Course title: Aspects of American Romanticism (A, 19th c.)
Instructor:Dr Jelena Šesnić
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Duration: Semester 3 or 5
Status: elective
Enrolment requirements: enrolment in 3rd or 5th semester

Mon, 8:45-9:30 (A-105)
Wed, 10:15-11:45  (A-105)
Office: B-018
Phone: 01-4092060
E-mail: jsesnic@ffzg.hr
Office hours: Mon, 12:00-13:00; Thur 10-11

Course description: The period spans the decades from the 1820s to approximately the 1860s marked by the flowering of national literature in post-revolutionary times; the adoption and americanization of European ideas in so-called New England Transcendentalism, and the emergence of alternative (women, African Americans, commoners) voices. Alternatively called the American Renaissance, the period testifies to the coming-of-age of American literature. The texts are a representative selection of the unprecedented surge of creative energy that left no aspect of social and personal life untouched (from religion, education, women’s rights to politics and abolition), and will thus guide is in our examination of the past to which the American present owes so much.

Requirements: regular attendance; participation in class discussions; in-class and home assignments; seminar paper; mid-term + final test (continuous assessment)

Selected works:
R.W. Emerson: selection of essays
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (selection of poetry)
Henry David Thoreau: Walden (selection); selected essays
Herman Melville: short stories (selection) (“The Piazza”; “Bartleby, the Scrivener”; from The Encantadas: Sketches One and Two)
Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Hope Leslie (novel)
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (slave narrative)            

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

Additional reading:
Buell, Lawrence, ed. The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings. Modern Library Classics, 2006. (selection)
Phillips, Christopher, ed. Literature of the American Renaissance. Cambridge UP, 2018. (selection)
Reynolds, Larry J. The Routledge Introduction to American Renaissance Literature. Routledge, 2021.
Rowe, John Carlos. At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature.
Columbia UP, 1997. (selection)
Warren, Joyce, ed. The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Rutgers UP, 1993. (selection)

Course title: Contemporary American Novel
Instructor: Dr. Sven Cvek, Dr. Hrvoje Tutek
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 3rd and 5th or 4th and 6th
Enrollment requirements: enrollment in the 3rd and 5th or 4th and 6th semester

Course title: American Women’s Writing of the Nineteenth Century  (A, 19. st.)

Instructor: Dr. Jelena Šesnić

Fall 2022/23

Mon, 8:45-9:30 (A-105)

Wed, 10:15-11:45 (A-105)

E-mail: jsesnic@ffzg.hr

Phone: 01-4092060

Office: B-018

Office hours: Mon, 12:30-13:30 p.m.; Thur, 10-11 a.m.

Course requirements: Regular attendance, assignments 20%; seminar paper (6-7 pp, ca 2500 words; MLA) 30 %; continuous evaluation (a mid-term  and a final test) 50%.

Course description: The course is an overview of representative texts by and about women in nineteenth-century America. In order better to contextualize the texts, we shall be looking at two earlier traditions informing writing by women that are mutually compatible rather than exclusionary. The one is represented by Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and situates a woman at the center of the project of nation-building, while the other is exemplified by Rowson’s hugely popular sentimental/ seduction novel, from which the novel writing in the States takes off. Thus the feminine tradition appears to be crucial from the very beginning for the ways the American nation describes and represents itself. This argument, however, becomes possible only in the wake of the strong intervention into the field of literary history and literary canon formation enacted by feminist, poststructuralist, new historicist, and cultural critics from the 1970s onwards.

Required reading:

Novels/ narratives

1. Mary Rowlandson: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682)
2. Susanna Rowson: Charlotte Temple (1791)
3. Lydia Maria Child: Hobomok (1824)
4. Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl (1861)
5. Louisa May Alcott: Work: A Story of Experience (1873)
6. Frances Harper: Iola Leroy (1893)

Syllabus (alterations possible):

1. General introduction. Introduction to Rowlandson.
2. Analysis of cultural, political, ethical, and gendered implications of Rowlandson’s captivity
3. Rowson’s novel as a representative and generative instance of the sentimental/ seduction novel
4. Rowson, cont.
5. L.M. Child’s Hobomok and the idea of cultural nationalism
6. Child, cont.
7. Midterm.
8. Jacobs’s text in between the domestic, sentimental and seduction novels and the representative masculine slave narratives
9. Jacobs, cont.
10. Alcott’s Work as a story of women’s emergence in the public sphere in a transforming society
11. Alcott, cont.
12. Harper’s Iola Leroy and the post-slavery, post-Reconstruction America
13. Harper, cont.
14. Final test. Course evaluation.

