The History and Paradigms of American Studies 1 (Šesnić, 2022)

Course title: The History and Paradigms of American Studies 1 (A, 19th/20th)
Literary Seminar (MA Level): The History and Paradigms of American Studies 1 (A, 19th/20th)
Instructor: Dr. Jelena Šesnić
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective (obligatory for American Studies majors in the 1st semester)
Enrollment requirements: enrollment in the 1st and/or 3rd semester

Fall 2023/24
Mon, 11-12:30, A-123
Wed, 1:15-2, A-105
Office: B-018

Phone: 01-4092060
E-mail: jsesnic@ffzg.hr

Office hours: Mon, 12:00-13:00 p.m.; Thur, 10-11 a.m.

Course description:

In the seminar we shall be discussing the emergence and various methodologies of American Studies from their beginnings in the 1930s and 1940s until the revisionist interventions in the 1960s and 1970s. In the introductory sessions the following questions shall be considered: why and in which contexts American Studies have appeared; in what way their approaches differ from the other disciplines concerned with U.S. American culture and society. The next sessions will be dedicated to the scholars who have founded American Studies. In the concluding part, a synthesis of readings of selected critical texts – accompanied by the relevant and illustrative primary (literary) texts – will be offered so as to point to their similarities and highlight the differences among the paradigms. Conclusively, it will be considered how these paradigms might be relevant for the understanding of the United States in the past and at present, and to what extent they might be applicable in other temporal and spatial contexts.

Course requirements: regular attendance (10%); in-class and home assignments (20%); seminar paper (40%); midterm and final test (30%)

Syllabus (subject to change):

  1. historical emergence of American Studies as a discipline
  2. methodologies of American Studies, an overview
  3. Main practitioners: F.O. Matthiessen
  4. Perry Miller
  5. Henry Nash Smith
  6. R.W.B. Lewis
  7. Midterm
  8. Leo Marx
  9. Richard Slotkin
  10. Alan Trachtenberg
  11. Sacvan Bercovitch
  12. Final test; course evaluation

Selected bibliography of texts will be provided in digital form on Omega.

Additional readings:

Castiglia, Christopher. Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times, NYU P, 2017.

Fuller, Randal. Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists. Oxford UP, 2007.

Pfister, Joel. Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies. Paradigm Publishers, 2006.

—. Surveyors of Customs: American Literature as Cultural Analysis. Oxford UP, 2016.

Van Engen, Abram C. City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. Yale UP, 2020.

Voelz, Johannes. Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge. Dartmouth, 2010.

 

 

 

 

 

Images of American Politics in Literary and Visual Media

Naziv kolegija: Prikazi američke politike u književnosti i vizualnim medijima (A, 20. st.)

Course title: Images of American Politics in Literary and Visual Media (A, 20th c.)
Instructor: Dr. Jelena Šesnić, Full Prof.
Requirements: Enrollment in the MA program in English.

Fall 2021/2022

Mon, 11-12:30 (A-123)
Wed, 13:15-14 (A-105)
E-mail: jsesnic@ffzg.hr

Phone:
01-4092060
Office: B-018
Office hours: Mon, 12:30-1:30 p.m.; Thur, 14:30-15:30 p.m.

Course description: American political system has been a medium of democratic governance of one of the most powerful countries in the world for more than two centuries. During that time segments of the democratic system have changed in scope and function allowing us to consider the direction and implications of those changes. Different elements of the system must be considered in order to give a more comprehensive picture of the impact and role of democratic processes: the party system, checks-and-balances, institution of the presidency, separation of powers (the legislative branch, the judiciary, the executive branch), the role of the Constitution, the role of the media, campaigning and voting from local to state to federal level, democratic participation, populism, lobbying and pork-barrel, politics in the age of social media, the 2020 pandemic and politics, etc. These processes will be placed in a cultural context primarily with respect to their representations in fiction and visual media, particularly in the late modern period (from the second half of the 20th century), while the focus of the course will be on popular and media-generated images related to different facets of American political system.

Course requirements: Regular attendance (10%); home and in-class assignments (20 %); seminar paper (10-12 double-spaced pp., Times New Roman, 12; 40 %); continuous assessment (mid-term and final test; 30 %).

Primary texts:

Fiction: Robert Penn Warren: All the King’s Men (1946) (novel)

 
Films: John Frankenheimer: The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Alan Pakula: The Parallax View (1974)

Oliver Stone: Nixon (1995)

Oliver Stone: W (2008)

John Madden: Miss Sloane (2016)

Jon Stewart: Irresistible (2020)

Secondary readings will be provided in the course reader on Omega.

Optional reading:

  • Christ, Birte, and Greta Olson, eds. Obama and the Paradigm Shift: Measuring Change. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012.
  • Foy, Joseph, ed. Homer Simpson Goes to Washington: American Politics through Popular Culture. The UP of Kentucky, 2008.
  • Hofstadter, Richard. 1948. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. Vintage Books, 1989.
  • Hofstadter, Richard. 1963. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. Harvard UP, 1996.
  • Howe, Irving. Politics and the Novel. Fawcett Premier, 1967.
  • Jones, Charles O. The American Presidency: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2007.
  • Maisel, Sandy L. American Political Parties and Elections: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2007.
  • Nelson, Dana. Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People. U of Minnesota P, 2010.
  • Revue LISA/ LISA e-journal. Bypassing Confusion to Understand the Trump Phenomenon, XVI, no. 2, 2018.
  • Shaw, Tony. Hollywood’s Cold War. U of Massachusetts P, 2007.

 

The History and Paradigms of American Studies 1 (Šesnić, 2021)

Course title: The History and Paradigms of American Studies 1 (A, 19/20)
Literary Seminar (MA Level): The History and Paradigms of American Studies 1 (A, 19/20)
Instructor: Dr. Jelena Šesnić
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective (obligatory for American Studies majors in the 1st semester)
Enrollment requirements: enrollment in the 1st and/or 3rd semester
Fall 2021/22

Tue, 14:45-16:15 (A-123)
Thur, 15:30-16:15 (A-105)

Office: B-018
Phone: 01-4092060
E-mail: jsesnic@ffzg.hr

Office hours: Mon, 12:30-1:30; Thur, 14:30-15:30 p.m.

