To the attention of students writing anything under my supervision or with assistance : the expected degree thesis submission deadline is the end of March (for those graduating in the autumn term, the end of November).
My house rules of co-operation with students :
1. Everyone is kindly expected to take into consideration their own working speed and working methods, and time their work accordingly;
2. You should always grant me a week's time to read your texts, so can you, please, take account of this as well when planning your work;
3. By default, the papers to be read should be submitted electronically (Word doc);
4. In the case of degree theses and other works, I will only read texts that are longer than five double-spaced pages (as it is not worth reading shorter ones); the exceptions to this rule are: outline and bibliography;
5. By definition, consultations are held in person and orally in my office hours, not by email; the latter means is used for consultations in exceptional cases only (e.g. when a student has gained a scholarship abroad).
6. In general, I am asking everyone who wants me to read anything to give me a week for reading. In case you submit your text out of my office hour, you should calculate the one week not from the moment of your submission but from the time I get it (so, e.g. in case you submit your text over the weekend, expect it to be read within a week after the upcoming Monday - for the times of reading emails see below - and you can expect the consultation in the office hour a week after).
7. The above pertains to your requests of reference letters as well. I can provide you with letters of reference only on condition of getting the full project application documentation in advance: a week before (under the conditions described above) you expect me to be ready with your letter of reference.
8. I also remind students who write the degree thesis under my supervision that I usually grant the regular two-week degree thesis submission deadline extension, but in between 1 and 15 April it is the student's responsibility to finish their degree thesis.
9. Please note that I am not constantly online in general (or in a position) to respond to email queries; in the following periods, however, by definition you cannot expect email responses of me:
a. on weekdays from 5 p.m. till 8 a.m. (exc. on Fridays: see point b. below);
b. from 2 p.m. on Fridays till 8 a.m. on Mondays;
c. on official (bank/national) holidays.
Thanks for your cooperation.
The titles of the courses available in a given term are indicated in bold.
BTAN22003BA-K2, BTAN3201OMA(L), BTAN(L)28003 British Literary History (second year – BA, teacher training, minor, part-time BA) – a team-taught lecture course, concluding in a compulsory exam
The course will provide an outline of the main tendencies and the major figures of English literature from Chaucer's age to World War II.
BTAN22004BA-K3, BTAN3200OMA British Literature (second year – BA; teacher training) – 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 Hardy, from Shakespeare via Jane Austen 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 eight hundred years, and, at the same time, provide the opportunity to discuss and express your opinion of these fascinating texts.
BTAN22008BA-K3; BTAN3202OMA; ANL28004BA Modern British Literature and Culture 1 (second year – BA, teacher training, minor, part-time BA) – seminar
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 Englishness, colonialisation, gender, the countryside, the impact of the two world wars, the midwar period and the Angry generation. 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 Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, new Nobel-prize winner Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, Rebecca West's Return of the Soldier, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger.
BTAN32002BA-K3 British Society and Gender: Introduction to Gender Studies (BA Year 3; English Studies stream, British Studies track) – a team-taught lecture course, concluding in a compulsory exam
This course will explore how gender is constructed in and by society (history, sciences, psychoanalysis, language, teaching and the media), and will also investigate cultural texts like myths and literature. Students will be provided an insight into the approach that gender is a concept crucial to the understanding of our world, of the public and private relations that all of us (males and females) are participants in. Gender studies, thus, is an area that facilitates critical thinking in regard to the overt or latent gender bias of the institutional system, including also what is considered the private realm, very often misconceived as a “refuge from the political”. The course will also investigate cultural texts like certain passages from the Bible, myths, and fairy tales. The disciplinary approaches of the course will range from sociology and discourse theory to psychoanalysis, from linguistics through teaching methodology to masculinity and queer studies.
BTAN32006BA-K3-11 Topics in British and Irish Literature: Gender Trouble in Short Stories by Women Writers (BA Year 3; English Studies stream, British Studies track) – seminar
The short story, a relatively modern and as such not very prestigious genre, provided a perfect literary space for women writers from the time of its emergence in the (late) nineteenth century. This period coincided with women’s early struggles for legal, educational and political rights, and as such with their coming to consciousness as gendered human beings. The short story, a minor and less conspicuous genre, functioned well in giving women writers the chance to explore certain aspects of women’s existence, while, at the same time, they could also experiment with narration and genre.