 

Secondary literature (required):

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood : The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. (selection)

Castiglia, Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White

Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago, London: The U of Chicago P, 1996. (selection)

Elbert, Sarah. „Introduction.“ Work: A Story of Experience by Louisa May Alcott. Shocken Books: New York, 1977. Ix- xliv.

Goddu, Teresa. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP,

1997. (selection)

Grasso, Linda. The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature in America, 1820-1860. Chapel Hill, London: The U of North Carolina P, 2002. (selection)

Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Chapel Hill, London: The U of North Carolina P, 2001. (selection)

Howard, June. „What Is Sentimentality?“ American Literary History 11.1 (Spring 1990): 63-

81.

Nelson, Dana. The Word in Black and White: Reading ‘Race’ in American Literature, 1638-1867. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. (selection)

Schloss, Dietmar. “Republicanism and Politeness in the Early American Novel”. Early America Re-Explored: Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture. Eds. Fritz Fleischmann and Klaus H. Schmidt. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 269-90.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: the Mythology of the American

Frontier, 1600-1800, Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1973. (selection)

Welter, Barbara. „The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860“. 1966. Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline. Ed. Lucy Maddox. Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. 43-70.

 

 

 

Victorian Literature: Genres and Issues

Course title: Victorian Literature: Genres and Issues
Instructor: Prof. Borislav Knežević
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 3^rd and 5^th
Enrolment requirements: Introduction to Study of English Literature 1 and 2
Course description: This course is designed as an introduction to Victorian literature. The reading is made up by texts by representative works of some of the most important Victorian writers, and it covers the important genres of the period (fiction, poetry, nonfiction prose). The course will attempt to define the central themes of Victorian literature, that have to do with Victorian social makeup, industrialization, urbanization, imperialism, construction of gender roles, and professionalization of writing. Much of our work will be conducted through a close reading of formal and historical properties of the selected texts.
Objectives: The course places an emphasis on active student engagement with the literary text, in order for the students to master the skills of interpreting literary text. One of the important goals of this course is to allow students to improve their skills of written analysis of literature.
Course requirements: The grade is based on continuous evaluation: an essay in the second half of the term (5 pages), a mid-term quiz and a quiz at the end of term.

Week by week schedule:

1. week: Victorian poetry: Tennyson.1. week: Introduction to the Victorian age. Periodization, historical context; main genres of Victorian literature.
2. week: Victorian poetry: Tennyson.
3. week: Victorian poetry: Browning.
4. week: Victorian poetry: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
5. week: Victorian novel: professionalization of novel writing. The structure of the literary field and the literary market. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre.
6. week: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre. Gaskell, “Our Society at Cranford”.
7. week: Gaskell, North and South. Industrial novel as a Victorian genre.
8. week: First quiz. Gaskell, North and South. Social geography in the novel.
9. week: Gaskell. Victorian class system: Cannadine.
10. week: Social ethnography: Frances Trollope, Thackeray, Mayhew. Social criticism: Carlyle, J.S. Mill.
11. week: Social criticism: Ruskin, art and political economy.
12. week: Criticism: Arnold. Essay due.
13. week: Victorian poetry: Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Arnold
14. week: Victorian poetry: Arnold.
15. week: Second quiz. Course evaluation.

 

Reading:

Poetry:
Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulyssess,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade”
Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess,” “Love Among the Ruins”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese (selected poems)
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” “The Buried Life”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Blessed Damozel,” “The Burden of Nineveh”

Non-fiction prose:
Thomas Carlyle,“Condition of England,” from Past and Present
W.M. Thackeray, The Book of Snobs (selection)
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (selection)
Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”
Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Preface)

Fiction:
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Elizabeth Gaskell, “Our Society at Cranford,” North and South

Historical context:
David Cannadine, “A Viable Hierarchical Society,” from The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Course title: British Romanticism: poetry
Course coordinator: Martina Domines Veliki, PhD
Instructor: Martina Domines Veliki, PhD
2019/20
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Duration: 1 semester (3rd or 5th, 4th or 6th semester)
Status: elective
Course type: 1 hour of lecture, 2 hours of seminar
Prerequisites: Introduction to English Literature or Introduction into English Lit 1 and 2, 3/5 or 4/6 semester enrollment
Course requirements: continuous assessment (midterm and final exam, final paper, class attendance and participation)

Objective: The students will be introduced to the major poets of English Romanticism, as well as their relevant historical, cultural, political and aesthetic milieu. The aim of this course is to encourage students to create their own view of the suggested array of poems through close reading. They will be asked to think about and analyze these poems with the help of a number of critical texts (from new historicist to post-structuralist ones).

