Courses on offer / Gender Studies Centre - Ureczky Eszter | Institute of English and American Studies

BTAN32004BA08; Food and Feasting in Popular Culture, Literature and Film
(British track, third-year BA)
The primary aim of the course is to introduce students to the interdisciplinary discourse of food studies within cultural studies by reading popcultural, visual, cinematic and literary texts on the representation of food and feasting (or fasting) in cultural history, with special attention to British cultural products and some iconic Hungarian works hardly known by today’s students (such as Zoltán Huszárik’s Szindbád). Topics and subject areas to be discussed include representations of cooking, eating, gastroception, "foodies" and consumerism in contemporary popular culture: literary gastro blogs, cookery shows and other diet and gastro shows, the culturally constructed notions of the normal and the pathological as well as eating habits and bodies with reference to 1st world food cult. The second part of the course deals with the representation of food on screen, that is, food movies, and it is divided into subsections based on genre (food documentaries: the cultural critique of the food industry) or typical Leitmotifs such as gastronomy as cultural translation and biography; food, perversion and the grotesque body; Asian food movies and the noodle western or films of heritage feasts. The third part of the course is called “food on paper” and is devoted to the literary representations of food, including one novel and short stories selected to illustrate such topics as food, drugs and artistic self-expression; hunger and gluttony, sin and atonement; and cannibalism.

BTAN32004; Doctors and Disease in Literature and Film
(British track, third-year BA)
The aim of the course is to introduce students to the interdisciplinary discourse of medical anthropology, gender studies, body studies and cultural studies by reading literary, visual, and cinematic texts on the representation of disease and epidemic in British cultural history. Topics to be discussed include visual images of health and disease in contemporary culture (posters of prevention campaigns), the culturally constructed notions of the normal and the pathological, plague as an Early Modern and modernist allegory of divine punishment and totalitarian regimes (excerpts from Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, Albert Camus, The Plague), cholera and Victorian sanitary reforms, colonial vs. domestic notions of purity (the film version of Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil and Matthew Kneale’s novel Sweet Thames), and finally AIDS as a contemporary epidemic and the various kinds of stigmatization evoked by it, films (And the Band Played On, Philadelphia), poems (Thom Gunn’s volume The Man with Night Sweats), and Adam Mars-Jones’s collection of short stories (Monopolies of Loss) will be used to approach this issue from several points of view.

BTAN2108MA08; Ugliness in Literature and Film (MA course in British studies)
The aim of the course is to provide an interdisciplinary framework for MA students to explore the historically changing meanings of “ugliness” and bodily “abnormality” in Western culture. The literary and filmic topics to be discussed rely on academic fields of study such as disability studies, biopolitics, as well as gender and body studies. By focusing on problems such as the dichotomy of beauty and ugliness in art history, popular culture, literature and film, the pre-modern carnivalistic body, the disfigured male villain and hero, the Victorian freak, images of female monstrosity, the diseased body, the disabled body, the transgender and the mutant body, the material to be covered systematically combines the aesthetic, the moral and the political discourses of what various cultural contexts have meant by the ugly in past.