F1318 Everyday Life through Modern Western Literature and the Japanese Haiku, Franck Villain

The notion of the everyday is at the heart of modern French cultural and Anglo-American cultural studies. Indeed, since the 1960s numerous writers, artists, philosophers, and social theorists have tried to home in on the patterns and rhythms of our daily activities. With the questioning of the idea of historical progress in the wake of World War II and the end of current ideologies, many western artists have looked for another connection with what we call "reality". This questioning started in France, from the compulsive surrealist experiment of the vast realm of "reality" to the Situationists, and reached its climax during the 1950s and 1960s with major publications such as Roland Barthes's Mythologies. This pivotal period establishes a defined structural field and sets out a methodological basis whose avatars can be found in Georges Perec's developments of the "Infra-Ordinary" or in later post-modern narratives, poetry, plays or essays, especially those dealing with the experience of urban territories.

If the attention to everyday life appeared in France in the last century, a similar attitude has been around in Japan since the Heian's period (794-1192), in particular in the poetic genre known as Tanka, or later in the eighteenth century with the famous Haiku. Since the beginning of Japanese literature, an aesthetic of everyday life around the notion of wabi-sabi (the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete) has developed through the attention given to the little things of ordinary and natural life. Western culture discovered this aesthetic at the end of the nineteenth century and the impact was very important, especially in French poetry from "Japonism" onwards.

First, this course will offer a broad historical survey of the notion of everyday life in French arts through the works of philosophers such as Walter Benjamin and Stanley Cavell. Second, this course will establish a bridge between the notion of the everyday and ordinary life in Japanese Haiku so as to understand why and how, from the end of the nineteenth century to the present, this foreign aesthetic has influenced western art. Accordingly, we will study the issue of intercultural possibilities and reflect on the historical conditions that make it possible for a society to open its art to a foreign culture. What are artists looking for in this exchange? Is it the dream of simple exoticism or a deeper self-examination that belongs to any society?

Teaching and evaluations methods
At first, I will explain the evolution of the Everydaylife in France and in Japan with many documents. Copies will be provided by the professor. After, each week we will work through one chapter of the course textbook that we will discuss and explain in class. Students will also be asked to prepare a short summary of what we said for the next class.