Irish culture

Dr. Aidan O’Malley, visiting lecturer
Subject: Modern literature
Course title: Irish culture
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Duration: 1 semester
Status: elective
Course type: lectures, seminars
Prerequisites: enrolment in 3rd / 5th semester
Course requirements:

  • 10-15 minute oral presentation
  • Mid-term exam (you are not permitted to answer a question on the text you presented)
  • Final exam (you are not permitted to answer a question on the text you presented)
  • 1,500-2,000 word essay based on your presentation. Plagiarism will result in a fail grade.
  • Attendance and participation in class

Course description: This course provides an overview of Irish history, politics, literature and culture more generally, with the focus on the period from the late-nineteenth century to the present. Particular attention is paid to the intersections of political and cultural impulses that led to the creation of the two states in the twentieth century—the Republic and Northern Ireland—and to understanding how both subsequently operated as states. To do this, the course explores how ideas of what constituted Irish identity have been proposed, have come to assume hegemonic force, have been debated and resisted through political and cultural activities, as well as through modes of historical interpretation.
Objective: The course intends to further students’ skills in understanding how literary and other cultural texts interact with political and historical events. To this end, students will be introduced to some of the major texts in twentieth-century Irish literature and history. They will also be introduced to some of the major debates in Irish Studies such as postcolonialism, revisionism and nationalism.

Syllabus:

Session 1: Outlining the course and organisation of presentations
Session 2: Locating Ireland

Overview of Irish history and culture up to the 19th century
Session 3: Colonialism and Nationalism
Lecture: 19th-century Irish nationalism

Seminar: The Famine; Celticism; Cultural nationalism
Session 4: The Literary Revival
Lecture: The Revival and the founding of the Abbey Theatre

Seminar: W.B. Yeats, Cathleen Ni Houlihan; On Baile’s Strand
Session 5: The Myth of the West
Lecture: The role of the west in the Irish imagination

Seminar: J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World; John Ford, dir., The Quiet Man
Session 6: Joyce
Lecture: Introduction to Joyce
Seminar: ‘The Dead’, from Dubliners
Session 7: The Founding of the Free State
Lecture: 1916; The War of Independence; The Civil War
Seminar: Neil Jordan, dir., Michael Collins
Session 8: The Creation of Northern Ireland
Lecture: Unionism; World War II; The founding of Northern Ireland

Seminar: Frank McGuinness, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme
Session 9: Mid-Term Exam
Session 10: Being Irish in English
Lecture: The creation of an Irish identity in English

Seminar: Brian Friel, Translations
Session 11: The Northern Irish ‘Troubles’
Lecture: The history of the ‘Troubles’

Seminar: Paul Greengrass, dir., Bloody Sunday
Session 12: The Artistic Response to the ‘Troubles’
Lecture: The Northern Irish literary ‘renaissance’

Seminar: Seamus Heaney, selected poems; Anne Devlin, Ourselves Alone; Steve McQueen, dir., Hunger
Session 13: Gender in Ireland
Lecture: Women and gender in the Republic and Northern Ireland
Seminar: Eavan Boland, ‘Outside History’; Marina Carr, The Mai
Session 14: Sport in Ireland
Lecture: Varieties of sports in Ireland and their relationships with political and cultural movements; the GAA
Seminar: Football (soccer); Rugby; Horse racing
Session 15: Irish Music and Contemporary Ireland
Lecture: From Carolan to boy bands
Seminar: Traditional music; popular music; Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, dirs., Good Vibrations (2013)

Presentations

Session 4: Use of Irish myth in W.B. Yeats, On Baile’s Strand
W.B. Yeats, Cathleen Ni Houlihan and cultural nationalism
Session 5: Fathers and sons in J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World:

Gender relations and stereotypes in John Ford, dir., The Quiet Man:
Session 6: The dead in Joyce, ‘The Dead’
Session 7: Heroes and anti-heroes in Neil Jordan, dir., Michael Collins
Session 8: Masculinities in Frank McGuinness, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching
towards the Somme
Session 10: The depiction of language change in Brian Friel, Translations
Session 11: Concepts of justice in Paul Greengrass, dir., Bloody Sunday
Session 12: Senses of roots in Seamus Heaney, selected poems (‘Digging’; ‘Mid-Term

