English

"Global Writing" are influential texts that are read by people around the world, bridging different cultures and languages. The older term "World Literature" includes some of the writers that the course will cover, but "Global Writing" is a broader concept. This course examines the key role of writers, translators, editors, and readers, looking at many key issues involving language and cultural identity. It also critically examines the selection process for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Course goals

This course introduces key literary works of American literature written or set during the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century (1860s to 1960s). Study the aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, and/or political impact of literary works at their time of publication. Discussions in lectures and seminars consider the possible legacies of the texts: how they continue to shape intellectual debates, literary history, and cultural practices in the twenty-first century in America and in the broader field of literature in English. In-depth knowledge and understanding of the ways in which cultural, social, intellectual, and political issues of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century figure in a selection of American literary texts; ability to select and analyze relevant primary and secondary sources and to produce original scholarly work on the topic of the course; and the ability to identify and apply some of the relevant critical concepts and literary theory to the study of American literature are gained.

Weekly workshop-seminar sessions and tutorials engage students in identifying and exploring the specific genre of Creative Non Fiction, with the goal of using such literary works as foundations for an examination of advanced principles in producing successful communicative writing (with an emphasis on the “creative” element). The course is based around an exploration of sub-genres of the form, with class discussion time given to considering the personal essay and memoir; literary journalism (“new journalism”); observational/descriptive essays and travel writing, for example. A reading list of creative non-fiction texts is used as the basis for lectures and example technique texts and as the springboard for in-depth critical analyses. During workshop seminars, students engage in peer assessment, providing oral and written critiques of classmates’ creative nonfiction writing (submitted on a rotating weekly basis). 

This course is offered by the Faculty of Economics and is designed to help students improve their oral, presentational and academic writing skills in English. The topics to be considered in class will vary slightly depending on the students' interests and academic orientation. The actual work will consist of student presentations; reading and analyzing student essays and short academic papers, and class discussions. Specific advice will be given to each participant on how to approximate their writing and oral presentation to more natural patterns of speech.

The focus of this course is a selection of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. The critical tools used in class include structuralist, post-colonial, and gender studies. Through this course, the students appraise each text individually and look at the global issues pervading the Sherlock Holmes corpus. The proposed method of study is comparative analysis.

This course consists of a series of interactive workshops that provide an opportunity to design, practice, and deliver academic presentations in the student’s field of study. It covers the preparation stage of effective and memorable presentations, how to structure thoughts, and how to hone presentation skills to persuade in lectures, oral exams, master theses defenses, conferences, and public speaking in general. Topics include designing, preparing, and structuring informative and persuasive presentations; creating supporting slides; using correct academic and domain specific language; speaking confidently with appropriate rate, projection, pitch, and tone; implementing nonverbal communication such as facial expression, eye contact, moving with the slides; using vocal variety and pauses to spellbind the audience; switching on the charisma button; applying “logos, ethos, and pathos”; expanding one’s comfort zone in front of an audience and delivering with confidence; analyzing and critiquing presentations in a detailed and diplomatic way; and dealing with fear when speaking in front of an audience. 

This course examines morphology and syntax in English texts from two time periods. While inflections played an important role in Old English grammar, present-day English relies primarily on structures where word order and function words are of central importance. Students thus investigate morphological and syntactic aspects of Old and present-day English texts. Through independent research projects, students also learn how to apply methods of morphosyntactic analysis to authentic texts in order to describe the structure of English.

The course introduces some of the most interesting and innovative work in contemporary fiction, and gives students the knowledge and the tools to read it, judge it, and write about it with pleasure and with critical insight. Students are asked to think rigorously about the idea of the "contemporary," and how that term might relate to other literary and cultural categories. Spanning the last twenty years or so, the set texts don't attempt any sort of representative cross-section of fiction of the period; rather than seeking such a survey, students concentrate on how certain writers have used fictional form to think about what is old and what is new: what is current, or anachronistic, or ahead of its time. (To think, that is, about the structure of contemporaneity itself.)

This course offers an introduction to the full sweep of English literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. It allows students to sample works from different periods while also showing how these works are connected together, over and across time, by continuing narrative, generic and thematic concerns. Teaching will be by seminar, setting literary works written in English including modern translations of Old English. The course introduces students to a wide variety of reading matter – epics, mock-epics, long poems, novels, and it encourages students, through intense weekly seminars, to further develop their reading skills, and to broaden their critical vocabulary. The richness and variety of English literature is unparalleled – it is a wonderful subject to study. But it is also a challenging one, and this course is designed to give students a taste of that challenge.

In this course, students translate passages of Old English poetry using the resources of a modern edition; comment in detail on the language and poetic form of Beowulf; discuss the Beowulf manuscript; and analyze the thematic content of the poem, relating it to appropriate historical and literary contexts.