The courses are arranged in the following order: BA, MA, PhD levels, previous 5-year system. The titles of the courses running in the Spring semester of 2023/24 are highlighted.
BA level:
AN 10000BA Essay Writing and Research (1st-year seminar)
This seminar aims to introduce students into academic writing and research, especially in the field of literary and cultural studies. Students will get acquainted with the basics of research methodology (how to use the library, search engines and electronic databases effectively), and ideally will learn how to write essays that will meet the requirements of a research paper (with a clear thesis, a coherent, smoothly flowing argument that critically engages with the cited secondary material). Students will also learn to quote and document their sources according to the MLA Style.
AN 22002BA Introduction to Literature and Visual Culture (2nd-year seminar)
The aim of the course is to help students acquire the basic skills and terms needed for analysing literary texts and visual images as well as to offer students glimpses into some crucial critical approaches to texts and images. Seminars will discuss key literary terms (narrative, plot, point-of-view, character, setting, figures of speech), various cultural media (literature, film, advertising, music video) and critical directions always on the basis of analysing concrete texts or images.
BTAN22004 & AN1060MA British Literary Seminar (2nd-year 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 help students prepare for their end-of-the-term exam. Apart from this practical aspect, though, the seminar aims to give you the joy of reading some of the greatest classics in English: Geoffrey Chaucer (medieval English literature), William Shakespeare (the English Renaissance), John Donne and Andrew Marvell (metaphysical poetry), Jonathan Swift (Augustan satire), William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, John Keats and P. B. Shelley (Romantic poetry), Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë (Victorian fiction), Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning (Victorian poetry), and T.S. Eliot (modernism).
AN 32001BA Introduction to Irish Studies (3rd-year compulsory lecture course, British studies track)
A series of lectures offering the students an introduction to Irish culture giving insights into various aspects, phenomena and authors of modern and contemporary Irish history, music, film, literature, with glances at antecedents. Each lecture is self-contained but also inter-connected to the other lectures. Recurrently discussed topics in the course will be the intersections between history and culture, the past and the present, the personal and the political, forms and modes of memory (personal, collective, cultural) – as well as the interplay between memory and imagination – the local and the global, tradition and modernity; the re-inscription and subversion of stereotypes, and the role of place, myth and music in modern Irish culture.
NB! As James Joyce's seminal novel, Ulysses was published for the first time exactly a 100 years ago in Paris, to mark this anniversary on 23 November the Embassy of Ireland, Budapest and IEAS, UD will jointly organise a multimedial celebration Ulysses 100, which will form part of the course.
AN 32006BA05 From the Outhouse of the Empire to the Celtic Tiger and Beyond: Transformations of a Sense of Irishness (3rd-year required-optional seminar, British Studies track)
Ireland had come a long way from a colonial past to becoming a booming country of the European Union at the end of the 20th century earning the title “Celtic Tiger” (applied until the onset of the global economic recession in 2008). The aim of this course is to map crucial social and cultural transformations that accelerated during the Celtic Tiger period, with glimpses at developments in Northern Ireland, which most recently has attracted global attention as one of the most contentious issues in the long-drawn-out decision-making process of how (if at all) the UK should leave the EU. We will inquire especially into how crucial cultural markers of Irishness have changed in the past three decades, always keeping an eye on the historical dimension of the issues discussed. Our topics will include colonial and self-representations of the Irish, the Irish language and Irish-English, the myth of the West, music, religion, emigration/immigration, the “Troubles” and “the Peace Process” in Northern Ireland, and the impact of Brexit on Northern Ireland and on Anglo-Irish relations. Our discussions will be supported and/or prompted by ample audio-visual, popular cultural material: all the classes will rely on sitcoms (either in English or in Irish with English subtitles), some also on films, music, advertisements and documentaries. The course also functions as a satellite of (is in a complementary relationship with) the compulsory lecture course Introduction to Irish Studies.
