Utrecht University

Stories drawn from lived experience are a powerful force in English language culture and society. This course examines the core themes and issues raised by a variety of cultural forms that take lived experience as their base, such as biography, memoir, autobiographical poetry and fiction, the essay, documentary, and social media. The course explores questions including: How do life writers establish the veracity of their narratives? How do they negotiate the need to tell the truth of their experience with the desire to tell an engaging story? How is life writing received by audiences, and what kinds of contributions does it make to cultural, political, and social debates? How do we respond to the complex ethical terrain of writing and reading stories based on real people and real events? Students investigate the importance of confession, testimony, witnessing, and documentation to a range of life writing forms to develop answers to these questions.

This interdisciplinary course focuses on the languages and cultures of the peoples that dominated the British Isles during the early medieval period (c.400-c.1100) – the Anglo-Saxons, Insular Celts, and Scandinavians – and how they interacted and influenced each other. The course is aimed at students of English and Celtic, so the group is split up accordingly for the seminar sessions. The English track provides a thorough introduction to the Old English language (phonology, syntax, morphology) and helps students develop skills in translating Old English. By placing the study of Old English in its cultural historical context through the translation and discussion of a number of literary and non-literary texts, the course also explores topics such as medieval history writing, learning in Anglo-Saxon England, daily life, the position of women, manuscript culture, and early legal tradition. The Celtic track provides students with a thorough understanding of language change in all its forms (phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, etc.), with a strong focus on the Medieval Insular Celtic languages.