Taught courses – Bényei Tamás
BA core module
INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE AND CULTURE
The objective of this interactive lecture course is to provide students with the terminology for reading and interpreting the many kinds of cultural texts that surround us, from literature through various types of cultural narratives to visual texts like films, paintings and advertisements. The course starts with the screening of the 1994 US film Renaissance Man (starring Danny De Vito) which serves as a background for many topics addressed subsequently. Classes tackle themes and issues like the uses of the humanities, definitions and aspects of culture, popular or mass culture, the various approaches to art and literature, representation, notions of subjectivity and identity, gender and narrative. The material of the course changes from year to year, but the purpose is to discuss issues the understanding of which is crucial for all of us, and to foster critical thinking in the students.
BA translation specialization
TRANSLATING FICTION seminar
The seminars, conducted in Hungarian, and working with texts by a wide range of mainly contemporary writers, tackle some of the most common difficulties that confront translators of English literature (pronouns, ways of address, the reporting verbs of dialogues, the gerund form and the present participle, word order etc). Classroom discussions are based on the participants’ translations of sample texts and on the comparison of English originals and their existing Hungarian translations.
BA third year - British track
ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, H. G. Wells’s Doctor Moreau’s Island and The Time Machine, Rider Haggard’s She, and Bram Stoker’ Dracula and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories owe their continuing popularity to the fact that they are variations on timeless themes. They, however, are also interesting as expressions of the fears, desires and anxieties of the turn of the century, anxieties connected to urban crime (the detective story), sexuality and the crisis of gender identity (for instance, the myth of the femme fatale), degeneration, the weakening of Britain’s power (stories of invasion), the inadequacy of the power of reason (ghost stories) and the British empire. This seminar course is devoted to the examination of some of these texts (as well as some other texts from the same period, including ghost stories) both as timeless tales and as typical turn-of-the-century texts.
FAIRY TALE AND MYTH
The purpose of the seminar is to familiarise students with the cultural and literary uses of myths and fairy tales as well as the relationship between the two. Through the reading of ‘original’ myths, fairy tales, folk tales as well as contemporary adaptations of both, the classes will also address the reasons for the contemporary popularity of rewriting such stories. We shall compare the different attitudes adopted by contemporary writers and their texts toward the myths and fairy tales they are reworking. We read stories from Greek mythology (the creation of the world) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, some well-known fairy tales (“Hansel and Gretel”; “Sleeping Beauty’”, “Snow White”), Hungarian fairy tales (“Ribike”, “Virág Péter”, “A háromágú tölgyfa tündére”, „Világszép nádszál kisasszony”), versions of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Little Red Riding Hood” (including Neil Jordan’s film The Company of Wolves), some modern rewritings of fairy tales and myths (e.g. Jeanette Winterson’s Weight and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit), as well as Neil Gaiman’s gothic children’s novel Coraline.
SHAKESPEARE’S WORLD
This team-taught course of mixed format (lectures and seminars) is concerned with William Shakespeare in various cultural and social contexts. Topics to be discussed include the general features of Shakespearean theatre, the figure of Caliban as a cultural icon, Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies, the motif of eating and feasting in Shakespeare, the film versions of Shakespeare’ plays, and Shakespeare’s sonnets. Plays discussed will include King Lear, As You Like It and The Tempest.
SCOTTISH FICTION AND FILM
This seminar is an introduction to some aspects of one of the most remarkable cultural phenomena of recent decades, the spectacular revival of Scottish culture, including fiction and film. After an introduction to various traditions and clichés of representing Scotland and a discussion of the film Braveheart, we shall discuss five novels and a couple of films. Novels to be discussed include Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar. Films include Local Hero, Trainspotting, Shallow Grave and the film version of Morvern Callar. (NB. This course has not been taught for a couple of years – some of the texts are incorporated into MA seminars that are currently on offer)
MA British studies
Core modules
TERMS AND CONCEPTS IN LINGUISTIC, LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES
(Instructors: Bényei Tamás, Győri Zsolt, Hudácskó Brigitta, Kalmár György, Séllei Nóra, Ureczky Eszter)
Rather than introducing theoretical and critical schools, this team-taught course focuses on certain terms and problems that we consider to be relevant not only to your studies but also to the understanding of our wider political and cultural environment and even to our everyday life. The course has a mixed format, combining lectures with discussion and presentations by students. Topics discussed change from year to year, but this is a fair indication of the range of subjects: power, law, representation, carnival and the grotesque, cultural memory, trauma, Holocaust memorials, liberalism, violence, terror and terrorism, biopolitics, nationalism, addiction.