The course will open with a theoretical introduction to the history and the critical history of the short story, reflecting upon the gendered aspects of this critical history and on the generic-narrative specificities of the genre. The main body of the course will be taken up by the analysis of short stories proper. Each class will be devoted to two short stories respectively, and, in turn, each class will be devoted to a topic. In this way, the course will be much more thematic (and theoretical) than chronological. Nor will it be limited to British (English) women writers. Quite the contrary, it aims to give an overview of some central texts by main (and some minor) female short story writers from various English-speaking countries and from various cultural backgrounds. By putting texts next to each other, for example, by a contemporary first-nation American writer and a major modernist while exploring the “same” topic, students will be able to explore not only various narrative strategies and a certain topic, but also cultural diversity as it is revealed by the texts. Similarly, while there is a lot greater emphasis on the feminine aspects of the “gender trouble” in the course, the question of masculinity will always be implied and spelt out, what is more, in two classes there will be an explicit contrast between the “troubles” caused by the dominant gender inscriptions of femininity and masculinity.
By the end of the course, we will also try and answer the question why the short story has become a major modernist and postmodern genre for women writers, furthermore, students will be able to think more critically about culture, literature and literary criticism.
BTAN32007BA-K3-07 Topics in British and Irish Society and Gender: The Brontë Sisters in their Social Context (BA Year 3; English Studies stream, British Studies track) – seminar
The course intends to explore the oeuvres of the three Brontë sisters almost in their entirety (except for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights), ranging from the most widely discussed classic novels through the less known writings (Villette and Shirley by Charlotte Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë, and Emily Brontë’s poetry) to the arts of the three sisters, including a comparative study of their brother, Branwell’s painting. The course will also include the analysis of some approaches to the myth and reality of the Brontës, and will discuss a Jane Eyre-intertext: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. The course forms an integral part of the series of courses that discusses women writers and issues of gender in their writings, thus the basic approach will be feminist literary theory and feminist critical practice.
BTAN32005BA-K3-01 Genres in British Literature and Film: Literature, Film and Adaptation (BA Year 3; English Studies stream, British Studies track) – seminar
BTAN2109MA BTAN1007MA ADVANCED RESEARCH METODOLOGY (FOR 2ND-YR) VISUALITY AND LITERATURE: LITERATURE, FILM AND ADAPTATION (FOR 1ST YR)
The course offers to provide students a more conscious reading (interpretation) of film adaptations of literary works. Based on Brian McFarlane’s theory of film adaptations, the concepts of transferability and adaptation proper will be introduced. These analytic tools can provide answers to questions why and how certain elements of the literary text are inevitably changed by adaptation. Apart from the inevitable adaptations (because of the non-transferability of certain elements and functions), the course will also raise the question how, as a result of the adaptation, the “original” text has been changed, and how those changes may affect even certain emphases in the narrative. Ultimately, the course intends to create an attitude in the students that dispels the general “fidelity” expectation, and rather considers film adaptations as intertexts to the literary texts. This awareness will be created by a close reading of both the literary text and the film, in this way the basic method used will be a comparative (re)reading of both the literary text and that of the film.
BTAN1006MA-K4 Historical Aspects of English Linguistics, Culture and Literature: Victorian England: Culture and Literature (English Studies MA Year 1; British Literary and Cultural Studies Track) – a team-taught lecture course, concluding in a compulsory exam
The course will combine the historical and the thematic aspects, and the traditional lecture course with the more interactive seminar format. Our aim is to provide students with an insight into the development of 19th-century English literature in a way that will broaden their perspective not only in terms of literary history, but also theoretically and by opening new thematic vistas which, at the same time, have been cutting-edge scholarship in the more recent past. The topics addressed will include the British empire, women’s suffrage, the changes of the reading public, the sensation novel, the revival Arthurian myths, visual culture, Neo-Gothicism, crime fiction, the occult, etc.
N.B. This is the first half of a three-term lecture course on the historical development on English literature and culture. The second part of the course will cover the history of British literature and culture until the 1950s (called: Historical Aspects of English Linguistics, Culture and Literature 1), whereas the third part of the course, covering the period starting with the 1960s, and also discussing issues like popular literature, is to follow under the official name: „Modern British Society”.