 

Course title: American Women’s Writing in the Nineteenth Century (A, 19. st.)
Winter 2018/2019
Mon, 8:45-9:30 (A-105)
Wed, 10:15-11:45 (A-105)
Instructor: Dr. Jelena Šesnić, Assoc. Prof.
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.
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English

Prerequisites: Enrolment in the 3rd or 5th semester of the English Language program.

Course requirements: Regular attendance; assignments (oral and written); seminar paper (6-7 pp, ca 2500 words); continuous evaluation (a mid-term and a final test).

Course description: The course is an overview of representative texts by and about women in nineteenth-century America. In order better to contextualize the texts, we shall be looking at two earlier traditions informing writing by women that are mutually compatible rather than exclusionary. The one is represented by Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and situates a woman at the centre of the project of nation-building, while the other is exemplified by Rowson’s hugely popular sentimental/ seduction novel, from which the novel writing in the States takes off. Thus the feminine tradition appears to be crucial from the very beginning for the way the American nation describes and represents itself. This argument, however, becomes possible only in the wake of the strong intervention into the field of literary history and literary canon formation enacted by feminist, poststructuralist, new historicist and cultural critics from the 1970s onwards.

Required reading:

Novels/ narratives

1. Mary Rowlandson: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682)
2. Susanna Rowson: Charlotte Temple (1791)
3. Lydia Maria Child: Hobomok (1824)
4. Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl (1861)
5. Louisa May Alcott: Work: A Story of Experience (1873)
6. Frances Harper: Iola Leroy (1893)

Syllabus
Week 1: General introduction. Introduction to Rowlandson.Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative as a formative national text; Richard Slotkin’s notion of „regeneration through violence“

Week 2: Analysis of cultural, political, ethical, and gendered implications of Rowlandson’s captivity

Week 3: Susanna Rowson’s novel as a representative and generative instance of the sentimental/ seduction novel

Week 4: Rowson’s novel in the context of transatlantic cultural exchange and sentimentalism

Week 5: L.M. Child’s Hobomok and the idea of cultural nationalism

Week 6: Hobomok as a revisionst text; politics of race and gender in the novel (Indian and female characters)

Week 7: Mid-term. Introduction to Jacobs’s slave narrative depicting her life in slavery

Week 8: Jacobs’s text in between the domestic, sentimental and seduction novels and representative masculine slave narratives

Week 9: Analysis of narrative and cultural strategies in conjunction with race and gender in Jacobs’s text.

Week 10: Alcott’s Work as a story of women’s emergence in the public sphere in a transforming society.

Week 11: Analysis of the novel’s accommodation of realism with the conventions of sentimentalism and women’s fiction.

Week 12: Harper’s Iola Leroy and the post-slavery, post-Reconstruction America. On-going influence of the domestic and sentimental fiction.

Week 13: Status and color distinction within the black community; Iola Leroy as a „tragic mulatta“ and the problem of passing.

Week 14: Final test. Student evaluation.

Secondary literature (required):
Castiglia, Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago, London: The U of Chicago P, 1996. (selection)

Elbert, Sarah. „Introduction.“ Work: A Story of Experience by Louisa May Alcott. Shocken Books: New York, 1977. Ix- xliv.

Foster, Frances S. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993. (selection)

Goddu, Teresa. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. (selection)

Grasso, Linda. The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature in America, 1820-1860. Chapel Hill, London: The U of North Carolina P, 2002. (selection)

Howard, June. «What Is Sentimentality?» American Literary History 11.1 (Spring 1990): 63-81.

Kaplan, Amy. «Manifest Domesticity». American Literature. No More Separate Spheres. 70.3 (September 1998): 581-606.

Nelson, Dana. The Word in Black and White: Reading ‘Race’ in American Literature, 1638-1867. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. (selection)

Schloss, Dietmar. “Republicanism and Politeness in the Early American Novel”. Early America Re-Explored: Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture. Eds. Fritz Fleischmann and Klaus H. Schmidt. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 269-90.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1800, Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1973. (selection)

Welter, Barbara. „The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860“. 1966. Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline. Ed. Lucy Maddox. Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. 43-70.

Optional reading:
American Literature. No More Separate Spheres. 70.3 (Sept. 1998).

Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse. „The Problem of Population and the Form of the American Novel“. American Literary History 20.4 (Winter 2008): 667-85.