MA level:
AN 1203MA Advanced Academic Writing (1st year, compulsory seminar)
The purpose of the seminar is to improve students’ academic writing skills, focusing primarily on literary studies. In preparation for their MA thesis, students will learn to recognise and employ various critical writing strategies and argumentation techniques. The course is designed to deepen students’ awareness of what makes a skilfully written academic essay, develop their critical thinking, and refine their critical writing skills in practice. Having gained a certain level of MLA proficiency in the BA program, students will also be expected to become confident users of the MLA style by the end of the semester.
AN 2106MA James Joyce’s Ulysses 1 (required-optional seminar)
This two-semester seminar course is devoted to a chapter-by-chapter close reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses with special (but not exclusive) emphasis on how the text engages with diverse cultural discourses: colonial and anti-colonial stereotyping, 19th-century teleological constructions of history, orientalism perpetuated in popular cultural media, Victorian constructions of femininity and masculinity, various forms of cultural imperialism, the ideological exploitation of music, the Victorian rhetoric of purity, and so forth. Our discussions will be aided by ample documentary audio-visual material and will be further spiced with occasional excursions into translation questions prompted by the renewed Hungarian translation of Ulysses published in 2012.
NB! As Ulysses was published for the first time exactly a 100 years ago in Paris, to mark this anniversary on 23 November the Embassy of Ireland, Budapest and IEAS, UD will jointly organise a multimedial celebration Ulysses 100, which will form part of the course.
AN 2107MA James Joyce's Ulysses 2 (required-optional seminar)
This seminar course is a continuation of James Joyce’s Ulysses 1. Completion of the first half of the course is a prerequisite. Our strategy will remain unaltered: detailed discussion of the text focusing especially on how it engages with diverse cultural discourses.
AN 2108MA Film as Social and Cultural Critique in 21st-century Ireland
As Irish cultural critics, Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin argued on the threshold of the 21st century, with the coming of the Celtic Tiger “culture as social critique has given way to culture as commodity” (Reinventing Ireland 2002). Focusing on the cultural medium of film in the same seminal collection, Debbie Ging claims that “a booming economy has started to erase self-questioning in favour of a more marketable vision of Irishness.” Despite this general tendency since the early 1990s, Irish cinema has never entirely lost its critical edge, which indeed became strengthened with the collapse of the Celtic Tiger success story eight years into the 21st century. The present course concentrates on five Irish auteurs, Neil Jordan, Lenny Abrahamson, Martin McDonagh, John Michael McDonagh and John Carney, whose films, pointing beyond the boundaries of the national, offer oblique social and cultural critique (of neoliberalism, modernity at large, the Catholic Church, essentialising conceptions of national, ethnic, cultural and gender identity) in highly unconventional, formally innovative ways – Abrahamson’s alternative Celtic Tiger and post-Celtic Tiger films deploying a minimalist aesthetics, while Jordan and the McDonagh brothers relying on playful (often darkly comic) exuberance. John Carney’s musical films closing the course offer innovative takes on the musical genre.
AN 2108MA06 War and/in Peace: The Northern Ireland Troubles and the Peace Process in Film and Fiction (required-optional seminar)
“In Ireland, you cannot divorce the literary [and one could add, the cultural] from the historical, from the political,” as Seamus Heaney has noted. The aim of this course is to explore the validity of this observation by focusing on how contemporary Northern Irish film and fiction portray, reflect on, engage with the socio-political conflict, known as the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, and the ensuing “Peace Process.” More particularly, the course aims to highlight the transformations in representing the Troubles, which accelerated with the beginning of the Peace process in the 1990s. To achieve this end the close reading of novels and films will be embedded in contextualised readings theoretically informed by cultural studies, postcolonial studies, trauma studies and memory studies. The focal points in our discussions will be the representation of violence in art – the negotiation between the ethical and the aesthetic in representing violence, violence and the city, violence and the body – trauma, the relationship between trauma and memory, art as a site of commemoration and of counter-memory; modes of re-visioning personal and cultural identities and modes of reconfiguring the city, especially the city of Belfast, treated as synonymous with violence in much of 1970s and 80s “Troubles fiction.”