Break’; ‘Personal Helicon’; ‘Requiem for the Croppies’; ‘Toome’; ‘Broagh’;
‘The Tollund Man’)
Steve McQueen, dir., Hunger: the body as the site of politics
The depiction of the roles of women in the ‘Troubles’ in Anne Devlin,
Ourselves Alone
Session 13: Women in Ireland in the 20th century

Women, Ireland and Literature in Eavan Boland, ‘Outside History’
(De)generations in Marina Carr, The Mai
Session 14: Football (soccer); Rugby; Horse racing. Focus on the historical

developments of these sports, their political and social statuses and
how these may have changed, where they have featured in literary
and popular culture.
Session 15: The history of traditional music

Popular music since the 1960s in Ireland
Punk and the ‘Troubles’ in Good Vibrations

Required reading:
W.B. Yeats, On Baile’s Strand
J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World
Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock
Frank McGuinness, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme
John McGahern, Amongst Women
Other texts listed in the syllabus will be available for photocopying as a Reader.

Optional references:
The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vols. I-V, (Derry and Cork: Field Day and Cork University Press, 1991 and 2002)
Irish University Review, vol. 33, no. 1, (2003), ‘New Perspectives on the Irish Literary Revival’
Irish University Review, 35: 1 Spring/Summer 2005, (Special John McGahern issue)
The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 17:1, July 1991, (Special John McGahern issue)
The Irish Review, 4, Spring 1988, (Nationalism and Revisionism Symposium)
Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster: New Updated Edition, (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2001)
George D. Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, 3rd ed., (London and New York: Routledge, 1995)
Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, XXVI: 104, November 1989, pp. 329-351
Ciaran Brady, (ed.), Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1938-1994, (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994)
Malcolm Brown, The Politics of Irish Literature: from Thomas Davis to W.B. Yeats, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972)
Terence Brown, (ed.), Celticism, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996)
Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-1985, (London: Fontana, 1985)
Steve Bruce, God Save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988)
Clare Carroll and Patricia King, (eds.), Ireland and Post-Colonial Theory, (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002)
Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990)
Roy Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland, (London and New York: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001)
Roy Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, (London: Penguin, 1988)
Roy Foster, ‘The Problems of Writing Irish History’, History Today, 34: 1, January 1984, pp. 27-30.
Roy Foster, ‘‘We Are All Revisionists Now’’, The Irish Review, 1, 1986, pp. 1-5.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983)
Ernest Gellner, Culture, Identity, and Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996)
Joseph J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Ben Levitas, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Nationalism, 1890-1916, (Oxford University Press, 2002)
David Lloyd, Ireland After History, (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999)
F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890-1939, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)
Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town, 3rd ed., (London and Boulder, Colorado: Pluto Press, 1993)
Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992, (Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2000)
W. J. McCormack, (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)
John McGahern, Memoir, (London: Faber, 2006)
Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: A Mirror up to Nation, (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997)
Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People, (London and New York: Routledge, 2001)
Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness, (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994)
William Irwin Thompson, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916, A Study of an Ideological Movement, (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1972)

American Women’s Writing in the Nineteenth Century (archive)

Course title: American Women’s Writing in the Nineteenth Century (A, 19. st.)
Subject: Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Instructor: Dr. sc. Jelena Šesnić
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Duration: Fall semester
Status: Elective
Course type: 1 period lecture + 2 periods seminar
Prerequisites: Enrolment in the 3rd or 5th semester
Course requirements: Regular attendance; assignments in and outside class (discussion, written tasks, short presentations); 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 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 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. Rebecca Harding Davis: Margret Howth (1861)
6. Frances Harper: Iola Leroy (1893)

Syllabus

Week 1: Two traditions of women’s writing in the USA; historical and cultural contexts of their emergence (Welter’s thesis, competing views). Revisionist interventions into the canon formation.