Baym, Nina. «Women’s Novels and Women’s Minds: An Unsentimental View of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Fiction». Novel: A Forum on Fiction 31.3 (Summer 1998): 335-50.

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood : The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. (selection)

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. 1977. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

Elbert, Monika, ed. Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930. Tuscaloosa, London: The U of Alabama P, 2000.

Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Chapel Hill, London: The U of North Carolina P, 2001.

Karcher, Carolyn. «Reconceiving Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Challenge of Women Writers». American Literature 66.4 (Dec. 1994): 781-93.

Kelley, Mary. Private Women, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984.

Kilcup, Karen, ed. Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1999.

Maddock Dillon, Elizabeth. «Sentimental Aesthetics». American Literature 76.3 (September 2004): 495-523.

Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham, London: Duke UP, 2000.

Moon, Michael and Cathy Davidson, eds. Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oronooko to Anita Hill, Duke UP, Durham and London, 1995.

Romero, Lora. Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States. Durham, London: Duke UP, 1997.

Samuels, Shirley, ed. The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991.

Šesnić, Jelena. Mračne žene. Prikazi ženstva u američkoj književnosti (1820.-1860.). Zagreb: Leykam International, 2010.

Tate, Claudia. «Allegories of Black Female Desire; or, Rereading Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Narratives of Black Female Authority». Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writings by Black Women. Ed. Cheryl Wall. New Brunswick, London: Rutgers UP, 1991. 98-126.

Tawil, Ezra. „Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Became White“. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 32.1 (Fall 1998): 99-124.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.

Warren, Joyce, ed. The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1993.

Course title: The Nineteenth-Century American Novel (A, 19)
Mon, 8.45-9.30 (A-105); Wed, 9.30-11.00 (A-105)
Instructor: Dr. Jelena Šesnić
ECTS: 6
Language: English
Duration: Semester 3 to 6
Status: elective
Requirements: Introduction into the Study of English Literature 1 & 2

Course description: The novel figures as one of the key literary genres in the development of US national literature. The course proposes to chart a development and diversification of the American novel in the nineteenth century as it sustains the idea of American specificity on one hand, while, on the other, reflects derivation from and postcolonial cultural dependence on the European (English) literary models. The growing sense of American cultural consciousness will be traced on the exemplary novels that are still important cultural landmarks. In addition, the development of the novel suggests changes of literary styles and periods ranging from neo-classicist to romantic to realist and beyond. At the same time, these novels exemplify the most common sub-genres of the American novel at the time.
The proposed primary texts include: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851; romance/ the philosophical novel; with some omissions); E . A. Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838; the adventure/ gothic novel); Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852; the sentimental novel); and William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885; the realist novel).
Syllabus (alterations possible)
Week 1: American literature as a postcolonial form (Buell); Emerson’s idea of an American author in “The Poet”
Week 2: Jehlen, the novel and the middle class; Chase, the romance and the novel, the idea of an “American tradition”; Melville: Moby-Dick
Week 3: Moby-Dick (cont.); Melville in the context of his times (letters to Hawthorne; “Hawthorne and His Mosses”); Moby-Dick as the great American novel (Buell)
Week 4: Moby-Dick (cont.)
Week 5: Edgar Allan Poe: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; the romance and the gothic tradition; Hawthorne’s prefaces
Week 6: Pym (cont.); Goddu: the gothic, whiteness and blackness
Week 7: Pym (cont.)
Week 8: Mid-term test.
Week 9: Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the sentimental intervention; reform and politics vs art and literature?; the American novel and slavery
Week 10: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (cont.); Jane Tompkins and the “other” American Renaissance
Week 11: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (cont.)
Week 12: WD Howells: The Rise of Silas Lapham; the problem of “American realism” (Howells, Twain)
Week 13: The Rise (cont.); Henry James’s selected prefaces; from James’s The American Scene
Week 14: The Rise (cont.)
Week 15: Final test. Student evaluation.

A. Primary readings:

Novels:
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick (with some omissions)
E.A. Poe: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
William Dean Howells: The Rise of Silas Lapham

Prefaces, manifestoes, criticism, reviews:
W. Emerson: “The Poet”
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Prefaces (selection)
William Dean Howells: “A Call for Realism”
Henry James: The Art of the Novel (selection); The American Scene (selection)
Herman Melville: “Hawthorne and His Mosses”
Mark Twain: “James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”

Buell, Lawrence. “The Unkillable Dream of the Great American Novel: Moby-Dick as Test Case”. American Literary History 20. 1-2 (Spring-Summer 2008): 132-55.
Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957. 1-28.
Goddu, Teresa. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. (selection)
Hamilton, Geordie. “Rethinking the Politics of American Realism Through the Narrative Form and Moral Rhetoric of W.D. Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham”. American Literary Realism 42.1 (Fall 2009): 13-35.
Jehlen, Myra. “The Novel and the Middle Class in America”. Ideology and Classic American Literature. Eds. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 125-44.
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. 122-46.