AN 2108MA09 “The Past is the New Frontline”: The War over Memory in Post-Belfast Agreement Film and Fiction (required-optional seminar)
Northern Ireland has recently attracted global attention not only as a backdrop to the blockbuster TV series Game of Thrones, but also as one of the most contentious issues in the long-drawn-out process of the UK leaving the EU (Brexit). As 2019 saw the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the euphemistically called "Troubles" (a 30-year long violent conflict in the region) and the preceding year marked the 20th anniversary of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (officially bringing the conflict to and end), in recent years discussions of the unsettling effects of Brexit on Northern Ireland have either gone parallel or been conjoined with with an intensified collective retrospection. Within this highly fraught context the course explores – through the media of film and fiction – the complex role of memory and forgetting in present-day Northern Irish society and culture. Recurring topics in the course will be the relationship between memory and violence, memory and trauma, memory and mourning, memory and justice; the memory of the Troubles from a multidirectional perspective; as well as how the cultural narratives under discussion – functioning themselves as media of memory – also self-reflexively interrogate various other media of memory (memorials, museums, television).
AN 2106MA04 Music Video: Advertising/Commodity/Art Form (required-optional seminar)
The course inquires into the nature, function and aesthetic value of one of the most widespread popular cultural forms, music video. Focusing on this particular cultural form integrating several semiotic fields, the course also aims to address some crucial questions concerning the contemporary cultural scene: consumption and postmodernism, advertising and art, the cross-fertilisation of various cultural forms (especially musical film and music video), the representations of the body in popular cultural media, and so forth.
20th Century Irish Fiction (required-optional seminar)
The great Irish writers, as Hugh Kenner has suggested, “have always been able to regard the human dilemma as essentially an epistemological, not an ethical, comedy.” The course deals with the comparative study of four Irish authors – James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien and John Banville. It will focus on how various modes of inquiry into the Truth – art, philosophy, science – are represented and undermined in their fiction. In addition to this, since four out of the six texts to be discussed intensively engage – mostly ironically – with the phenomenon of the Celtic Revival, this aspect will also be highlighted, thus adding a cultural flavour to a basically philosophically oriented inquiry
PhD level:
James Joyce’s Ulysses 1
This two-semester seminar course is exclusively devoted to a chapter by chapter close reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses with special emphasis on how the text engages with diverse cultural discourses: colonial and anti-colonial stereotyping, 19th-century teleological constructions of history, orientalism perpetuated in popular cultural media, Victorian constructions of femininity and masculinity, various forms of cultural imperialism, the ideological exploitation of music, the Victorian rhetoric of purity, and so forth. Our discussions will be aided by ample documentary audio-visual material and will be further spiced with occasional excursions into translation questions prompted by the renewed Hungarian translation of Ulysses published in 2012.
James Joyce's Ulysses 2
This seminar course is a continuation of James Joyce’s Ulysses 1. Completion of the first half of the course is a prerequisite. Our strategy will remain unaltered: detailed discussion of the text focusing especially on how it engages with diverse cultural discourses.
Academic Writing Skills
The purpose of the seminar is to hone PhD students’ academic writing skills, along with developing their critical thinking skills.
Within the previous 5-year programme:
AN 21410 British Literary Seminar I (1st year – five-year programme)
This seminar course complements the lecture course British Literary History I. We will read and discuss some literary specimens of a vast span of time from Chaucer up to the end of the 18th century: excerpts from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, dramas and sonnets by Shakespeare, some representatives of Metaphysical poetry, the fiction of Defoe, Swift, Sterne and Horace Walpole. All the texts we discuss are selected from the list of required readings for the end-of-the-year oral comprehensive exam.