Week 2: Introduction to Rowlandson.Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative as a formative national text; Richard Slotkin’s notion of „regeneration through violence“

Week 3: Analysis of cultural, political, ethical, and gendered implications of Rowlandson’s captivity

Week 4: Susanna Rowson’s novel as a representative and generative instance of the seduction novel

Week 5: Rowson’s novel in the context of transatlantic cultural exchange and sentimentalism

Week 6: L.M. Child’s Hobomok and the idea of cultural nationalism

Week 7: Hobomok as a revisionst text; politics of race and gender in the novel (Indian and female characters)

Week 8: Mid-term. Introduction to Jacobs’s slave narrative depicting her life in slavery

Week 9: Jacobs’s text in between the domestic, sentimental and seduction novels and representative masculine slave narratives

Week 10: Analysis of narrative and cultural strategies in conjunction with race and gender in Jacobs’s text.

Week 11: Harding Davis’s Margret Howth as a novel of the industralizing America and of the emerging working class.

Week 12: Analysis of the novel’s accommodation of realism with the conventions of sentimentalism and women’s fiction.

Week 13: Harper’s Iola Leroy and the post-slavery, post-Reconstruction America. On-going influence of the domestic and sentimental fiction.

Week 14: Status and color distinction within the black community; Iola Leroy as a „tragic mulatta“ and the problem of passing.

Week 15: 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)
– 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.
– Yellin, Jean Fagan. „The ‘Feminization’ of Rebecca Harding Davis“. American Literary History 2.2 (Summer 1990): 203-19.

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


 

Creating Place Out of Space: Early Australian Literature

Course title: Creating Place Out of Space: Early Australian Literature
Instructor: Dr. Tihana Klepač, Assoc. Prof.

ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Status: elective
Enrolment requirements: enrolment in 3rd or 5th semester
Course requirements: continuous assessment; regular attendance, work in class, 1 written assignment, mid-term and end-term exam.
Course description: Selected texts exemplify the creation of place out of space on the Australian continent. The course traces the formulation of the Australian national Self from the first descriptions of landscape worlding (Spivak) Australia, introducing the country into cultural circulation, to the acceptance of geographical and historical particularities, coming to terms with inherited ways of representing the continent and the nation, to the emergence of national consciousness in late 19th century and the formulation of the nation through novels which are postulated as the culmination of the national impulse. The course thus outlines the process whereby an unknown and distant land becomes a home.
Objectives: The objective of the course is to awaken the students’ awareness of the ways in which narrations formulate the national self by exploring the example of early Australian literature.
Course requirements: The final grade is based on continuous assessment which includes regular attendance, preparation for and participation in class, writing small assignments, timely submission of the final paper, and obligatory sitting for midterm and endterm exam. Students must meet all requirements of continuous assessment.

Week by week schedule:
WEEK 1
Introduction to the history and culture of Australia

WEEK 2
Representing a New World: 1789 – 1850;
Australia as a Land of Oddities

WEEK 3
Worlding of the continent (Spivak); James Cook’s diaries, travel writing by Australian inland explorers: Edward Eyre, Charles Sturt (excerpts)

WEEK 4
The Colonial Period 1850 – 1890; British penal system; Governor Phillips’s diary; films: Discovery: Short History of the World – Convict Australia, Timewatch: The Floating Brothel
WEEK 5
Narratives of crime and punishment, influence of environment on the character; the formulation of national characteristics; Marcus Clarke: For the Term of His Natural Life, Rolf Boldrewood: Robbery Under Arms (excerpts)

WEEK 6
«Damned Whore» vs. «God’s Police» – representation of women in Australian; film Timewatch: The Floating Brothel
WEEK 7
Literature by women: interventions in the romance, as the genre available to women writers, to discuss the position of women, marriage and often the very conventions of the genre; Ada Cambridge: A Marked Man (excerpts)

WEEK 8
Imitating Victorian models: sonnets, love poems; abandoning the Victorian model, description of bushrangers in blank verse; early formulation of national symbols: the spell of the bush, the bush grave; poetry: Harpur, Kendall, Gordon, Ada Cambridge (selected poems)