B. Supplementary readings:

Buell, Lawrence. “American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon”. American Literary History 4.3 (Autumn 1992): 411-42.
Castronovo, Russ. Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. (selection)
Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. (selection)
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. (selection)
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964. (selection)
Pease, Donald E., ed. New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Requirements: regular attendance and active participation in the seminar (10% of the grade); in-class and home assignments (10 %); written tests (mid-term and final: 50 %; continuous assessment, mandatory); seminar paper (6-7 double-spaced pages, MLA style, 30 %)

 

 

Course title: British Romanticism: poetry
(Former course title: English Romantic Poetry)
Course coordinator: Martina Domines Veliki, PhD
Instructor: Martina Domines Veliki, PhD
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Duration: 1 semester (3rd or 5th, 4th or 6th semester)
Status: elective
Course type: 1 hour of lecture, 2 hours of seminar
Prerequisites: Introduction to English Literature or Introduction into English Lit 1 and 2, 3/5 or 4/6 semester enrollment
Course requirements: continuous assessment (midterm and final exam, final paper, class attendance and participation)

Objective: The students will be introduced to the major poets of English Romanticism, as well as their relevant historical, cultural, political and aesthetic milieu. The aim of this course is to encourage students to create their own view of the suggested array of poems through close reading. They will be asked to think about and analyze these poems with the help of a number of critical texts (from new historicist to post-structuralist ones).

Course description: Authors we will read include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. Through reading of their representative poetry we will tackle some fundamental Romantic concepts such as poetic inspiration, memory of the past events, the sublime, deism and mysticism, the relationship between the poetic subject and nature as well as the role played by language. The poetic subject becomes the central topic of most Romantic poetry and it is actualized through a close relationship with nature that acts as either a consoling or a debilitating force. Priority will be given to the Romantic poets of the first generation. These poets often imagine themselves to be responding to the French Revolution. They rebel against social injustice, cherishing feelings for ‘common’ people and believing, in the words of Shelley, that they are indeed the acknowledged ‘legislators of the world’.

Weekly schedule:
week 1: Introduction into English Romanticism. Historical background.
week 2: William Blake – selections from Songs of Innocence and Experience
week 3: Blake continued – “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
week 4: William Wordsworth – excerpts from the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, a selection of poems from Lyrical Ballads
week 5: Wordsworth continued: a selection of poems from Poems in Two Volumes
week 6: Wordsworth continued – The Prelude (chosen books)
week 7: Samuel Taylor Coleridge – selections from Biographia Literaria
week 8: Coleridge continued – “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “Dejection: an Ode”, “Kubla Khan”
midterm exam
week 9: George Gordon Byron – excerpts from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
week 10: Byron continued – excerpts from Don Juan , “Prometheus”, “Fare Thee Well”
week 11: Percy Bysshe Shelley – “Ozymandias”, “Ode to the West Wind”
week 12: Shelley continued – “To a Skylark”, excerpts from “A Defence of Poetry”, “Prometheus Unbound”
week 13: John Keats: “To Autumn”, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
week 14: Keats continued – “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
week 15. : final exam and final paper

READING LIST:

Primary literature:
Curran, Stuart (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998)
Roe, Nicholas. Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005)
Wu, Duncan. Romanticism: An Anthology (3rd edition) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)
Wu, Duncan: A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)