Course description:

In the seminar we shall be discussing the emergence and various methodologies of American Studies from their beginnings in the 1930s and 1940s until the revisionist interventions in the 1960s and 1970s. In the introductory sessions the following questions shall be considered: why and in which contexts American Studies have appeared; in what way their approaches differ from the other disciplines concerned with U.S. American culture and society. The next sessions will be dedicated to the scholars who have founded American Studies. In the concluding part, a synthesis of readings of selected critical texts – accompanied by the relevant and illustrative primary (literary) texts – will be offered so as to point to their similarities and highlight the differences among the paradigms. Conclusively, it will be considered how these paradigms might be relevant for the understanding of the United States in the past and at present, and to what extent they might be applicable in other temporal and spatial contexts.

Course requirements: regular attendance (10%); in-class and home assignments (20%); seminar paper (40%); midterm and final test (30%)

Readings:

  1. historical emergence of American Studies as a discipline
  2. methodologies of American Studies, an overview
  3. Main practitioners: F.O. Matthiessen
  4. Perry Miller
  5. Henry Nash Smith
  6. R.W.B. Lewis
  7. Midterm
  8. Leo Marx
  9. Richard Slotkin
  10. Alan Trachtenberg
  11. Sacvan Bercovitch
  12. Final test; course evaluation

Selected bibliography of texts will be provided in digital form on Omega.

Additional readings:

Castiglia, Christopher. Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times, NYU P, 2017.

Fuller, Randal. Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists. Oxford UP, 2007.

Pfister, Joel. Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies. Paradigm Publishers, 2006.

—. Surveyors of Customs: American Literature as Cultural Analysis. Oxford UP, 2016.

Van Engen, Abram C. City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. Yale UP, 2020.

Voelz, Johannes. Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge. Dartmouth, 2010.

English Baroque Poetry (Brlek)

Course title: English Baroque Poetry
Instructor: Assoc. Prof. Tomislav Brlek

ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 1st and 3rd semester
Enrollment requirements: enrollment in the 1st or 3rd semester of the graduate programme of the English Department
Course description: The mail goal of the course is to relocate English literature of the early seventeenth century from renaissance in the narrower sense of the term into post-renaissance movement known in most European countries as baroque. Teaching poetics and rhetoric of baroque poetry is the focus of this literary and historical procedure.

  1. Introduction: baroque as a literary period: renaissance principle of decorum and baroque violation of decorum
  2. Distinctive characteristics in (a) style (paralogic, antithesis, emblem, word play, concetto, ingenuity, linguistic and intellectual combinatorics), (b) genre (generic preferences, characteristic mixture of genres, new combinations of genres) and (c) point of view (toward poetry, poets, world; actuality, dramaticality, linguistic and epistemological scepticism)
  3. Expressions and terms: mannerism baroque, metaphysical poetry
  4. Concetto in English baroque poetry
  5. Elizabethan world picture as a source of baroque imagery
  6. Petrarchan topoi and their baroque transformations
  7. John Donne: Songs and Sonets (“The Canonization”, “The Sun Rising”, “The Good Morrow”, “The Flea” i “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”).
  8. John Donne: Holy Sonnets (“Batter My heart, three—person’d God”).
  9. George Herbert: The Temple (“Easter Wings”, “Jordan (I)”, “Jordan (II)”, “The Pulley”, “The Forerunners” and “Virtue”).
  10. Henry Vaughan: Silex Scintillans (“The Retreate” and “Regeneration”).
  11. Richard Crashaw: Carmen Deo Nostro (“The Weeper”).
  12. Andrew Marvell: Collected Poems (“To His Coy Mistress” and “The Garden”).
  13. Thomas Traherne: Commentaries of Heaven (“Shadows in the Water”).
  14. Ben Jonson: Underwood (“My Picture Left in Scotland”)
  15. Written exam

OBLIGATORY LITERATURE:

  1. Gardner, Helen (ur), The Metaphysical Poets, Harmondsworth [etc.]: Penguin Books, 1988.
  2. Ford, Boris (ur), The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 3: From Donne to Marvel, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988.
  3. Sidney, Philip, An Apology for Poetry, u: D. J. Enright & Ernst de Chickero (ur), English Critical Texts, London: Oxford UP, 1962; 12-17.
  4. Johnson, Samuel, Lives of the English Poets, 1. tom, London: Oxford UP, 1961; 3-49.
  5. Eliot, T. S, “The Metaphysical Poets”, u: D. J. Enright & Ernst de Chickero (ur), English Critical Texts, London: Oxford UP, London, 1962, 302-311.

ADDITIONAL LITERATURE:

  1. Abrams, M. H (ur), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 1. tom, 6. izdanje, New York i London: W W. Norton, 1993.
  2. Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973; 273–301.
  3. Grierson, Herbert J. C, Cross Currents in English Literature of the Seventeenth Century, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966.
  4. Hollander, John, i Frank Kermode (ur). The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1: The Middle Ages Through the Eighteenth Century, New York; London & Toronto: Oxford UP, 1973; 2337-2316.
  5. Segel, Harold B. The Baroque Poem: A Comparative Survey, New York: Dutton Paperback, 1974; 12-142.
  6. Tillyard, E. M. Elizabethan World Picture, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972.
  7. Warnke, Frank J, Versions of Baroque: Terms and Concepts, New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1975; 1-20.

Modern British Novel and the British Empire

Modern British Novel and the British Empire
Course title: Modern British Novel and the British Empire
Instructor: Prof. Borislav Knežević
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 1st and 3rd
Enrolment requirements: Enrolment in the graduate programme of the English Department


Course description: In this course we will read a selection of novels by British authors (Kipling, Conrad, Woolf) and one novel (by Tagore) written in India under British rule; our thematic focus will be on the literary uses of the British Empire, imperialism and colonialism in those novels. We will deal with characteristics of modernism as a period in literary history, and the ways in which the selected novels exemplify such characteristics. Much of our discussions will center on themes articulated by postcolonial criticism (the relationship between the metropole and the colony; going native; writing about imperial others; writing as an imperial other, construction of gender in colonial societies and discourses, etc.). Kipling’s novel Kim, which does not belong to literary modernism, will be used to provide an introduction both to the discussion of literary-historical periodization and the discussion of postcolonial criticism. The students are expected to take part in course discussions and to examine closely the formal and historical characteristics of the literary texts. The students are also expected to further develop skills of researching and working with secondary sources. By participating in class discussions and their individual research work the students should develop the ability of familiarizing themselves with the structure of the literary critical debate about the topics of this course.

Objectives: The course offers an introduction to some of the key texts of British modern novel, and to postcolonial criticism as an important type of contemporary literary study. Like other graduate level English literature courses, this course also focuses on improving the skills of analyzing literary texts.