Mid-term exam
WEEK 9
The Nationalist Period 1890 – 1922; development of cities: Sydney, Melbourne; the role of The Bulletin, Angus & Robertson and the Heidelberg school of painting

WEEK 10
Abandoning the conventions of romance and melodrama, readers are no longer British consumers of exotic stories about the colonies. Representation of Australia “from within”; ideas about Australian landscape and the national character; ballad: Paterson: “The Man from Snowy River”; excerpt from the film The Man from Snowy River, 1982, director: George Miller

WEEK 11
Short story: Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton (selected stories)

WEEK 12 – 13
Novel as a form of nation building – Novels of the Federation; Miles Franklin: My Brilliant Career; film: My Brilliant Career, 1979, director: Gillian Anderson; Joseph Furphy: Such is Life (excerpts)

WEEK 14
End-term exam.

Reading:
Due to unavailability of reference material, all relevant texts are contained in Early Australian Literature Reader and contains texts from the following editions:

– Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1988
– Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, Vintage, New York, 1988
– Elizabeth Webby, “Introduction” and “Colonial writers and readers,” The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, Elizabeth Webby (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 1-18 and 50-74
– Kerryn Goldsworthy, “Fiction from 1900-1970,” The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, Elizabeth Webby (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 105-109
– Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, The Colonization of Women in Australia, Penguin, London, 1981
– Susan Sheridan, Along the Faultlines – Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, 1995
– Leigh Astbury, City Bushmen, The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology, Oxford UP, Melbourne, 1985

 

British Romanticism: poetry (archive)

Course title: British Romanticism: poetry
(Former course title: English Romantic Poetry
)
Instructor:
Martina Domines Veliki, PhD
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Duration: 3rd or 5th, 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
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. Their innovations at the level of subject matter but also of literary form were far-reaching to the point that we could speak about them as being the first ‘modern’ writers.
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 more traditional to post-structuralist ones).
Course requirements: continuous assessment (midterm and final exam, final paper, class attendance and participation).

Weekly schedule::
1. week. Introduction to English Romanticism. Periodization. Formative experiences for Romantic poetry
2. week. William Blake. Selections from Songs of Innocence and Experience
3. week. Blake continued – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
4. week. William Wordsworth, excerpts from the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, a selection of poems from Lyrical Ballads
5. week. Wordsworth continued – a selection of poems from Poems in two Volumes
6. week. Wordsworth continued – The Prelude (chosen books)
7. week. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – selections from Biographia Literaria
8. week. Coleridge continued – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Dejection: an Ode
9. week. Mid-term exam
10. week. George Gordon Byron – excerpts from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
11. week. Byron continued – Prometheus, Fare Thee Well
12. week. Percy Bysshe Shelley – Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind
13. week. Shelley continued – To a Skylark, excerpts from A Defence of Poetry, Preface to Prometheus Unbound
14. week. John Keats – To Autumn, La Belle Dame Sans merci, Ode on a Grecian Urn
15. week. End-term exam

Reading list:
Primary literature:
– Bloom, Harold & Trilling, Lionel: Romantic Poetry and Prose (New York, London, Toronto : Oxford University Press , 1973) ili Wu, Duncan: A Companion to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)
– Abrams, M. H.: The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1960)
– Bloom, Harold: The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry  (London: Cornell University Press, any edition)
– Curran, Stuart (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
– Daiches, David: A Critical History of English Literature in four volumes (relevant  chapters) (London : Secker & Warburg , 1992)

Secondary literature::
– Abrams, M. H.: Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic  Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1971)
– Bennett, Andrew: Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge UP, 1999)
– Brisman, Leslie: Romantic Origins (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978)
– 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 University Press, 1981)
– Day, Aidan: Romanticism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996)
– de Man, Paul: The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)
– 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)
– Mellor, Anne K.: Romanticism and Gender (Routledge, 1993)
– Roe, Nicholas. Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon  Press, 2003)
– Reed, Arden: Romanticism and Language (Cornell University Press, 1984)
– Bone, Drummond: The Cambridge Companion to Byron (Cambridge UP, 2004)
– Morton, Timothy: The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (Cambridge UP, 2006)
– Newlyn, Lucy: The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (Cambridge UP, 2002)
– Wolfson, Susan: The Cambridge Companion to Keats (Cambridge UP, 2001)