Secondary literature:
Abrams, M. H.: The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford UP, 1960)
Abrams, M. H.: Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (London: Oxford UP, 1971)
Ashfield, Andrew and Peter de Bolla. The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1996)
Bainbridge, Simon (ed.) Romanticism: A Sourcebook (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
Bennett, Andrew: Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge UP, 1999)
Bloom, Harold: The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (London: Cornell UP, any edition)
Bone, Drummond: The Cambridge Companion to Byron (Cambridge UP, 2004)
Bromwich, David: Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Butler, Marilyn: Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries – English Literature and its Background 1760-1830 (Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1981)
Day, Aidan: Romanticism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996)
de Man, Paul: The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984)
Duffy, Cian. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge UP, 2005)
Duffy, Cian and Peter Howell (ed.) Cultures of the Sublime (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
Erdman, David: Blake : Prophet against Empire (New York : Dover, 1991)
Gill, Stephen: The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth (Cambridge UP, 2003)
Hartman, Geoffrey: Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787-1813 (Harvard UP, 1987)
Lucas, John. William Blake: Longman Critical Reader (New York: Longman, 1998)
Mellor, Anne K.: Romanticism and Gender (Routledge, 1993)
Morton, Timothy: The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (Cambridge UP, 2006)
Newlyn, Lucy: The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (Cambridge UP, 2002)
Pfau, Thomas and Robert F. Gleckner (ed.) Lessons of Romanticism (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1998)
Roe, Nicholas. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003)
Scrivener, Michael Henry. Radical Shelley (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982)
Simpson, David. Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination (New York and London: Methuen, 1987)
White, R.S. Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
Wolfson, Susan: The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge UP, 2001)

___________________________
(except ac. year 2019/20)

 

 

Dr Jelena Šesnić
Literary Seminar (2nd/3rd year): Aspects of American Romanticism (A, 19th c.)
Winter 2019/2020
Mon, 8:45-9:30 (A-105)
Wed, 10:15-11:45 (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 period spans the decades from the 1820s to approximately the 1860s marked by the flowering of national literature in post-revolutionary times; the adoption and americanization of European ideas in so-called New England Transcendentalism, and the emergence of alternative (women, African Americans, commoners) voices. Alternatively called the American Renaissance, the period testifies to the coming-of-age of American literature. The texts are a representative selection of the unprecedented surge of creative energy that left no aspect of social and personal life untouched (from religion, education, women’s rights to politics and abolition), and will thus guide is in our examination of the past to which the American present owes so much.

Requirements: regular attendance; participation in class discussions; in-class and home assignments; seminar paper 6-7 pp. (ca 2000 words); mid-term + final test (continuous assessment, mandatory)

Selected works:

R.W. Emerson: selection of essays
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (poetry, selection)
Henry David Thoreau: Walden (selection); selected essays
Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century (essay)
Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Hope Leslie (novel)
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Herman Melville: Typee (novel; selection)

Readings (alterations possible)

October

Week 1: Introduction: key concepts; lit-historical context

Week 2: Emerson: selected essays („The American Scholar“, „Self-Reliance“)

Week 3: Emerson: „The Poet“; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (selection)

Week 4: Thoreau: Walden (selected chapters)

Week 5: Thoreau: Walden (selected chapters)

November

Week 1: Thoreau: „Civil Disobedience“, „A Plea for Captain John Brown“ (essays)

Week 2: Fuller: „Autobiographical romance“, „Self-definitions“ (excerpts)

Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth-Century

Week 3: Fuller: Woman. *Mid-term.*

Week 4: Sedgwick: Hope Leslie

December

Week 1: Sedgwick: Hope Leslie

Week 2: Douglass: The Narrative

Week 3: Douglass: cont.

January

Week 1: Melville: Typee

Week 2: Melville, cont. *Seminar paper submission.*

Week 3: Evaluation. *Final test.*

 

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

Additional reading:

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad, Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1978. (selection)

Pease, Donald. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context, Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987. (selection)

Pease, Donald, ed. National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, Durham: Duke UP, 1994. (selection)

Rowe, John Carlos. At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature.

New York: Columbia UP, 1997. (selection)

Warren, Joyce, ed. The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1993. (selection)

Course title: Contemporary American Novel
Instructor: Prof. Stipe Grgas, Dr. Sven Cvek, Dr. Hrvoje Tutek
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 3rd and 5th or 4th and 6th
Enrollment requirements: enrollment in the 3rd and 5th or 4th and 6th semester
Course description: The course explores a number of novels which have been published since 9/11. The argument for targeting this body of texts derives from the notion that the contemporary or the “now” of the United States dates from this event. The course attempts to describe the form of the novel in contemporary US writing, the manner in which it reflects the present moment in US history and the way it engages the challenges of present reality.
Objectives: The purpose of the course is to develop the student’s ability to approach literary texts and to broaden their perspectives on the complexity of US reality.
Course requirements: continual attendance, oral presentation, written assignment, written final exam

Week by week schedule: the event, the present, 9/11 and its representations, American myths and their literary representations, the new regionalism, the city and capital, the sense of the ending

Reading List:
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice
Steve Erickson, Shadowbahn
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Don Delillo, Cosmopolis
Don DeLillo, „Hammer and Sickle“
Annie Proulx, „Tits Up in a Ditch“
Paul Beatty, The Sellout
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

 