Course requirements: The grade is based on continuous evaluation: a written essay in the second half of the term (5-6) pages, a mid-term quiz and a quiz at the end of term.

Week by week schedule:

1. week: Introduction to modernism. Periodization, status of the novel as a genre, the historical context of imperialism. Said’s concept of orientalism.
2. week: Kipling.
3. week: Kipling. Cohn: representations of colonial authority. Conrad.
4. week: Conrad. Achebe, and the issue of racism in literature.
5. week: Brantlinger, and the relationship between modernism and imperialism.
6. week: Tagore.
7. week:Mid-term quiz.
8. week: Tagore.
9. week: Renan, and defining the nation.
10. week: Nehru, and the question of development.
11. week: Woolf. The essay is due.
12. week: Woolf.
13. week: Woolf.
14. week. Cannadine, Ornamentalism.
15. week: Second quiz.

 Reading:
A. Required reading
Novels:
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

Criticism:
Edward Said, “Introduction” to Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Bernard S. Cohn, “Representing Authority in Colonial India,” from Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa.” Massachussets Review 18, 1977.
Patrick Brantlinger, The Rule of Darkness (selection). Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?”, in Omar Dahbour, Micheline R. Ishay (eds.), The Nationalism Reader. Humanity Books, 1995.
Jawaharlal Nehru, “The Discovery of India,” The Nationalism Reader.
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism. How the British Saw Their Empire (selection). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

B. Optional reading:
Anthony Apiah, “Topologies of Nativism” Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan, Literary Theory: An Anthology. London: Blackwell, 1998.
Carole Boyce Davies, “Migratory Subjectivities.” Literary Theory: An Anthology.
Frantz Fanon, “The Wretched of the Earth” iz Omar Dahbour, Micheline R. Ishay (eds.), The Nationalism Reader. Humanity Books, 1995.
Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” from Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

 

 

 

 

Re-presenting Los Angeles and the American City in Media

Course Title: Re-presenting Los Angeles and the American City in Media
Instructor:
Dr. Leo Zonn

Semester: winter or summer semester 2010/11
The University of Texas at Austin, Fulbright Visitor
Course Title: Re-presenting Los Angeles and the American City in Media
Eligible Students: Graduate, Elective Course
ECTS credits: 6

Course Description: The purpose of this course is to examine representations of Los Angeles in the media of popular culture, with an emphasis upon race, ethnicity, gender, and the ways in which Los Angeles represents the ‘post-modern city’ in a globalizing world of increasingly intense interactions. The theoretical notions of place, space, and re-presentation frame our conversations, while examples from other American cities are often incorporated. A variety of media that contribute to images of Los Angeles will be considered as part of a larger network—cinema, cyberspace, documentary film, maps, murals, music and music videos, novels and short stories, newspapers and magazines, paintings and illustrations, Retablos and other folk art, television, tourist practices, and word of mouth. We can only examine a few of these in detail, but we should not ever forget that they are all interrelated with one another and with the reality of Los Angeles and beyond. We will talk about the concept of inter-textualityand associated post-structural ideas, but we should never forget that there are many versions of any reality we might think we know and they are never independent of one another. In this case these many media contribute to an image of a place called Los Angeles.

Course Objectives: And what new skills and perspectives will you have at the end of the semester other than the fact you will know much more about Los Angeles and how people see it than you did before? You will have a better sense of how to interpret the ways in which media tell us about places, in this case American cities, but you will also be more able to ask how and why do they do it. For example, what broader tales about the U.S. and the American city are being told, what broader issues about its people are embedded in these re-presentations? Race, ethnicity and gender will occupy much of our time, so what do these images say about relations between social and cultural groups in my country? How do different audiences view the same images in these terms? One of our primary objectives then, is to provide you a new framework for interpreting re-presentations not only in terms of people who created them, but perhaps more importantly in understanding the ways in which they reflect the broader culture and society within which they were made.
Course Requirements: A final examination will comprise 20% of your grade, attendance, participation and several smaller papers will be 40%, and your final paper will be 40%. Less than ideal attendance can have a negative influence on your grade. Your final paper will be a detailed and comparative study of works from within several media in terms of the ways in which they re-present the city of Los Angeles. You will be expected to incorporate the ideas we have discussed in class and have derived from our readings. Details are forthcoming, but relax, we will discuss the possible subjects and the ways in which you can approach them in detail.

Required Readings
The only book that is required is a short novel, The Day of the Locust, by Nathaniel West. We will be drawing select readings from City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (2006 edition) by Mike Davis, so you may wish to obtain a copy; it is considered to be a classic (the original edition was 1990). All other readings will be made available to you or the references will be provided and you can download them. More important, you will also be asked to find articles that will not be provided by me but that you will find through your own searching. Many of these will be included in the bibliography you will include in your paper.

We will watch and listen to pieces and segments direct from the web in terms of advertisements, music videos, and other media forms. While this class is about many different media, we will emphasize film for at least the first third of the semester. If we can somehow watch one or two, they will likely come from the following list: Blade Runner, Chinatown, Double Indemnity, Menace to Society, L.A. Story, Quincenera orMiFamilia, although there are so many, many interesting possibilities. How about Clueless?

Office and Contact
Office: B-017

Office Hours: Thursday 2.00-4.00 or by appointment

Please note that it is appropriate to contact me for appointments or information about class content at my email address, zonn@mail.utexas.edu

Pre-Raphaelitism

Course title: Pre-Raphaelitism
Instructor: Professor Tatjana Jukić
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Semester: 1 or 3
Enrollment requirements: Enrollment in the graduate programme

Course description: The course explores how literature intersects with visuality in Victorian culture, with the emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Taking Foucault’s discussions of the nineteenth century as our point of departure, we will analyze how the Pre-Raphaelites engage the contact zones of literature and the visual, and anticipate critical and visual developments that we associate with the twentieth century. We will focus on art, poetry and/or criticism by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt.

Course requirements: The grade is based on a written essay at the end of term (30% of the final grade), and two tests (30% of the final grade each), as well as on active participation in the class (10% of the final grade).