BTAN2113MA03 Major Figures in British and Irish Literature and Culture: The Other (in Texts by) Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (English Studies MA Years 1-2; British Literary and Cultural Studies Track) – seminar
As a semi-complementary seminar course to the compulsory lecture course on Victorian studies, its aim is to help students gain a better understanding of the Victorian age in its cultural complexity, and to familiarise students with the concept created by Steven Marcus, “the Other Victorians”, even though by extending the term in two ways: on the one hand, by including some early nineteenth-century (pre-Victorian) texts that can be considered as forerunners of Victorian otherness; on the other hand by extending the notion of otherness beyond the idea of Marcus’s, who used the term primarily in a sense referring to the double-faced nature of the Victorian concept of sexuality. The course, however, means to explore nineteenth-century women writers’ writings as texts of various forms of otherness, ranging from experimentation with non-canonised fictional forms through the analysis of how novel forms of science and non-literary discourse are present in literature to various forms of cultural otherness, like industrialism or the unseemly involvement of women writers in public causes. The course also tackles otherness in the sense that we will discuss texts and writers who do not belong to the core curriculum (like the Brontës or the most famous novels by Austen and George Eliot), but will rather focus on texts that may reveal a less seamless surface of Victorian textuality.
BTAN2110MA04 Gender Studies: Film and Gender (English Studies MA Years 1-2; British Literary and Cultural Studies Track) – seminar
The course offers to provide an insight into the specificities of how gender may be relevant in the production and interpretation of films. Film and gender are interrelated in multiple ways. In the course, we will try and investigate three areas. First, based on the basis of films and theory, we will investigate the psychoanalytic notion of the (male) gaze and how it is involved in photography and film, the par excellence arts of the gaze. Second, we will address the question how film is involved in the politics of representation and how ideology interpellates the reader of films via various cinematic techniques, among them certain film genres. Third, we will make an attempt at seeing how the film as a mode of representation can be opened up into feminist perspectives, that is, we will address the question in what terms the women’s cinema can be conceived. The selection of films will range from the 1940s to the late 1990s, and will provide a variety both thematically and in terms of cinematic techniques, in this way, in the course students can also investigate how various modes of presentation and various film genres are related to certain thematic concerns. As a result of this structure, the course will consist of a theoretical introduction that will raise issues pertaining to the later discussions, and will familiarise students with theoretical concepts on the basis of which the films will be interpreted. The subsequent discussions of the films will always presuppose the students’ awareness of the relevant secondary readings, whereas we will try and not limit the discussion exclusively to these theoretical concepts. The course, in this way, will have a thorough theoretical foundation complemented by gender sensitive semiotical close readings, and will conclude in a rounding-up which will hopefully open further potential perspectives of how gender might be relevant to the specificities of film art.
BTAN2113MA01 Major Figures in British and Irish Literature and Culture: Virginia Woolf (English Studies MA Years 1-2; British Literary and Cultural Studies Track) – seminar
The course is offered for third- and fourth-year students, who are already familiar with Virginia Woolf as a major modernist, and have also read at least one novel by her. The course will build on this preliminary knowledge, but the primary aim is the rereading of Woolf from a double theoretical perspective: those of modernism and feminism. In this sense, the course will rely on the critical turn that came about in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which created the term female modernism, and posited Virginia Woolf as its major representative.
The course will consist of four major components: at the beginning, by reading Woolf’s autobiographical texts, and by the students’ presentations on the Bloomsbury Group, we will create a personal and at the same time cultural context for Woolf, and will investigate how that complex cultural moment in history is related to her ideas on writing; in the second part, we will reread Woolf’s “modernist manifestos”, and on that basis we will interpret, by applying close reading, some short fictional texts; as a third component, students will face Woolf as an essayist and theoretician of feminism and feminist literary criticism; and as a final, but most substantial part, we will read three of her major novels from the double perspective of modernism and feminism.
BTAN2104MA07 Advanced Topics in British and Irish Literature and Culture: Women and Madness in Literature and Film (English Studies MA Years 1-2; British Literary and Cultural Studies Track) – seminar
Designed to be interdisciplinary, the course offers to address the issue how the image of madness serves multiple purposes in works of English, American, Canadian and New Zealand literature in the 19th and 20th centuries, how the term madness and the manipulation of the term “madness” basically serve the purposes of, and perpetuate, the dominant patriarchal power structure. By relying on Freudian, Foucauldian, Laingian and feminist theories of madness (with special emphasis on hysteria), the course intends to bring to the surface the implications of the prevalent discourses of madness in the past two hundred years, and to examine their interconnectedness with literary representations: not only how stories of madness reflect the power structure but also the way how madness may function as a subversive discourse in some literary texts, including the analysis of theories contesting the subversive potential of madness.
The issue of women and madness in literature exceeds the boundaries of literary studies: partly by its gender and social studies aspect, the course can develop new perspectives on current situations of how discursive systems create “reality”, thus doing the course, students can acquire further tools of critical thinking that may help them in analysing human subjectivity and discursive phenomena in other fields of study as well.
