"Literature is just one form of cultural production among others"

Sébastien Hubier is a lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne and at Sciences Po, and associate researcher at the University of Dijon. We talked to him about the very popular courses he teaches on the Reims campus.

You studied for almost ten years at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne before becoming a lecturer on the Reims campus. What made you decide to teach at Sciences Po?

I joined the Sciences Po faculty the year Sciences Po opened its Reims campus. At the outset, what particularly appealed to me about the courses at Sciences Po was that they covered disciplines which are fairly marginal in France, at least at university, such as cultural studies, gender and women's studies, and cross-cutting approaches to popular culture. The Reims campus has changed a lot since then, but it is still just as lively and full of enthusiasm.

You teach two courses on the Reims campus, one of which focuses on Hollywood cinema (The Dream Factory. Elements for a culturalist analysis of Hollywood cinema). What links do you make between literature and cinema?

One of the main advantages of cultural studies is that it stresses the fact that literature is just one form of cultural production among others and that today, it can only be considered in relation to the other arts. And not only the traditional arts like music, painting and theatre, but also—especially even—comics, video games and all the media arts.

For example, the double comparison between literature and film and between film and television series is a way to understand the implications of all the fictions we come across every day—fictions that often affect us more than we think, and sometimes without our knowing it. I think that studying film and contemporary literature in this way also has the advantage of showing students that research is not a question of unearthing old, outdated works, but of understanding today's world, the world we live in.

The other course you teach at Sciences Po is called "Libertins amoureux et séductrices dépravées aux âges modernes" (Amorous libertines and depraved seductresses in modern times). You get students to study a wide variety of works and characters, from the Don Giovanni (1787) of the Mozart and Da Ponte operas to Hank Moody in the American TV series Californication (2007-2014). Do these two characters really have something in common?

Right from the pilot episode of Tom Kapinos's series, the question arises as to whether Hank Moody is a new Casanova or a post-modern Don Juan. By comparing this figure to the different versions of Don Juan (who has varied considerably, from Tirso de Molina's baroque version to Pushkin's romantic one) on the one hand and, on the other, to extracts from Casanova's memoirs (including the famous one that pits the Venetian seducer against Emilie and Armellina), we are gradually led to question the notions that are traditionally attached to seduction—hypocrisy, lies, affection, desire, corruption, shame, power, cynicism, beauty, etc.—but the representations of which have changed, sometimes dramatically, over the course of history. And the character of Karen in Californication also allows us to vary our points of view and study the role of female characters in the stereotypical narrative of seduction; a role that is not always what you would expect.

You propose to study how literary myths of the seducer and the vamp have evolved through the lens of gender studies. What can this contribute to the current debate about gender equality?

Gender studies have two sides. First there is the activist side, which demands full equality between men and women, and rightly so. The other, more theoretical side focuses mainly on relationships between genders, especially in fiction, and representations of femininity which, like those of masculinity, are composed of clichés. This analysis of literary and artistic myths, both old and contemporary, is crucial in understanding the gendered habitus that prevail in real life, in order then to deconstruct the hierarchies embedded in the social world. I would add that all this encourages us to carefully compare American perspectives and French theories; I think that it is essential on a campus like Reims, which is imbibed to great advantage in a dual European-American culture.

Student associations on the Reims campus often ask you to participate film screening and discussion nights on topics that interest them. Which one have you most enjoyed?

To be honest, I always love participating in the debates organised by the various student associations. They are highly interactive occasions, made all the more rich and interesting for the fact that Sciences Po students come from very different backgrounds. I have memories of exciting debates about American Beauty by Sam Mendes and Harvey Milk by Gus Van Sant, with an excellent performance by Sean Penn. I also really enjoyed the heated discussions that followed the premiere of the Benh Zeitlin film, Beasts of the Southern Wild. The questions and hypotheses came thick and fast until late in the evening; it was a very stimulating moment where film analysis, cultural studies and political science really complemented each other.

Do you have a favourite book or film you would recommend?

Since we've been talking about gender and contemporary culture, I would happily recommend Neverhome, a historical novel published in 2013 by Laird Hunt, a colleague from the University of Denver who takes a keen interest in post-modern experiments. It paints an extremely cruel picture of the American Civil War and the relations between men and women, and has recently been translated into French by Actes Sud. In terms of cinema, I would recommend a movie that I missed when it came out in 2014 and I've just watched with great interest: Camp X-Ray by Peter Sattler, with Kristen Stewart and Peyman Maadi. It is a very disillusioned and disturbing portrayal of Guantanamo and of the relations that emerge not only between guards, but also between guards and prisoners, and between women and men.

Related link

Learn more about the Europe-North America and the Europe-Africa undergraduate programmes offered on the Sciences Po campus in Reims