WEEK 1 Visuality and Victorian culture. Panopticism. Painting and photography.
WEEK 2 Michel Foucault and the Victorians. Visuality and sexuality. Historicism and the second law of thermodynamics.
WEEK 3 The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Visuality, narration, historicism.
WEEK 4 The Pre-Raphaelite Shakespeare (1). Hamlet. John Everett Millais, „Ophelia“
WEEK 5 The Pre-Raphaelite Shakespeare (2). Measure for Measure. Millais and William Holman Hunt. Alfred Tennyson, „Mariana“
WEEK 6 The Pre-Raphaelites and psychoanalysis (1). Dante Gabriel Rossetti, „Ecce Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation)“
WEEK 7 The Pre-Raphaelites and psychoanalysis (2). Dante Gabriel Rossetti, „Pia de’ Tolomei“ and „Proserpine.“ Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the sonnet. Sigmund Freud, „Mourning and Melancholia“
WEEK 8 Midterm. Rossetti as translator. Translation as the „insanity of realism“ (Walter Pater)
WEEK 9 Women and the Brotherhood. Victorian women writers. Christina Rossetti (1). „In an Artist’s Studio,“ „My Dream,“ „The Convent Threshold“
WEEK 10 Women and the Brotherhood. Victorian women writers. Christina Rossetti (2). Goblin Market
WEEK 11 The Pre-Raphaelites, political economy and biopolitics. Ford Madox Brown, „Work.“ John Ruskin as critic.
WEEK 12 Croatian critics on Pre-Raphaelitism. Antun Gustav Matoš and Miroslav Krleža.
WEEK 13 The Pre-Raphaelites and (post)modernity. John Fowles and A. S. Byatt.
WEEK 14 Final discussion.
WEEK 15 Final test. Evaluation.

Required reading:
Dickens, Charles. “A Criticism of Millais’ ‘Christ in the House of His Parents’”
Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (selection)
Rossetti, Christina Rossetti. Stories and poetry (selection)
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Poetry, translations, criticism (selection)
Ruskin, John. Criticism (selection)
Pater, Walter. “Dante Gabriel Rossetti”
Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Poetry (selection)
Tennyson, Alfred. Poetry (selection)

Byatt, Antonia Susan. Possession. A Romance
Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Optional reading:
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator”
Bronfen, Elizabeth. Over Her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (selection)
Buchanan, Robert. “The Fleshly School of Poetry”
Cavell, Stanley. Contesting Tears. The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (selection)
Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical (selection)
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (selection)
Foucault, Michel. „Of Other Spaces“
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: 1. (selection)
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia”
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (selection)
Harding, Ellen (ed.). Re-Framing the Pre-Raphaelites. Historical and Theoretical Essays (selection)
James, Henry. Letters (selection)
Jukić, Tatjana. Zazor, nadzor, sviđanje. Dodiri književnog i vizualnog u britanskom 19. stoljeću (selection)
Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (selection)
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae. Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (selection)
Pointon, Marcia (ed.). Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed (selection)
Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference. Femininity, feminism and histories of art (selection)
Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image (selection)
Tobin, Thomas (ed.). Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism (selection)

 

 

 

 

Images of American Politics in Literary and Visual Media (2019)

Course title: Images of American Politics in Literary and Visual Media (A, 20th c.)
Instructor: Dr. Jelena Šesnić, Full Prof.
Winter 2019/2020
Mon, 11-12:30 (A-123)
Wed, 13:15-14 (A-105)
E-mail: jsesnic@ffzg.hr

Phone:
01-4092060
Office: B-018
Office hours: Mon, 12:30-13:30 p.m.; Thur, 11-12 a.m.
Requirements: Enrollment in the MA program in English.

Course description: American political system has been a medium of democratic governance of one of the most powerful countries in the world for more than two centuries. During that time segments of the democratic system have changed in scope and function allowing us to consider the direction and implications of those changes. Different elements of the system must be considered in order to give a more comprehensive picture of the impact and role of democratic processes: the party system, checks-and-balances, institution of the presidency, separation of powers (the legislative branch, the judiciary, the executive branch), the role of the Constitution, the role of the media, mechanisms of political campaigning from local to state to federal level, democratic participation, etc. These processes will be placed in a cultural context primarily with respect to their representations in fiction and visual media, particularly in the late modern period of American politics (from the second half of the 20th century), while the focus of the course will be on popular and media-generated images related to different facets of American political system.

Course requirements: Regular attendance (10%); home and in-class assignments (oral and written; 10%); seminar paper (10-12 double-spaced pp., Times New Roman, 12; 40%); continuous assessment (mid-term and final test; 40%).

Primary texts:

Fiction: Robert Penn Warren: All the King’s Men (1946) (novel)

Joe Klein: Primary Colors (1996) (novel)

Films: Robert Rossen: All the King’s Men (1949)

John Frankenheimer: The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Jonathan Demme: The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

George Clooney: Good Night and Good Luck (2005)

Paul Greengrass: Green Zone (2007)

Alan Pakula: All the President’s Men (1976)

Steven Spielberg: The Post (2017)

Oliver Stone: Nixon (1995)

Oliver Stone: W (2008)

Rob Reiner: LBJ (2016)

 

Syllabus (alterations possible)

October 2019

  1. Introduction.
  2. American political system in a historical perspective. Cultural aspects of American political system. (The Federalist Papers: selection; Arendt: On Revolution; Tocqueville’s tradition).
  3. Genre of the political novel. (Scheingold: selection). Politics as profession; politician as a social type (Max Weber: political writings). Politician as an all-American hero; danger and appeal of populism: R. Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (novel)
  4. Warren, cont.
  5. Comparison of the novel and the film, All the King’s Men

     

    November 2019

  6. The Cold War paranoia: Frankenheimer, The Manchurian Candidate
  7. The Cold War paranoia: Clooney, Good Night and Good Luck
  8. The War on Terror, before and now: Demme’s 2004 re-make, The Manchurian Candidate. Greengrass: Green Zone. Midterm test.


    December 2019

  9. The presidential mystique and (un)reality: presidential bio pics (Stone: Nixon, W)
  10. Rob Reiner: LBJ
  11. The presidential mystique and (un)reality: Primary Colors (novel).


    January 2020

  12. The Fourth Estate: politics and the media: Pakula, All the President’s Men; Spielberg: The Post
  13. New directions in American politics: the Trump presidency. Seminar paper deadline.
  14. Final test. Course evaluation.