AN 22102 British Literary Seminar II (2nd year – five-year programme)
This seminar course complements the lecture course British Literary History II. We will focus mainly on poetry – the most famous representatives of the first and second generations of Romantic poets (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats) and some Victorian poets (Tennyson, Browning and A. E. Houseman) – and Victorian fiction (Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Dickens). All the texts to be discussed are selected from the list of works required for both the oral exam at the end of the semester and the comprehensive exam at the end of the academic year.
AN 22100 British Literary Seminar III (2nd year – five-year programme)
This seminar course complements a lecture course on 20th century British literature. We will mainly focus on some specimens of English (and Irish) Modernism – including fiction (J. Conrad, V. Woolf, J. Joyce, E. M. Forster), poetry (T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats) and drama (J. M. Synge), but will also glimpse at post-war fiction (Jeanette Winterson) and drama (Samuel Beckett).
AN(L)23100 Modern Irish Literature and Culture (lecture course jointly conducted with Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse) (British Studies track – five-year programme)
A series of lectures offering the students an introduction to Irish culture, giving insights into various aspects, phenomena, and authors of modern and contemporary Irish history, arts, music, film, literature, with glances at antecedents. Each lecture is self-contained but also inter-connected to the other lectures.
AN 25000 James Joyce’s Ulysses 1 (required-optional seminar)
This two-semester seminar course is exclusively devoted to a chapter by chapter close reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses with special emphasis on how the text engages with diverse cultural discourses: colonial and anti-colonial stereotyping, 19th-century teleological constructions of history, orientalism perpetuated in popular cultural media, Victorian constructions of femininity and masculinity, various forms of cultural imperialism, the ideological exploitation of music, the Victorian rhetoric of purity, and so forth. Our discussions will be aided by ample documentary audio-visual material.
AN 25001 James Joyce's Ulysses 2 (required-optional seminar)
This seminar course is a continuation of James Joyce’s Ulysses 1. Completion of the first half of the course is a prerequisite. Our strategy will remain unaltered: detailed discussion of the text focusing especially on how it engages with diverse cultural discourses.
Shakespeare's Plays in the Mirror of 20th Century Playwrights and Directors (required-optional seminar)
Shakespeare's plays have always provided plenty of food for thought. On the one hand this course will focus on how 20th-century playwrights have reinterpreted and recreated the Renaissance plays according to the modern spirit, for instance, Tom Stoppard in his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead(an alternative Hamlet) and Edward Bond in his Lear; on the other hand how 20th century directors visualised and/or recreated the original plays, for instance Roman Polanski in his Macbeth, Tom Stoppard in his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Peter Greenaway in his Prospero's Books (an alternative The Tempest)
The early Works of James Joyce (required-optional seminar)
This one-semester seminar course deals with Joyce's works preceding Ulysses with special emphasis on Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The aim of the course is twofold: to highlight Joyce’s texts within the context of contemporary Ireland (examining their engagement with the discourses of Irish political and cultural nationalism) and European modernism.
AN 23505 20th Century Irish Fiction (required-optional seminar)
The great Irish writers, as Hugh Kenner has suggested, “have always been able to regard the human dilemma as essentially an epistemological, not an ethical, comedy.” The course deals with the comparative study of four Irish authors – James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien and John Banville. It will focus on how various modes of inquiry into the Truth – art, philosophy, science – are represented and undermined in their fiction. In addition to this, since four out of the six texts to be discussed intensively engage – mostly ironically – with the phenomenon of the Celtic Revival, this aspect will also be highlighted, thus adding a cultural flavour to a basically philosophically oriented inquiry.
AN 27600 Music Video: Commodity/Art Form (required-optional seminar)
The course inquires into the nature, function and aesthetic value of one of the most widespread popular cultural forms, music video. Focusing on this particular cultural form integrating several semiotic fields, the course also aims to address some crucial questions concerning the contemporary cultural scene: consumption and postmodernism, advertising and art, the cross-fertilisation of various cultural forms (especially musical film and music video), the representations of the body in popular cultural media, and so forth.
Modern Literary Texts
British and Irish Civilisation