Dr Jelena Šesnić
Literary Seminar (2nd/3rd year): Aspects of American Romanticism (A, 19th c.)
Fall 2016/2017
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Status: elective
Duration:   3^rd or 5^th semester
Mon, 8:45-9:30 (A-105)
Wed, 10:15-11:45 (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 period spans the decades from the 1820s to approximately the 1860s marked by the flowering of national literature in post-revolutionary times; the adoption and americanization of European ideas in so-called New England Transcendentalism, and the emergence of alternative (women, African Americans, commoners) voices. Alternatively called the American Renaissance, the period testifies to the coming-of-age of American literature. The texts are a representative selection of the unprecedented surge of creative energy that left no aspect of social and personal life untouched (from religion, education, women’s rights to politics and abolition), and will thus guide is in our examination of the past to which the American present owes so much.

Requirements: regular attendance; participation in class discussions; in-class and home assignments; seminar paper 6-7 pp. (ca 2000 words); mid-term + final test (continuous assessment, mandatory)

Selected works:
R.W. Emerson: selection of essays
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (selection)
Henry David Thoreau: Walden (selection)
Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Hope Leslie (novel)
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Herman Melville: Typee (novel)

Readings (alterations possible)

October 2016
Week 1: Introduction: key concepts; lit-historical context
Emerson: selected essays („The American Scholar“, „Self-Reliance“)
Week 2: Emerson: „The Poet“; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (selection)
Week 3: Thoreau: Walden (selected chapters)
Week 4: Thoreau: Walden (selected chapters)

November 2016
Week 1: Thoreau: „Civil Disobedience“, „A Plea for Captain John Brown“.
Week 2: Fuller: „Autobiographical romance“, „Self-definitions“ (excerpts)
Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth-Century
Week 3: Fuller: Woman (cont.)
Week 4: Sedgwick: Hope Leslie (intro). *Mid-term.*

December 2016
Week 1: Sedgwick: cont.
Week 2: Sedgwick: cont.
Week 3: Douglass: The Narrative
Week 4: Douglass: cont.

January 2017
Week 1: Melville: Typee (intro)
Week 2: Melville, cont. *Seminar paper submission.*
Week 3: Melville, cont. *Evaluation. Final test.*

Secondary readings: additional reading material will be provided in digital form on Omega.
Additional reading:
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad, Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1978. (selection)
Pease, Donald. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context, Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987. (selection)
Pease, Donald, ed. National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, Durham: Duke UP, 1994. (selection)
Rowe, John Carlos. At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature.
New York: Columbia UP, 1997. (selection)
Warren, Joyce, ed. The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1993. (selection)

 

Course title: The Victorian Novel. Poetics and Politics
(Former title of the course: Victorian novel – poetics and cultural politics)
Instructor: Professor Tatjana Jukić
ECTS  credits: 6
Language: English
Semester: 3 or 5
Enrollment requirements: Introduction to the Study of English Literature 1 and 2

Course description: The course attempts to describe and analyze the poetics and the politics of the Victorian novel. It explores how the novel engages and reciprocates the complexity of the Victorian natural sciences, the Victorian visual arts and the Victorian social and political theory. We will focus on the selected novels by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Students are encouraged to read at least one extra novel, by Anthony Trollope and/or Thomas Hardy.

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 Victorian culture and the Victorian novel.
WEEK 2 The Victorian novel and the natural sciences. Lyell and Darwin.
WEEK 3 The social and political prerogatives of the Victorian novel (1). Victorian women writers.
WEEK 4 The social and political prerogatives of the Victorian novel (2). Bentham and utilitarianism.
WEEK 5 The Victorian novel and the visual arts (1). Panopticism. Narration and focalization.
WEEK 6 The Victorian novel and the visual arts (2). The Pre-Raphaelites.
WEEK 7 Midterm.
WEEK 8 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1).
WEEK 9 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (2).
WEEK 10 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1).
WEEK 11 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (2).
WEEK 12 George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical (1).
WEEK 13 George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical (2).
WEEK 14 Final discussion.
WEEK 15 Final test. Evaluation.

Required reading:
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861.
George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical, 1866.

Optional reading:
George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871.
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969.
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, 1874.
Antohony Trollope, Doctor Thorne, 1858.
Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard UP. 2000. 75-124.
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1983. 236-258.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard UP. 1992. 113-142.
Tatjana Jukić, Zazor, Nadzor, sviđanje. Dodiri književnog i vizualnog u britanskom 19. stoljeću. Zagreb: Zavod za znanost o književnosti Filozofskog fakulteta u Zagrebu. 2002. 157-208, 291-320.
J. Hillis Miller, Victorian Subjects. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 229-235, 289-302.
Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference. Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. New York i London: Routledge. 1988. 91-114.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP. 1977. 37-72.
Herbert F. Tucker (ed.). Victorian Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. 1999. 307-404.425-437.