BTAN2110MA03 Gender Studies: The Female Künstlerroman (English Studies MA, Years 1-2; British Literary and Cultural Studies Track) – seminar
In this course devoted to the genre of the Künstlerroman, the basic issue addressed will be whether there are specificities/what kinds of specificities there are on the basis of which the female Künstlerroman as a subgenre can be defined. To explore this question, after a theoretical introduction to the genre based on essays by contemporary women writers addressing the issue of femininity and creativity, texts by women writers of diverse backgrounds will be read and discussed: among others British (Margaret Drabble), New-Zealander (Janet Frame), West-Indian-British-Parisian (Jean Rhys), American-British (Sylvia Plath), Danish (Isak Dinesen) and French (Hélène Cixous).
BTAN2109MA05 Visuality and Literature: The (Female) Gothic (English Studies MA, Years 1-2; British Literary and Cultural Studies Track) – seminar
The aim of the course is to follow the changes in the functions of the (Female) Gothic in its historicity for about two centuries, since its emergence at the end of the eighteenth century till the late twentieth century. We will treat the Gothic as a code of the fantastic that has been used to utter, whether consciously or unconsciously, anxieties that are rooted in conflicts between the public and the private, the social and the individual, and last but not least, in unutterable and inarticulable tensions between the genders. Hence the title: (Female) Gothic in Fiction and Film: whereas the main focus of investigation will be Gothic texts by and about women, we will also explore how the Gothic works as a coded semiotic system for gender relations in general, and how the Gothic space functions as a psychic space, as a symptom of the unconscious in which desires are hidden, repressed and channeled into forms that often turn out to be (self-)destructive. In most of the cases, the approach applied will be a combination of textual close reading, psychoanalysis and cultural studies because as we will see the changing historical contexts will bring about different uses of the Gothic. Apart from reading literary texts we will discuss films and film adaptations as well (the latter providing ample chance to examine how various semiotic systems function), but also theoretical texts that are relevant for highlighting the complex relations between the Gothic fantasy in literature and film, psychoanalysis, the sublime, popular culture, the body, sanity/insanity and social-economic (including gender) relations.
BTPBR_T_3_01 Gender, Subjectivity, and Representation (PhD) – seminar
The course is intended to be a theoretical introduction into how gender studies and poststructuralist theories of subjectivity interact in contemporary literary theory and criticism. The basic issue that the course will address is how the subject is problematised by various tendencies within feminist theories/gender studies, how these ideas have been influenced by other, non-feminist theories of subjectivity, and how all these ideas can be applied to the readings of (literary) texts.
BTPBR_T_6_01, BTP2BR_T_4_01 The Theoretical Junctures of Feminism (PhD) – seminar
The course will revolve around the question: what happens to feminism, and to female identity so often posited by feminist thinkers, if they “meet” the postmodern and postmodern theories of subjectivity. The course will explore the relationship between feminism and postmodernism, and the junctures between feminism and certain theories of Bourdieau, Bakhtin, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan and Derrida. The classes will be devoted to the discussion of the assigned theoretical texts, but, in terms of presentations, they will also rely on related texts chosen by the students (and, in an ideal case, relevant to their research). The course is not designed to be an introduction to gender studies, so it presupposes a thorough preliminary knowledge of theories of gender.
BTPBR_T_12 Women and Madness (PhD) – seminar
For information: see BTAN2104MA07 above
BTP2BR_T_30_01 Genre and Gender: The Short Story (PhD) – szeminárium
For information: see BTAN32006BA-K3-11 above
BTP2BR_T_12_01 Major Figures: Other Texts in Victorian Literature (PhD) – seminar
For information: see BTAN2113MA03 above
BTP2BR_T_26_01: Cinematic Adaptations (PhD) – seminar
For information: see BTAN32005BA-K3-01 above
BTP2BR_T_24_01 Gothicism in Culture (PhD) – seminar
For information: see BTAN2109MA05 above
BTP2BR_T_25_01 The Gendered Subject in Film (PhD) – seminar
For information: see BTAN2110MA04 above
BTP2BR_T_19_01 Virginia Woolf’s Oeuvre (PhD) – seminar
For information: see BTAN2113MA01 above
BTP2BR_T_11_01 Historical Aspects of English Culture: Victorianism (PhD) – lecture
For information: see BTAN1006MA-K4 above
Before registering for a course, PhD students are kindly requested to contact the course tutor to check out if they are eligible to attend the course. At the request of PhD students, all MA courses on offer in a particular term can be turned into PhD courses as well, with some modification in the requirements and on condition the student did not attend the same course as an MA student. In such cases, PhD students are requested to indicate to the course tutor their wish to attend the course well in time (at the latest on the first week of term).