English

This seminar examines the close relationship of textuality, storytelling and subjectivity in three canonical modernist texts: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Students study the period of Modernism and the distrusts and questions of the claim of human reason to be a reliable means for understanding and controlling the world. Key topics include narrative strategies within a newly structured world, textual experiments as empowering spaces for the shaken subject, and textual patterns emphasized in order to compensate for the loss of a more tangible world order. Additionally, the texts focus on textual representation served as a 'hyper-realist' depiction of the chaotic state of decay whereas story telling provided a potential panacea in a world devoid of meaning. 

This course explores the representation of women and the construction of female sexuality and feeling in a wide range of 18th-century writing. The course addresses fictional and non-fictional writing by both women and men in novels, medical works, advice books for women, and erotic literature. The course explores contemporary debates about the place of women in society, (including personal conduct), and the place of sexuality (both socially-sanctioned and otherwise). A central concern is attitudes to female feeling, from sexual passion to sensibility, and the ways in which feeling of various kinds enables conformity to, or critical interrogation of, a larger social and cultural order. Attention also is paid to the relationship between bodies and passion, the social disciplining of feeling, and the relationship between emotion and gender. Literary works are supplemented with a range of additional sources that enable students to contextualize the novels and poems and link them into contemporary debates and attitudes.

At the end of the 20th century, several scholars famously pronounced that society had become “posthuman” (N. Katherine Hayles) and that “we are cyborgs” (Donna Haraway). Two and a half decades later, this diagnosis seems even more accurate: cyborgs, androids, and artificial intelligence populate literature and film; ‘cyborg’ technology in medicine can replaces limbs, organs, and senses; and artificial intelligence assists humans in various ways in their daily lives, from applications in their phones to digital assistants and chatbots. What are the implications of these developments for a traditional understanding of the human and the relationship between humans and machines? How do these transformations impact ideas about, and representations of, the human body and embodiment? What ethical and socio-political issues are at stake? The course explores these questions with the help of theoretical approaches from the fields of Posthumanism, Gender Studies and Critical Race Studies, as well as literary texts and films. Students read two contemporary novels – Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) – and watch two films – Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012). They also have a chat with Chat GPT.

The focus of this course will be the discussion and comparative analysis of English language narrative and film within the domain of the Strange, Fantastic, Sci-fi, Slipstream and New Weird sub-genres. The lectures and discussions will cover the cross-medium experience, adaptation, film theory and literary "readings" of film. An interdisciplinary approach involving literary theory, film theory, philosophy, pop culture and psychoanalysis will be employed in these analyses.

This course introduces into the linguistic sub-discipline pragmatics. Students examine how meaning emerges in context, and how this contextual meaning can be distinguished from the literal meaning of a linguistic expression. The range of topics includes assertion, presupposition, implicature, and speech acts.

George Orwell once wrote that "many people who would consider themselves extremely sophisticated and “advanced” are actually carrying through life an imaginative background which they acquired in childhood." This course examines the political lessons children’s books encode about what childhood is, and about which children matter and why. Students read children’s texts from a range of genres and forms – including fantasy, school stories, picture books, and domestic fiction – written between the late 18th century and the present day. Key focuses include agency, gender, race, class, and the environment. 

This course looks at various candidates for the "Great American Novel," a term for fictional narratives that seem to capture the essence of the United States. The course examines the concept's origins following the American Civil War, evolution throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and enduring appeal in the popular imagination. Selected fiction is considered in relation to US national identity, the ideal of the American dream, notions of authorship, and anxieties toward social issues such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexual orientation.

This course examines how British literature from the 1980s is already full of ghosts, specters, and pasts that destabilize any secure sense of present or future. In the first section, students read the novel Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd (1985) as well as parts of the graphic novel From Hell by Eddie Campbell and Alan Moore (1989-1998). They then move on to Jeanette Winterson’s novel Sexing the Cherry (1989), analyzing the feminist potential of (re)turning to nonlinear histories. In the final section of the class, students examine how selected Black British poetry, and the film Twilight City (1989) conjure the violent specter of the British Empire as always already all-too-present. The course has a distinct focus on improving close reading skills and developing methods to approach theory productively. Along with British Cultural Critic Mark Fisher’s and Jacques Derrida’s concepts of hauntology, students build a theoretical toolkit that includes work on historiographic metafiction and the spatial turn. Additionally, the course draws on trauma theory, queer temporality and phenomenology, as well as Afrofuturist and Afropessimist writing.

This course focuses on building English writing skills for natural science students. Students participate in various academic English writing activities that focus on the composition of texts, logical development, professional vocabulary selection, academic research, citation, and bibliography to cultivate academic English writing skills in natural sciences fields.  

Made from the stuff of dreams and nightmares, "the fantastic" in literature poses questions about the nature of reality in a changing world. As science transformed understanding of life in the 18th and 19th centuries, literature placed fears and hopes for the future alongside the oldest beliefs and superstitions, creating a new genre of the fantastic, a modern world of monsters and phantoms where nothing is quite what it seems. This course explores the development of the supernatural and fantastic in European literature from fairytales to science fiction, and examines contemporary resonances, including the enduring appeal of a Hollywood monster and a cult internet meme.