 

Required reading:

  • Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Penguin, 1963. (selection)
  • Banita, Georgiana and Sascha Pohlmann, ed. Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter, 2015. (selection)
  • Coyne, Michael. Hollywood Goes to Washington: American Politics on Screen. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. (selection)
  • Delogu, Jon C. Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet Age. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2014. (http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/tocqueville-and-democracy-in-the-internet-age/) (selection)
  • Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers. (http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1786-1800/the-federalist-papers/) (selection)
  • Mausbach, Wilfried, Dietmar Schloss, and Marting Thunert, ed. The American Presidency: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Heidelberg: Universitaetsverlag Winter, 2012. (selection)

– „Revue LISA/ LISA e-journal.“ Bypassing Confusion to Understand the Trump Phenomenon. Vol. XVI. No. 2, 2018. (selection)(https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/9641?lang=en)

  • Scheingold, Stuart. The Political Novel: Re-imagining the Twentieth Century. New York and London: Continuum, 2010. (selection)
  • de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. 1835. 1840. (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/home.html) (selection)
  • Weber, Max. Political Writings. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. (See also Croatian translation: Vlast i politika. Prir. Vjeran Katunarić. Zagreb: Jesenski i Turk, 2013.) (selection)

Additional reading material will be provided on the Omega platform.

Optional reading:

American Literary History, vol. 24, no. 3 (Fall 2012). (Project Muse)

Brown, Wendy. „Apocalyptic Populism.“ Eurozine.com. 30 August 2017. (https://www.eurozine.com/apocalyptic-populism/)

Christ, Birte, and Greta Olson, eds. Obama and the Paradigm Shift: Measuring Change. Heidelberg: Universitaetsverlag Winter, 2012.

Comparative American Studies: An International Journal. Special Issue. Texting Obama: Politics/Poetics/Popular Culture. Vol. 10, no. 2-3 (August 2012).

Foy, Joseph, ed. Homer Simpson Goes to Washington: American Politics through Popular Culture. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2008.

Hofstadter, Richard. 1948. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Hofstadter, Richard. 1963. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.

Howe, Irving. Politics and the Novel. New York: Fawcett Premier, 1967.

Jones, Charles O. The American Presidency: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2007.

Maisel, Sandy L. American Political Parties and Elections: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2007.

Nelson, Dana. Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.

Shaw, Tony. Hollywood’s Cold War. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2007.

 

Modern British Novel and the British Empire (arch.)

Course title: Modern British Novel and the British Empire
Instructor: Prof. Borislav Knežević
ECTS credits:
6

Status: elective
Semester: 1st and 3rd
Enrollment requirements:
Enrollment in the graduate programme
Course description: In this course we will read a selection of novels by British authors (Kipling, Conrad, Woolf) and one novel (by Tagore) written in India under British rule; our thematic focus will be on the literary uses of the British Empire, imperialism and colonialism in those novels. We will deal with characteristics of modernism as a period in literary history, and the ways in which the selected novels exemplify such characteristics. Much of our discussions will center on themes articulated by postcolonial criticism (the relationship between the metropole and the colony; going native; writing about imperial others; writing as an imperial other, construction of gender in colonial societies and discourses, etc.). Kipling’s novel Kim, which does not belong to literary modernism, will be used to provide an introduction both to the discussion of literary-historical periodization and the discussion of postcolonial criticism. The students are expected to take part in course discussions and to examine closely the formal and historical characteristics of the literary texts. The students are also expected to further develop skills of researching and working with secondary sources. By participating in class discussions and their individual research work the students should develop the ability of familiarizing themselves with the structure of the literary-critical debate about the topics of this course.

Objectives: The course offers an introduction to some of the key texts of British modern novel, and to postcolonial criticism as an important type of contemporary literary study. Like other graduate level English literature courses, this course also focuses on improving the skills of analyzing literary texts.

Course requirements: The grade is based on a written essay at the end of term (5-6) pages, a mid-term quiz and a quiz at the end of term.

Week by week schedule:
1. week: Introduction to modernism. Periodization, status of the novel as a genre, the historical context of imperialism. Said’s concept of orientalism. McClintock and the question of postcolonial theory.

2. week: Kipling.
3. week: Kipling Cohn: representations of colonial authority. Conrad, and European imperialism in Africa.
4. week: Conrad. Achebe, and the issue of racism in literature.
5. week: Brantlinger, and the relationship between modernism and imperialism.
6. week: Tagore.
7. week: Mid-term quiz.
8. week: Tagore.
9. week: Renan, and defining the nation.
10. week: Nehru, and the question of development.
11 week: Woolf. The essay is due.
12 week: Woolf.
13 week: Cannadine, Ornamentalism .
14 week. Second quiz.
15 week: Course summary.

Reading:
A. Required reading:

Novels:
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

Criticism:
Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa.” Massachussets Review 18, 1997.
Patrick Brantlinger, The Rule of Darkness (excerpts). Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Frantz Fanon, “The Wretched of the Earth” in Omar Dahbour, The Nationalism Reader. Humanity Books, 1995.
Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-colonialism’”.  Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory. A Reader (ed. Patrick Williams, Laura Chrisman).  New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Edward Said, “Introduction” to Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Bernard S. Cohn, “Representing Authority in Colonial India”, in Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?”, The Nationalism Reader.
Jawaharlal Nehru, “The Discovery of India”, The Nationalism Reader.

David Cannadine, Ornamentalism. How the British saw Their Empire (excerpts). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

B. Optional reading:
Anthony Apiah, “Topologies of Nativism” Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan, Literary Theory: An Anthology. London: Blackwell, 1998.
Carole Boyce Davies, “Migratory Subjectivities”. Literary Theory: An Anthology.
Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism”, from Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

 


Continue reading Modern British Novel and the British Empire (arch.)

Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures (2017/18)

Dr. Jelena Šesnić Literary seminar: Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures (1st/2nd Year) (A, 20th c.)
Winter 2017/2018
Semester: 1 or 3
Mon 11-12:30 (A-123)
Wed 13:15- 14 (A-105)
E-mail: jsesnic@ffzg.hr

Phone: 01-4092060
Office hours: Mon, 12:30-1:30 pm; Thu, 11-12 am

Course description: The course examines a very innovative and dynamic section of contemporary US literary/cultural production—literature produced by and about different established and newly arisen “ethnic communities” with special focus on the 1965 immigration reform, post-Cold War and post-9/11 developments, respectively. We shall address new modes of representing the ways of belonging, community and citizenship in relation to representative ethnic groups (African American, Native American), while in the second part of the course the attention will be given to the ways new cultural productions (both visual and textual) address concerns felt by more recent or recently more visible ethnic and racial formations (Asian American, Latino/ Chicano, Arab American, etc.). These textual and visual artefacts make evident some continuing concerns with nation- and community-building in the States, while they depict a new class of national subjects, a new generation of Americans.

