To the attention of students writing their thesis under my supervision
Course titles set in bold are taught in the current semester, 2023/2024 spring.
BA/OMA COURSES
AN22008BA; AN28004BA; AN3202OMA
Modern British Literature and Culture 1
The purpose of this seminar is to introduce students to some aspects of 20th- and 21st-century British literature and culture. Since the fundamental cultural institutions are dealt with in a following course in the second term, besides discussing classic literary and filmic texts from a cultural studies point of view, the course will focus on investigating issues like Englishness, colonisation, gender, the impact of the two world wars, the mid-war period and the 1950s in culture. Whereas the course will primarily rely on written literary texts, it will have visual components as well, both in the form of film viewing (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Magdalene Sisters) and by accompanying the written assignments with (audio)visual illustrations in class. Literary texts will include Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, George Orwell’s 1984 and Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey.
AN22009BA/AN5200OMA
Modern British Literature and Culture 2.
The purpose of this seminar course is to introduce students to some aspects and features of 20th-century British literature and culture. Since the fundamental cultural institutions are dealt with in a previous course, in the second term, besides discussing classic twentieth-century literary texts from a cultural studies point of view, the course will focus on investigating issues like the 60s, Thatcherism and the 1980s, postmodernism, multiculturalism, and heritage culture. Whereas the course will primarily rely on written texts, it will have visual components as well, both in the form of film viewing, and by introducing complementary visual material, too. Literary texts will include Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, Julian Barnes’s England, England, Jeff Noon’s Vurt and a selection of poems by Ted Hughes.
AN32003BA
Postcolonial Thought in Literature and Film
The course is intended as an introduction to postcolonialism both in literary and social theory and in terms of representational practices. Therefore, its objectives are twofold. First, it aims to get students acquainted with the basic concepts, theoretical nodes (such as orientalism, hybridity, mimicry, etc.), and most important authors of postcolonial thought (e.g. Said, Rushdie, Fanon, Bhabha), supported by a rich variety of examples ranging through time periods, geographical locations, and various media. Second, it showcases many of the major canonical postcolonial texts and films (such as White Teeth by Zadie Smith, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe or Werner Herzog’s cult classic Aguirre, the Wrath of God), so that by the end of the course, students are in possession of a good understanding of the field, being familiar with the most prominent cornerstones of postcolonial thought.
AN32005BA
Reading and Playing Video Games (together with Imre Horváth)
The course is intended as a theoretical and practical introduction to the analysis of video games from a cultural studies perspective. Its objectives are threefold. First, it aims to make students acquainted with the vocabulary, methodology, theoretical foundations and primary research foci of ludology and game studies. Second, by exploring the intersections between old and new media – films and video games, non-linear texts and interactive films –, it intends to position the medium of video games within the broader field of cultural production, outlining its possible links to other media. Third, through the “close reading” of a few selected video games, the course seeks to demonstrate how the analysis of video games may contribute to and may be pursued within the broader field of cultural studies. By the end of the course, students should be in possession of a solid theoretical toolkit to think critically about video games within the field of cultural studies.
AN10003BA, AN18003BA, AN1002OMA Skills Development: Writing and Composition
This course introduces the student to the skills and formats of academic writing in English, leading to the types of writing expected of university students. Students practice a variety of writing formats primarily in exposition, argumentation, and critical analysis, including the following 3 pieces of writing: descriptive, comparative and argumentative essays.The second part of the course will cover research skills and writing supported by research, as well as documentation and the MLA format. Students will practice techniques of invention, organization, and revision, and will undertake such composing activities as topic selection and development, audience analysis, organization and development of ideas in short essays, grammar, spelling, and mechanics in writing. The coursework relies heavily on cooperation between students, therefore peer-review will be required and its quality will also be assessed.
BTAN10006BA, BTAN1005OMA
Advanced Writing and Composition
After the first term’s introductory course into writing, which focussed on paragraph writing and individual genres (rhetorical strategies, treatment of material), this course moves beyond, but relies on what has been covered in the first term. After two weeks dedicated to revision, an in-depth treatment of, and practice in argumenting (supporting claims with evidence, being mindful of audience and purpose, strategies as well as fallacies of argumentation) will follow. The third part of this course deals with the theory and practice of summary writing, a skill tested in the end-of-year EYE examination. The fourth major part of the course is the research paper, (library search, documenting sources, etc.). The nature of the course suggests that there will be weekly practical assignments (some of the for submission) along with in-class discussions.
AN32003BA11
Reading BrexLit: The Case of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet
The course is intended as a guide for students interested in reading Ali Smith’s four post-Brexit novels, the Seasonal Quartet (Autumn, 2016; Winter, 2017; Spring, 2019; and Summer, 2020). At the same time, the broader objective of the seminar is to explore the context, implications and consequences of Brexit in contemporary British culture. Therefore, the course’s objectives – and as a result, approaches to the primary texts – are twofold. First, it seeks to look at the four novels from a cultural studies perspective, not only thinking about the Quartet, but thinking through it about issues such as immigration, race, gender, and environment (not only) in contemporary Britain. Second, parallel to the course’s interest in contemporary British culture and politics as the primary context of the novels as illustrated by the additional film viewing sessions, the seminar also intends to position the Quartet in British and European literary and artistic tradition, exploring how Smith’s use of her cultural points of reference.
AN22004BA, ANL22004BA, AN3200OMA
British Literary Seminar
The purpose of this seminar course is to follow the lecture course on British literary history, and by reading key texts from the earliest periods of English literature to the twentieth century, the seminar aims to provide support to students in preparing for their end-of-the-term exam. Apart from this practical aspect, though, the seminar aims to give you the joy of reading some the greatest classics in English, ranging from Chaucer to Swift, from Shakespeare via Thomas Hardy to the Brontës, and from the metaphysical poets via the English romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats to Victorians like Tennyson and Browning. In this way, this survey course in English literature aims at the impossible: to familiarise students with a literary heritage of 800 years, and, at the same time, provide the opportunity to discuss and express your opinion of these fascinating text
s.
MA COURSES
AN2105MA
A Fantasy Called Empire: Colonialism and Coloniality in Speculative Fiction
The course relies on the assumption that speculative fiction is an expression/mirror/critique of the sociocultural context of its production, and as such, the emergence of 20th-century speculative fiction (first and foremost science fiction, but other, hybrid genres also included) was fundamentally driven by imperialism, its claims to unambiguous knowledge and its constant demand for technological progress. The scope of the course is broad: with an emphasis on British colonial practices and contemporary takes on them, the course materials range from the turn of the century (heavily building on the science fiction tradition established by H. G. Wells) to the early 2020s and incorporate mostly novels, a standalone episode of a TV series, a radio drama, and a short narrative video game. After a general introduction, the course is arranged by the themes of “White Male Fantasies in Speculative Fiction,” “Knowledge Production and Epistemic Violence,” “Imperial Gothic,” “Exploration-Exploitation,” and “Reverse Colonisation.”