20TH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE I
(general subject title: Modern British Society and Language)
This lecture course is the second instalment of the lecture series devoted to the study of British culture and literature from Victorian times to the present day, and the first of two which provide an introduction to some of the major developments in the culture and literature of 20th-century Britain. Although the course follows a loosely chronological thread, its logic is that of cultural studies, rather than keeping strictly to literary history: it will explore literary phenomena as they are embedded in their cultural context. Themes explored during the course include: Englishness and Britishness, the representation of the English countryside and landscape, the cultural memory of the two world wars, the problems of the interwar period, Modernism and gender, the cultural role and literary representation of social class, middlebrow culture and literature, peculiarly English genres like the novel of manners and the domestic novel, as well as the cultural and literary history of utopia and dystopia.
20TH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE II: POST-1945 BRITISH CULTURE AND LITERATURE
(general subject title: The English Language)
This team-taught lecture course is the third instalment of the series devoted to the study of British culture and literature from Victorian times to the present day. Like the two preceding courses, this is an interdisciplinary enquiry into some aspects of twentieth-century (not only post-1945) British cultural and literary phenomena. Topics include the cultural effects of the British Empire and its aftermath in colonial and postcolonial art, multicultural and black British literature and culture, the search for Scottish identity through the literary tradition, ways of thinking about postmodernism in the different arts, the development and kinds of British popular literature, women’s writing and ecological literature. There are also lecture on poetry and film.
Elective modules
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE
The seminar course is an introduction to some of the main ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis through literary texts. We start with a look at hysteria, reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella “Cousin Phyllis”. Then we look at the psychoanalytical notion of the subject, reading “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in conjunction with Freud. This is followed by a look at Freud’s famous “Irma dream” and the interpretation of dreams in general (while we also look Hungarian writer Géza Csáth’s story “The Toad”). Further topics include the Oedipus complex and the radical nature of Freud’s concept of sexuality. transference and repetition (Csáth’s “Vörös Eszti” is one text here), and the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy, connected to the notion of the uncanny (the text is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”). Mourning and melancholy are discussed on the basis of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligheia”, and the course concludes with a discussion of the death principle (Hawthorne: “Rappaccini’s Daughter”). The course concludes with the discussion of a film, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which is a storehouse of almost every topic discussed during the term.
STORIES AND THEORIES OF LOVE
The seminar course explores the ways European culture has tried to make sense of the experience love and desire by means of telling stories and inventing hopeless but beautiful theories about them. We shall look at the major sources of our thinking about love. Thus, we shall read a little - very little - Greek philosophy (Plato’s Symposium and bits of his Phaedrus), then we shall turn to the Christian notion of love (reading bits from the Bible as well as from St. Augustine’s Confessions), courtly love (reading bits from The Romance of the Rose), and go on to look at a few Renaissance paintings (Titian, Botticelli) in conjunction with the Neoplatonic theory of love as expounded in Marsilio Ficino’s short book On Love). A class, analyzing Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, addresses the issues of the delusions of love and the hackneyed nature of the languages of love. This will be followed by inquiries into some the major European myths of love: Tristan and Yseult (Bédier’s prose version of the story, Jean Delannoy’s 1943 Tristan film The Eternal Return and a few bits from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde), Narcissus (Ovid, Milton and several paintings), Pygmalion (Ovid and several paintings), and Don Juan (Tirso de Molina’s play Don Juan, Carlo da Ponte’s libretto Don Giovanni, and the film version of Peter Sellars’s modernized version of the Mozart opera).
THE BRITISH NOVEL IN THE 1980s
This seminar, something of a satellite course to the lecture on postwar British literature, is an introduction to some key works of the most exciting period in postwar British fiction. The 1980s were the time of political and cultural turmoil (due to the impact of Thatcherism): this was when postmodernism really made its mark in British fiction, and when second-wave feminist and postcolonial writers changed the nature of the British novel for good. Also, this was the decade when some today’s leading novelists (Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Ian McEwan etc.) established their reputations. Reading assignment are kept on a manageable level. Novels discussed include some of these titles: Martin Amis’s Money, Angela Carter’s Wise Children, Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, Graham Swift’s Waterland, Ian McEwan’s The Innocent, Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, Jane Rogers’s Mr Wroe’s Virgins, Ali Smith’s Hotel World, Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, Salley Vickers’s Miss Garnet’s Angel, Jim Crace’s Being Dead.
CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FICTION
This seminar course may be considered as a continuation of the course ’The British Novel int he 1980s’. The past few decades of British fiction have been extraordinarily rich in exciting and enjoyable new fiction, and this course looks at another six novels from the eighties and after. Novels to be discussed include some of the titles listed below: J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth or N/W, Meera Syal’s Anita and Me, Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Ali Smith’s The Accidental.