Requirements: Regular attendance and class participation; in-class and home assignments; seminar paper (10-12 double-spaced pp.); continuous assessment (midterm and final test).

Reading / viewing list
Primary texts

Novels
Gish Jen: Mona in the Promised Land (1996)
Mohja Kahf: Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Americanah (2013)
Memoirs
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me (2015)
Short stories
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (1999; selection)
Junot Díaz: This Is How You Lose Her (2012; selection)
Films
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989); Smoke Signals (Chris Eyre, 1998); Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996)

Readings by weeks and sections (alterations possible)
Part I: An overview
Introductory remarks: approaching ethnicity; interdisciplinarity in the study of ethnicity; race theory and ethnicity school; “racial formations” (Omi and Winant); consent and descent (Sollors); symbolic (voluntary) and ascribed (compulsory) ethnicity; American ethnic/racial pentagon; fantasmatic aspects of racial identifications; long-term ethnic groups/racial formations: African Americans, American Indians

*Entries from Keywords: “Citizenship”, “Ethnicity”, “Nation”, “Naturalization”, “Race”

October
Week 1: Introduction and key concepts
Week 2: African-American perspective: Do the Right Thing
Week 3: African-American perspective: Coates, Between the World and Me
Week 4: Amerindians and postmodernism: Smoke Signals

Part II: An overview
New racial formations; Chicanos and Latinos/Hispanics; Asian Americans; Arab Americans; post-1965 immigration and globalization; new paradigms of reading ethnic texts: diasporic and borderlands models

*The following entries from Keywords: “Border”, “Diaspora”, “Immigration”, “Mestizo”

Week 5: Chicanos as a sub-nation: Lone Star

November
Week 1 Latino diaspora: Junot Díaz: selection of short stories
Week 2: Midterm.
Week 3: Asian Americans as perpetual others: Lahiri: selection of short stories
Week 4: Asian Americans: Gish Jen: Mona in the Promised Land

December
Week 1: Gish Jen, cont.
Week 2: Post 9/11 and Arab Americans: Mohja Kahf: Girl in the Tangerine Scarf
Week 3: Kahf, cont.

January
Week 1: New African diaspora: Adichie: Americanah
Week 2: Adichie; cont.
Week 3: Evaluation. Final test.

Secondary readings
General introduction:
Appiah, Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. New Haven: Princeton UP, 2007. (selection)
– Burgett, Bruce, and Glenn Hendler, eds. Keywords for American Cultural Studies. New York and London: NYUP, 2007.
– (Entries: “Border”, “Citizenship”, “Diaspora”, “Ethnicity”, “Immigration”, “Mestizo”, “Nation”, “Naturalization”, “Race”)
– Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formations in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 53-76.
– Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. 20-39.

Additional material for each section will be provided in digital form on the Omega platform.

 

Architext in postmodern British literature

Course title: Architext in postmodern British literature
Instructor: Assoc. Prof. Vanja Polić

ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 1st and 3rd semester
Enrollment requirements: enrollment in the 1st or 3rd semester

Course description: The course offers an insight into the postmodern British novel with a focus on the dialogue that the postmodern literature sets up with British literary canon. Students will be introduced to different definitions of postmodernism (style or period?) and to key concepts that postmodernism engages with such as the questions of tradition, history, subjectivity and politics. Furthermore, strategies which the postmodern novelists use to question the basic tenets of modernism, such as parody, pastiche, irony, heteroglossia, dialogism, will also be studied. Architext in the course’s title refers to Genette’s “name” for literary genres, i.e. for various durable links between certain modes of enunciation (e.g. narration) and certain thematic concerns. By studying architext Genette arrives at poetics, thus the course will eventually attempt to articulate a poetics of the postmodern British novel.

Objectives: To acquaint the students with the postmodern British novel and poetics of postmodernism; to make them aware of the continuity of development of British literature through intertextuality, reinscription and reliance of recent literary texts on older canonic texts.

Course requirements: the final grade is based on continuous assessment which includes regular attendance (max. absences allowed: 4), preparation for class, in-class participation, writing small assignments, obligatory sitting for midterm exam and timely submission of the final paper. The paper is worth 35%, midterm exam 40% and other elements of continuous assessment are worth 25% of the final grade. Students must fulfill all elements of continuous assessment.

Week by week schedule

Week 1: general introduction into modernism; basic theories of postmodernism
Week 2: architext (G. Genette)
Week 3: M. Cunningham The Hours – historical contextualization of the template (V. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway) and contemporary intertextual deviations in The Hours
Week 4: M. Cunningham, The Hours – analysis continued
Week 5: Will Self, Dorian – aestheticism and decadence of the template (O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray) and hypertext
Week 6: Will Self, Dorian – analysis continued
Week 7: Robinson Crusoe and British 18th century as hypotext of the postmodern novel
Week 8: Midterm exam

Academic writing skills (guidelines for writing research paper)
Week 9: Michael Coetzee, Foe – pseudofeminist and postcolonial reinscription of D. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
Week 10: J. Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea and C. Bronte’s Jane Eyre
Week 11: J. Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea – analysis continued
Week 12: Alasdair Gray, Poor Things or postmodern Frankenstein by M. Shelley
Week 13: Alasdair Gray, Poor Things – analysis continued
Week 14: wrap-up discussion

Reading list:
– Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
– Michael Coetzee, Foe
– Michael Cunningham, The Hours
– Alasdair Gray, Poor Things
– Will Self, Dorian

Critical editions:
– Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, Routledge, 1987 (izbor)
– Mark Currie (ur.), Metafiction, Longman, 1995 (izbor)
– Simon Malpas, The Postmodern, Routledge (the new critical idiom) 2005
– Gérard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, Regents of University of California, 1992
– Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, Routledge, 1988
– Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, 1991
– Jean-François Lyotard, “” An Answer to the Question, What is the Postmodern?” in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, U of Minnesota P, 1984

All texts will be made available to the enrolled students in electronic form. Additional materials are received in class.

