of contemporary women's writing in French in the anglophone world.

This chapter examines the place of contemporary popular culture in French Studies. It considers the reasons behind UK French Studies's absence of engagement with popular culture, and cites a semantic misunderstanding between French Studies and cultural studies. It also suggests that contemporary popular culture lies outside the comfort zone of French scholars. The implication of high-cultural excellence enshrined in the word ‘literature’ has made them chary of station-bookstall ‘fiction’. They have happily studied art-house cinema for years, but have not felt quite so comfortable with popular film.

Oxford University's French subfaculty occupies a unique position in the network of French Studies in the UK: the size of the department, the collegiate structure of the university, and certain of its very specific traditions all contribute to this singularity. But in recent years this department has, like so many others, undergone a series of necessary changes. This chapter begins with overview of these changes, which serves as a background for two proposals for French Studies: one in favour of more French theatre plays and the other for a research programme based on the ‘Quarrels’ (of which the literary, artistic, intellectual, and cultural histories of France are rife with).

This chapter examines the notion that the study of French in the UK today is framed by a series of historical assumptions about the nature of the French language, and about the implications of speaking French for individuals who are British-based. It explains how languages and conversation came to be critical sites for the representation, articulation, and production of national and gender identities in the eighteenth century.