English

Conventional histories of French literature usually begin with the Chanson de Roland (c.1100), which is viewed as an inaugural text for a great tradition of national literature that runs smoothly through to the present and fosters a timeless ideal of France. However, this vision does not stand up to scrutiny – the “idea of France” turns out to be retroactive and fluid from the outset, then heavily contingent, in the post-medieval period, on changes of regime, on differences of class, gender, education or ethnicity, and on general cultural and political trends such as (to name but a few examples) Jacobinism, Romanticism, Republicanism, Fascism, Communism. This course examines how “France” and French national identity is constructed by studying a selection of key French literary texts from a variety of periods, including a postcolonial reflection on what it means to be “French.” 

This course examines how our place in the world is defined by gender. It introduces students to questions of gender in the culture and literature of Spanish America. The topic is studied through a number of cultural expressions, including prose, poetry, theatre and film, from a variety of countries and across various historical periods.

This course provides a basic study of Old English grammar, including phonetics, morphology, and syntax (pronunciation, noun/adj. declension, verb conjugation, basic rules of syntax). Readings include Bede's History of the English Church, Asser's Life of Alfred, and Old English poetry in translation.

This introductory course offers students the opportunity to study Shakespeare's plays in their original theatrical and historical contexts. Lectures combine close reading of the texts with video clips of productions, to encourage the students to read the plays not just as words on the page but as live events in the theater. Small-group seminars concentrate on close reading. The assessments asks students to analyze and contextualize selected passages from the plays and to write essays based on analysis of particular scenes.

The course examines the ways in which Brazilian fiction has articulated and responded to the experiences of social, economic, and political upheaval in the second half of the 20th century, with a focus on Brazil's authoritarian tradition, in particular the traumatic military dictatorship of 1964-85 and the process of Democratic Transition in the 1980s and 90s. Themes explored include: anonymity and identity - personal and national; love, sexuality, and the family; censorship and repression; ideas of a Brazilian revolution or utopia; popular and mass culture; marginality and exile; history, journalism, and alternative approaches to narrative. 

This course examines what a national literature means, and how it makes itself significant to the nation and beyond. It will think about colonialism and colonial writing in Australia, modes of Australian social realism, the emergence of an Australian modernism, ways of representing region, suburb and city, postcolonialism in Australia, 'multicultural' writing, and Indigenous literature. The focus is on the novel, short stories, poetry and genres such as romance and the Gothic.