History and Memory in Contemporary American Novel

Course title: History and Memory in Contemporary American Novel
Instructor: Assoc. Prof.  Jelena Šesnić

ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Status: elective
Semester: 7th and 9th semester
Enrollment requirements: enrollment in the 7th or 9th semester

________________________________________________________________________________
Dr Jelena Šesnić
Literary Seminar (MA): History and Memory in Contemporary American Novel
Fall 2016/2017
Mon, 11-12:30 (A-123)
Wed, 13:15-14 (A-105)
Office: B-018
Phone: 4092060
E-mail: jsesnic@ffzg.hr
Office hours: Mon, 12:30-13:30; Thur 11-12

Course description: The twentieth century has often been seen as a period overdetermined by memory, but also described as the traumatic century. Contemporary American novel (the late 20th and early 21st c.) responds to both these designations in specific ways, primarily by going back to overwhelming episodes or themes from national and global history. The novels considered in the seminar vary from the so-called postmodern historical novels («historiographic metafictions») to the political and graphic novels, while they take up, in turn, slavery, suppressed minority or ethnic histories, major political events (presidential assassinations, anarchism and the leftist agitation, minority struggles, terrorism) and the americanization/globalization of the Holocaust.
We shall consider the ways the novels enact viable models of individual and collective memory, especially in view of the contributions by sociological theories of memory (Halbwachs, Nora, Eyerman); political sciences (Anderson, Connerton); psychoanalytic/pychological notions of memory and trauma (Freud, van der Kolk); and their applications in critical theory and American studies (Assmann, Caruth, LaCapra, Hirsch).

Primary texts:
1. Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
2. Art Spiegelman: Maus I & II (1986, 1991)
3. Cynthia Ozick: The Shawl (1990)
4. E L Doctorow: Ragtime (1975)
5. Don DeLillo: Libra (1988)
6. Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
7. Sherman Alexie: Flight (2007)

Requirements: regular attendance; participation in class discussions; in-class and home assignments; seminar paper (min. 10 double-spaced pages); mid-term + final test (continuous assessment, mandatory)

Readings (subject to change)

October 2016
Week 1: Introduction: lit-hist. contexts; types and mechanics of memory; memory and history; why memory (studies)?; trauma studies and memory (Freud, Moses…)
Week 2: Morrison: Beloved (the neo-slave novel, national memory, cultural trauma)
Week 3: Morrison: cont.
Week 4: Spiegelman: Maus I, II (post-memory; the graphic novel and the Holocaust; americanization of the Holocaust)

November 2016
Week 1: Spiegelman: cont.
Week 2: Ozick: The Shawl (americanization of the Holocaust; testimonial literature)
Week 3: Doctorow: Ragtime (popular/celebrity culture and culture industry; collective memory; organic and modern types of memory)
Week 4: Doctorow: cont. *Mid-term.*

December 2016
Week 1: Don DeLillo: Libra (politics, trauma and national memory; historiography and metafiction)
Week 2: DeLillo: Libra
Week 3: Foer: Extremely Loud (9/11, trauma and memory; multidirectional, global memory; mediation and memory)
Week 4: Foer: Extremely Loud (cont.)

January 2017
Week 1: Alexie: Flight. (ethnic memory and national history; Nora’s theory of memory)
Week 2: Alexie: cont. *Seminar paper submission.*
Week 3: *Evaluation. Final test.*

Secondary readings
– Additional reading material will be provided in digital form on Omega.

Assmann, Aleida. «History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony». Poetics Today 27.2
(Summer 2006): 261-274.
Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, London: The Johns
Hopkins UP, 1995. (selection)
Erll, Astrid, and Ansgar Nünning, eds. Media and Cultural Memory. Berlin, New York:
Walter de Gruyter, 2008. (selection)
Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. Trans. Katherine Jones. New York: Vintage,
1939. 72-130. (Part Three, Section One)
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Ed., transl., and with an Introduction by
Lewis S. Coser. Chicago, London: The U of Chicago P, 1992. (selection)
Hirsch, Marianne. «Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile». Poetics Today 4 (1996): 659-686.
Nora, Pierre. «Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire». Representations
26 (Spring 1989): 7-12.

Optional
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. Rev. ed. London, New York: Verso, 1991. (izbor)
Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.
Assmann, Aleida, and Sebastian Conrad, eds. Memory in a Global Age: Discourses,
Practices, and Trajectories. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Connerton, Paul. Kako se društva sjećaju. Prev. Zdravko Židovec. Zagreb: Antibarbarus,
2004.
LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca, London: Cornell UP,
1998.
van der Kolk, Bessel. Psychological Trauma. Washington: American Psychiatric P, 1987.

A Historical Survey of the Fantastic in British Literature

Course title: A Historical Survey of the Fantastic in British Literature
Instructor
: Assoc. Prof. Iva Polak

ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 1 and 3
Enrollment requirements: enrollment in Semester 1 and/or 3
Course description: The course offers a historical survey of OE, ME and ModE texts that appropriate fantasy or the supernatural for various reasons. Each text is discussed in the framework of its socio-historical context to reflect, albeit tentatively, the implied listener/reader. Some literary works are analyzed alongside their cinematic adaptations. Theoretical underpinnings of the fantastic include discussions about mimesis, the rhetoric of the real and unreal, terminological muddy waters (fantasy/the fantastic/Fantasy), and the notion of impulse, mode and genre.
Objectives: Awakening students’ awareness of the existence of fantasy from the very beginnings of English literature; detecting the shifts in the function of the fantastic in literature and culture; clearer understanding of the theoretical postulates of the fantastic, introduced in the 20th century.
Course requirements:The final grade is based on continuous assessment which includes regular attendance (max. 4 unattended classes), preparation for and participation in discussions, and writing and timely submission of a series of short written assignments (c. 1000 words per assignment). Assignments are written after the end of each topical unit. Students must receive a minimum passing grade for reach written assignment to successfully pass the course. Plagiarizing detected in a single written assignment will lead to failing of the course.