 

Course Title: Aspects of American Romanticism (A, 19. st.)
Instructor: Dr  Jelena Šesnić
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Status: elective
Duration:   3^rd or 5^th semester

Fall 2015/2016
Mon, 8:45-9:30 (A-105)
Wed, 9:30-11 (A-105)
______________________________________________________________________________________

Course description: The period spans the decades from the 1820s to approximately the 1860s marked by the flowering of national literature in post-revolutionary times; the adoption and americanization of European ideas in so-called New England Transcendentalism, and the emergence of alternative (women, African Americans, commoners) voices. Alternatively called the American Renaissance, the period testifies to the coming-of-age of American literature. The texts are a representative selection of the unprecedented surge of creative energy that left no aspect of social and personal life untouched (from religion, education, women’s rights to politics and abolition), and will thus guide is in our examination of the past to which the American present owes so much.

Requirements: regular attendance; participation in class discussions; in-class and home assignments; seminar paper 6-7 pp. (ca 2000 words); mid-term + final test (continuous assessment, mandatory, non-negotiable)

Selected works:

R.W. Emerson: selection of essays

Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (selection)

Henry David Thoreau: Walden (selection); selection of essays

Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century; selection of essays

Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Hope Leslie (novel)

Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Herman Melville: Typee (novel)

 

Weekly Readings (alterations possible)

 

October 2015

Week 1: Introduction: key concepts; lit-historical context

Emerson: selected essays („The American Scholar“, „Self-Reliance“)

Week 2: Emerson: „The Poet“; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (selection)

Week 3: Thoreau: Walden (selected chapters)

Week 4: Thoreau: Walden, cont.

 

November 2015

Week 1: Thoreau: „Civil Disobedience“, „A Plea for Captain John Brown“

Week 2: Fuller: „Autobiographical romance“, „Self-definitions“ (excerpts)

Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth-Century

Week 3: Fuller: Woman (cont.)

Week 4: Sedgwick: Hope Leslie (intro) *Mid-term.

December 2015

Week 1: Sedgwick: cont

Week 2: Sedwwick: cont.

Week 3: Douglass: The Narrative

Week 4: Douglass: cont.

 

January 2016

Week 1: Melville: Typee (intro)

Week 2: Melville, cont. *Seminar paper submission.

Week 3: Melville, cont. Evaluation. *Final test.

 

Secondary readings:

• Additional reading material will be provided in digital form on Omega.

 

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad, Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1978. (selection)

Pease, Donald. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context, Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987. (selection)

Pease, Donald, ed. National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, Durham: Duke UP, 1994. (selection)

Rowe, John Carlos. At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature.

New York: Columbia UP, 1997. (selection)

Warren, Joyce, ed. The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1993. (selection)

 

 

 

Course title: American Postmodernism and Popular Culture
Instructor: Asst. Prof. Sven Cvek, Hrvoje Tutek
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 2^nd or 3^rd year of undergraduate studies
Enrollment requirements: student must be registered in the 3^rd semester
Course description: This course centers on some crucial aspects of US postmodernism, such as a transforming relationship between “popular” and “high” culture, inquiries into the exchanges between historiography and fiction, and questions of availability of critical positions in the “late-capitalist” society. The course will focus on selected US postmodern novels, their interpretations, and their interactions with various forms of popular culture (textual, visual, musical), commonly understood either as sites of authentic expression of “the people,” or as fundamentally inauthentic products of an alienating culture industry. The discussion will include issues of: the distinction between mass and popular culture, consumerism, culture industry and cultural amnesia, simulacra, culture as a question of identity, globalization and Americanization, utopia.
Objectives: students will learn about the important cultural, social and political aspects of American postmodernism and their relation to the literary production of the period. The course also aims at preparing the students for a critical, contextually and theoretically informed reading of the novels, with a special emphasis on approaches informed by cultural studies.
Course requirements: regular attendance, written test, essay paper.

Week by week schedule: TBA

Reading: four or five of the following titles:
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
Willam Gibson, Neuromancer
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Douglas Coupland, Generation X
Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
Colson Whitehead, Zone One
Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed
George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation

Students will also be required to read the course reader (about 200 pages) that provides the historical context and theoretical background for the course.

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