BRITISH FICTION IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
The seminar is a satellite course to the Modern British Society and Language lecture; the texts have been selected with a view to the list of required readings for the examination. Recommended by default for first-year MA students, with places for interested first-year MA students, the course is also a coherent whole addressing some of the major themes related to British literature and culture in the first half of the 20th century: issues like modernism, late modernism, the two world wars, middlebrow culture and others. Texts discussed will include titles from the list below: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View or Howards End, short stories from World War One (Kipling, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winifred Holtby), Evelyn Waugh: A Handful of Dust, George Orwell: Coming Up for Air, Henry Green: Party Going, stories from World War Two (Jan Struther, Elizabeth Bowen, Mollie Panter-Downes, William Sansom, Rosamond Lehmann, V. S. Pritchett), Elizabeth Taylor: Palladian, George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four; Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
AFTER OEDIPUS: CRIME FICTION AND FILM
The seminar is an introduction to crime fiction and film, or rather to crime in fiction and film. It introduces the major elements, themes and kinds of crime fiction, from Poe’s stories through Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie to hard-boiled fiction (Chandler) and metaphysical detective stories (Chesterton, Borges, Ackroyd), also taking filmic examples. It also aims to alert students to the complexity (narrative, ideological, psychological, political) of so-called popular genres, by indicating their embeddedness and conditioning in mythological patterns (that is why the course starts with the Oedipus theme, which will recur throughout the course), their narrative peculiarities, political agendas, metaphysical potentialities, gender implications and psychological intricacies. Texts discussed include King Oedipus by Sophocles, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Oedipus, short stories by E. A. Poe (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”), J. L. Borges, Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton, a Miss Marple novel by Agatha Christie (Murder in the Vicarage), Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, John Huston’s film version of The Maltese Falcon, Alan Parker’s film Angel Heart, Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its film version by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner).
METAMORPHOSIS IN LITERATURE
The course is intended as an introduction to the changing contexts, uses and meanings of the trope of metamorphosis through the centuries, drawing upon literary renditions of bodily transformation, while also looking at some emblematic pictorial representations. The themes that are intended to provide a coherent focus are those of gender (female embodiment), biopolitics and ecology, issues intertwined already in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The course is loosely divided into two parts, the first looking at particular Ovidian stories of metamorphosis and their literary afterlife (Daphne, Arachne, Io, Callisto, Erysichthon), while the second tackling 20th and 21st-century narratives of metamorphosis, mostly by recent British writers. The protagonist of the course is Daphne – partly because her story is one of the purest prototypes of Ovidian metamorphoses, and partly because her transformation has been appropriated in a number of intriguing ways. Some topics from the course:
Daphne – stories of female (dis)embodiment (Ovid: “Apollo and Daphne”, poetry by Petrarch and contemporary poets (Anne Sexton, Fiona Benson, Eavan Boland and others), short stories by Sara Maitland and A. S. Byatt, and visual representations); Metamorphosis and biopolitics (Ovid: “Io”; “Callisto”, “Actaeon”, “The Myrmydons”); Becoming-animal in twentieth-century literature (Franz Kafka: “The Metamorphosis”; Julio Cortázar: “Axolotl”); Metamorphosis, nature, ecology (Ovid: “Philemon and Baucis”; “Erysichthon”; James Lasdun: “Erysichthon”); Metamorphosis and exile (Christoph Ransmayr: The Last World (Die Letzte Welt, 1988); Biopolitics and geopolitics (Alice Thompson: The Falconer (2008); Gender, metamorphosis and body politics (Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (Truismes, 1996); Metamorphosis and the posthuman (Lisa Mason: Arachne (1990).
MULTICULTURAL BRITISH FICTION AND FILM OF THE DIASPORA
The seminar course, addressing diaspora fiction and film, is intended as an introduction to some aspects of what is surely one of the most important developments in post-1945 British culture: the appearance of multicultural Britain and various cultural hybridities in the formerly fairly homogeneous British culture, the increasing (cultural) visibility of the various diasporas, and the achievement of diaspora artists, including musicians, visual artists, writers and film-makers. Providing a historical-cultural introduction to the rise of multicultural Britain and diasporic identities, concentrating on South Asian and black British communities, the course will address theoretical issues like cultural hybridity and mimicry, types of cultural movement like migration, tourism, nomadism and flâneurism) as they appear in diaspora narratives. Hanif Kureishi: The Buddha of Suburbia; Sam Selvon: The Lonely Londoners; Joan Riley: The Unbelonging; Zadie Smith: White Teeth; Meera Syal: Anita and Me; Nadeem Aslam: Maps for Lost Lovers; Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal: Tourism; Films discussed include My Beautiful Laundrette, Bhaji on the Beach and East Is East.
POSTWAR BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS
This seminar is designed as an introduction to the rich fictional output of post-1945 women writers in Britain. While discussing the individual novels, the course will discuss the various attitudes women writers take vis-a-vis feminism, also looking at the differences between first and second generation feminist fiction. We shall also be concerned with the way various typically ’feminine’ topics and genres (the novel of manners, the novel of sensibility) are handled and rethought by postwar writers. Novels discussed include Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Elaine Feinstein’s The Border, Elizabeth Taylor’s A Wreath of Roses, Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, Anita Brookner’s Fraud and Salley Vickers’s Miss Garnet’s Angel.