Week by week schedule
WEEK 1
Introduction to key problems: the notion of reality in different time periods; mimesis-mimetic; fantasy-fantastic

WEEK 2
What is fantastic in fantasy; historical positioning of the fantastic; fantasy as a mode and/or a genre; introduction into the theory of the genre (Todorov, Brooke-Rose,Chanady, Hume, etc.)
– Christine Brooke-Rose (Ch. 2); Kathryn Hume (Ch. 2 & 5)
Assignment 1

WEEK 3
The problem of locating the fantastic in Anglo-Saxon (OE) literature

Beowulf , c. 8th c. (excerpts) – historical context, Anglo-Saxon listener and encoded reader; the problem of the real and the unreal; heroic or fantastic epic
WEEK 4
Beowulf (cont.) – relevance of epic for the development of fantastic literature

WEEK 5
Beowulf and Tolkien’s high fantasy; Tolkien. “The Monster and the Critic”
Assignment 2

WEEK 6
Fantasy and the Middle-Ages
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales  (“The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”) (1387-; Caxton 1st ed. 1476) – historical context, medieval forms, fable, fantasy of the so-called “simple forms” (Einfache Formen)
Assignment 3

WEEK 7
Sir Thomas Malory. Le Morte Darthur (1485) (excerpts): medieval intertext; from epic to romance; Arthuriana as myth and historiography; characters and narrative strands
WEEK 8
Le Morte Darthur (cont.) –Tolkien. “On Fairy Stories“; Karol Čapek. “Towards a Theory of Fairy Tales“; “A Few Fairy-Tale Motifs“; Monthy Python and the Holy Grail (1975) dir. Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones
Assignment 4
WEEK 9
Fantasy and the Early Modern Period

William Shakespeare. The Tempest (1623) – Elizabethan worldview; Prospero’s magic and how to present it on stage and screen; application of Todorov
WEEK 10
Cinematic adaptations of The Tempest: discussion of clips from Silent Shakespeare (1899-1901),  Prospero’s Books (1991) dir. Peter Greenaway, The Tempest (2010) dir. Julie Taymor; analysis of Forbidden Planet (1956) dir. Fred M. Wilcox
Assignment 5

WEEK 11
Fantasy in the Neoclassical Period

Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels (4th voyage) (1726, 1735)– utopian literature (Plato, Thomas More), Menippean satire, fantasy and allegory, location of the 4th voyage; problems of the 4th voyage
Assignment 6

WEEK 12
Fantasy and the Victorian Period

Lewis Carroll. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) –Victorian children literature; nonsense verse (Jabberwocky); source of the supernatural
WEEK 13
Lewis Carroll. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – application of Todorov
Assignment 7

WEEK 14
Towards SF

H. G. Wells. The Time Machine (1895) – ‘impure’ SF, novum (Suvin)
Assignment 8

Reading list:
Beowulf (excerpts)

Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales (“The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”)
Sir Thomas Malory. Le Morte Darthur (excerpts)
Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels, IV voyage
Lewis Carroll. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
H. G. Wells. The Time Machine; “The Grey Man”

Critical editions:
– Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Rhetoric of the Unreal. Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic, CUP, 1981. (Ch. 2)

Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy, Garland Publishing Inc, 1985. (excerpts)
– Čapek, Karel. In Praise of Newspapers and Other Essays on the Margin of Literature, Allen&Uwin, 1951. Essays: “Towards a Theory of Fairy Tales”; “A Few Fairy-Tale Motifs”.
– Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis. Responses to Reality in Western Literature. Methuen. 1984. (Ch. 2 & 5)
– Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion, Routledge, 1981. (excerpts)
– Polak, Iva. Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction. Oxford:Peter Lang, 2017: Ch.1 & 2
– Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre”. College English. Vol. 34. No. 3, 1972: 372-382.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Cornell UP, 1975.
– Tolkien, J.R.R. The Monster and the Critics and Other Essays, HarperCollins, 2006. Essays: “The Monster and the Critics”; “On Fairy Stories”.

All texts shall be made available to the enrolled students in electronic form. Additional materials are received in class.

 

 

 

 

Architext in postmodern British literature – ARCH

Course title: Architext in postmodern British literature
Instructor: Asst. Prof. Vanja Polić

ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 7th and 9th semester
Enrollment requirements: enrollment in the 7th or 9th semester

Course description: The course offers an insight into the postmodern British novel with a focus on the dialogue that the postmodern literature sets up with British literary canon. Students will be introduced to different definitions of postmodernism (style or period?) and to key concepts that postmodernism engages with such as the questions of tradition, history, subjectivity and politics. Furthermore, strategies which the postmodern novelists use to question the basic tenets of modernism, such as parody, pastiche, irony, heteroglossia, dialogism, will also be studied. Architext in the course’s title refers to Genette’s “name” for literary genres, i.e. for various durable links between certain modes of enunciation (e.g. narration) and certain thematic concerns. By studying architext Genette arrives at poetics, thus the course will eventually attempt to articulate a poetics of the postmodern British novel.

Objectives: To acquaint the students with the postmodern British novel and poetics of postmodernism; to make them aware of the continuity of development of British literature through intertextuality, reinscription and reliance of recent literary texts on older canonic texts.

Course requirements: the final grade is based on continuous assessment which includes regular attendance (max. absences allowed: 4), preparation for class, in-class participation, writing small assignments, obligatory sitting for midterm exam and timely submission of the final paper. The paper is worth 35%, midterm exam 40% and other elements of continuous assessment are worth 25% of the final grade. Students must fulfill all elements of continuous assessment.

Week by week schedule

Week 1: general introduction into modernism; basic theories of postmodernism
Week 2: architext (G. Genette)
Week 3: M. Cunningham The Hours – historical contextualization of the template (V. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway) and contemporary intertextual deviations in The Hours
Week 4: M. Cunningham, The Hours – analysis continued
Week 5: Will Self, Dorian – aestheticism and decadence of the template (O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray) and hypertext
Week 6: Will Self, Dorian – analysis continued
Week 7: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels and British 18th century as hypotext of the postmodern novel
Week 8: Midterm exam

Academic writing skills (guidelines for writing research paper)
Week 9: Michael Coetzee, Foe – pseudofeminist and postcolonial reinscription of D. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
Week 10: Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor HoffmanGulliver’s Travels as hypotext – reconstruction of Gulliver’s possible world from the fourth journey
Week 11: Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman – analysis continued
Week 12: Alasdair Gray, Poor Things or postmodern Frankenstein by M. Shelley
Week 13: Alasdair Gray, Poor Things – analysis continued
Week 14: wrap-up discussion

Reading list:
– Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
– Michael Coetzee, Foe
– Michael Cunningham, The Hours
– Alasdair Gray, Poor Things
– Will Self, Dorian

Critical editions:
– Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, Routledge, 1987
– Mark Currie (ed.), Metafiction, Longman, 1995 (selection)
– Gérard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, Regents of University of California, 1992
– Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, Routledge, 1988
– Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, 1991
– Jean-François Lyotard, “” An Answer to the Question, What is the Postmodern?” in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, U of Minnesota P, 1984
– Simon Malpas, The Postmodern, Routledge (the new critical idiom) 2005

All texts will be made available to the enrolled students in electronic form. Additional materials are received in class.