English

“Behold, I teach you the superman: He is this lightning, he is this madness!” thus spoke Friedrich Nietzsche. This course defines superheroes as the contemporary incarnation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch that calls for self-becoming and self overcoming. It traces the development of this enduring pop culture artifact, from immortal bodies of classical heroes to fantasies of the perfectible human through technoscience. With reference to cross-cultural expressions of the genre, the course dissects the concept of superheroes: What are they? Where do they come from? How can they help us change the way we think about ourselves, our environment, and the multiverse of possibilities that surrounds us? It discusses how the origins and evolution of these characters are shaped by sociohistorical factors, such as gender and sexuality, race, and society. Topics covered include good and evil, power and identity, and justice and responsibility. Students design their own superheroes and develop new ways of reading superheroes as modern myths about fears, longings, and aspirations.

This course examines four English Renaissance revenge tragedies, along with screen and stage adaptations. Through close readings and discussions, we situate each play in dialogue with questions of gender, law, and history. We also trace how the genre of revenge tragedy evolved across the period. The plays to be discussed are: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, and The Revenger’s Tragedy.

This course analyzes the symbiotic relationship between the two arts of literature and cinema. The objective is to distinguish the literary and artistic components of cinema within their complex interdependent relationship, to conduct a comparative analysis of films by identifying their literary elements, and to relate both discourses through connections considering 20th-century film theories. Additionally, the course introduces key bridging elements between the two, such as adaptation and screenwriting. This course strengthens comparative methodology by articulating discourses that range from linguistic to audiovisual and prepares students for the analysis of texts that lie at the intersection of both disciplines, while also offering insight into the historical audiovisual tradition rooted in literature.

This course provides an overview of the evolution of the English language from its origins to the 15th century. Topics include: the emergence of English; appearance of Old English varieties; Old English spelling, sounds, and grammar; resurgence of a new English; lexical influx in the late Middle Ages-- innovations and change; English texts from the early Middle Ages; consolidation of English.

Pre-requisites: The student must have a basic knowledge of the main linguistic concepts and a level of general skills suitable for reading and interpreting articles, analyzing data or extracting and communicating relevant conclusions. 

This course examines how the 1960s saw enormous transformations in both the matter and the forms of American prose writing. It considers how writers and artists battled for new freedoms, and sex and sexuality began to be featured in books published by mainstream publishers for the first time. Accompanying the famous revolutionary political movements that marked the decade, and responding to many of the same cultural and political pressures, were various revolutions of the word. The 1960s saw a widespread reaction against a now-institutionalized modernism, and the first great statements of what would come to be thought of as literary postmodernism (Thomas Pynchon, John Barth). This course discusses how critics like Susan Sontag argued for the continued validity of the modernist project, and for the need to extend it; and novelists like Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy sought to extend the traditions of realism and modernism in novels like Herzog (1964) and The Group (1963). American prose writing of the 1960s was also shaped and informed by the sexual revolutions that marked the decade, and writers such as Ursula Le Guin began to use the tools of imaginative writing to interrogate embedded cultural assumptions about gender, sexuality, patriarchy, and power. This course considers how in many ways, all of the key streams of 20th century American literature converged in the 1960s. The decade and its key texts explores issues central to American studies more broadly: American exceptionalism, the utopian promise underwriting the American experiment, the legacies of modernism, the meaning(s) of postmodernity, the political transformations of the postwar era, and the “hangover” of the early 1970s.

This course focuses on English literature and its internalization from the end of the Second World War to the present day, and the critical analysis of literary discourses and specific texts from that period. Students engage with the historical and cultural foundations of British society between the 20th and 21st centuries and topics include the analysis, criticism, creation, editing, and publication of texts.

This course introduces artificial intelligence (AI) applications, with particular attention to the current use of AI systems in the humanities. It reflects on the ethical implications of AI in teaching and learning contexts (e.g. for text production, translation, and language learning) as well as in a series of real-world cases. Contexts and cases focus on English language use, learning and teaching. The course introduces how generative AI systems work, including its reliance on the English language and Anglophone cultures, and the general issues covered in the course. The structure of the course consists of four blocks: bias, hallucinations and transparency; the workings of generative AI systems (LLMs and prompting), as well as data security and privacy; social inclusion and exclusion caused by the application of AI systems; and environmental impacts of using generative AI. Each block introduces students to a series of ethical issues surrounding AI use in the humanities and within the context of the English degree. These examples allow students to analyze the implications of AI in society. Throughout, important ethical issues concerning AI use are presented and critically discussed in class.