MAGIC REALISM
The course is an introduction into one of the most fascinating global phenomena in fiction. The seminars will address both halves of the expression (“magic” and “realism”), exploring some of the key features of this mode of writing (the handling of the fantastic, the importance of family plots, the contrast between orality and literacy, between the sacred and the profane spheres, the strategies of carnivalisation etc.). Novels to be discussed will include One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez); Midnight’s Children or The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie); The Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison) Imaginings of Sand (André Brink).
COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL IDENTITIES
This seminar is an introduction to the study of (post)colonial literature and culture. The course will start with the discussion of a few key theoretical articles by Edward Said, Sara Suleri and others, applying the theoretical insights to visual material like Orientalist painting and ethnographic photography (a class will be devoted to the discussion of ethnographic description). Besides short stories by Kipling, the course will explore classic colonial texts (A Passage to India by E. M. Forster and The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, also David Lean’s film version of Forster’s book) and some postcolonial rewritings of colonial classics: The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell, Foe by J. M. Coetzee, and The Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul.
POSTGRADUATE (PhD) COURSES
SPACE AND SUBJECTIVITY
The seminar course explores some key aspects of the construction of human subjectivity through its manifold interactions with space: we shall be particularly concerned with the ways in which the psychological, phenomenological and cultural constructions of space are overlaid one upon the other to create a complex, multilayered awareness of spaces and places. The theoretical component of the course ranges from psychoanalysis (Winnicott), phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Bachelard and Heidegger) and cultural studies (Foucault, Lefebvre, Le Certeau) to anthropology (Mary Douglas, Z. Smith) and architecture (Christan Norberg-Shulz). Issues discussed include the relationship between the body and spatial awareness, the phenomenological conception of space and the subject, the difference between space and place, the idea of the home and the museum, place and memory, and nomadic subjectivity. Literary texts discussed include Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, and short texts by Herman Melville, Vladimir Nabokov and Julio Cortazar.
MEMORY
This seminar is an introduction to some of the issues that have become central concerns of theory and global culture since the “memory turn” of the 1980s. Topics include: memory in philosophy; the phenomenology of memory; memory in psychoanalysis; memory, repetition, narrative (Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone); collective memory, cultural memory; nostalgia and melancholia; spaces of memory (ruin, monument, museum). Most of the texts discussed in the seminars are philosophical or theoretical.
INTERSUBJECTIVITY, VIOLENCE AND ETHICS
The course is primarily concerned with structures of intersubjectivity, trying to establish a theoretical framework for the investigation of these structures. Points of reference for our theoretical framework will be provided by Hegel’s story of the lord and the bondsman (from Phenomenology of Spirit) and the theoretical afterlife thereof (Alexandre Kojève, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, Jessica Benjamin, Judith Butler), notions of mimicry (Walter Benjamin, Lacan, Roger Caillois, Homi Bhabha), the economy of intersubjectivity (exchange, gift, parasitism), as well as ethical theories (mainly Levinas), which will provide a background for discussing motifs and issues like torture, embrace and the vocative. The works of fiction to be discussed include short stories by Kipling (“Beyond the Pale”, “On the City Wall”, “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes”), A Passage to India by E. M. Forster, In the Heart of the Country or Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee, and The Mimic Men by V.S. Naipaul.
METAMORPHOSIS
Topics discussed: Metamorphosis, narrative, and the subject (Ovid: „Python”; „Apollo and Daphne”; „Myrrha”; Julio Cortázar: „Axolotl”; A. S. Byatt: „The Stone Woman”; Daphne in the arts). The rhetoric of metamorphosis (Ovid: „Memnon”; „Actaeon”; „Picus and Canens”; „Callisto and Arcas”; „Cyparissus”; brief excerpts from Hegel’s Aesthetics, Northrop Frye’s The Great Code; Salvador Dalí: The Metamorphosis of Narcissus); Metamorphosis, image and myth (Ovid: „Hippocrene. “The Pierides”; „Alcyone and Ceyx”; „Arachne”; Diego Velazquez: Las hilanderas; Titian: The Rape of Europa; Kerényi Károly: „What Is Mythology?); Metamorphosis, gender and liminality (Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales); Metamorphosis and biopolitics (Charlie Chaplin: Gold Fever (excerpt); Ovid: „The Myrmidonians”; „Io. Argus.Syrinx”; Christoph Ransmayr: The Last World); Metamorphosis, monstrosity and surrealism (Surrealist photography (Man Ray, Brassai); George Bataille: „Metamorphosis”; Joan Miró: Personages in the Presence of a Metamorphosis)