 

 

American literature and culture 1: The Old South

Course title: American literature and culture 1: The Old South
Instructor:
Prof. Douglas Ambrose (Fulbright Scholar)

ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Status: Elective
Semester: 3th or 5th
Enrolment requirements: completed Introduction to English Literature
_________________________________________________________________________________________

 

COURSE GOALS:
Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.
                                                                                        William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

COURSE DISCRIPTION:
In this course we will “tell about the South.”  We will focus on the development and consolidation of the slave society and culture of the Old South and its relation to northern society and culture.  Through selected readings, lectures, and discussions, we will explore how the South developed a distinctive social order that found itself by the 1850s locked in a life and death struggle with the North.  What were the historical origins of this powerful, complex, and changing regional society?  What role did slavery play in southern social, cultural, economic, and political life?  How did a society of different and often antagonistic races and classes maintain stability and order down to the War for Southern Independence?  How did Africans and African Americans accommodate to and resist their enslavement?  How did white and black southerners perceive and relate to each other?  What characterized elite and non-elite white culture?  How did southern literary expression—novels, poetry, scholarship, religious literature—both participate in a broad “American” culture and reflect a distinct “Southern” cultural movement?  By addressing these questions, and others, we will gain a better understanding of how this region and its people affected the course of American history and culture.
FORMAT:
Although primarily a lecture course, I encourage questions and comments at all times.  On certain occasions, we will conduct class entirely as a discussion-based seminar.  Students should always complete all readings for the week before the Wednesday meeting so that they can offer informed and thoughtful contributions to class discussions.
ASSIGNMENTS:
You will have two written assignments, each of approximately 1000-1250 words. There will also be a final examination.
EVALUATION:
I will evaluate your performance based on your attendance, participation, and performance on the papers and the exam.
REQUIRED READINGS:
Nearly all of the materials for the course will be either on the class’s Omega site or available online.  Students should obtain a hard copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.


The Nineteenth-Century American Novel (archive)

Course title: The Nineteenth-Century American Novel
Instructor: Assoc. Prof. Jelena Šesnić
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Duration: Semester 3 to 6
Status: elective
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 in the course of the 19th century 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  (romance/ the philosophical novel; with some ommissions); E . A. Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (the adventure/ gothic novel); Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (the sentimental novel); and William Dean Howell’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (the realist novel).

Reading:

The novels (listed above)

Criticism, prefaces, reviews, manifestoes:
– Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet“
– Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Prefaces (selection)
– Howells, William Dean. “A Call for Realism“
– James, Henry. The Art of the Novel (selection); The American Scene (selection)
– Melville, Herman. “Hawthorne and His Mosses“
– Twain, Mark. “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.
– Cheyfitz, Eric. „A Hazard of New Fortunes: The Romance of Self-Realization“.  American Realism: New Essays. Ed. Eric Sundquist. Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 42-65.
– Goddu, Teresa. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. (selection)
– 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.

Additional reading:
– Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse. “The American Origins of the English Novel“. American Literary History 4.3 (Autumn 1992): 386-410.
– 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)

Requirements: Regular attendance and active participation in the seminar (10 % of the grade); oral presentation (10% ); seminar paper (30 %); written tests (mid-term and final: 50 %). Seminar grade is based on continuous assessment comprising all the above elements.

 

Shakespeare

Course title: Shakespeare
Instructor: Prof. Janja Ciglar-Žanić.

ECTS credits: 6.
Status: elective.
Semester: 3rd or 5th.
Enrollment requirements: completed 2nd or 4th semester.
Course description: The course will be concerned with a selected number of Shakespeare’s plays viewed in the light of new theories of literature and culture. A study of the new strategies of reading, developed in the last few decades (new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism, postcolonialism), will introduce the course. Each of the selected plays will be accompanied by different film productions of the corresponding play and the discussions will centre on the relationship between text and its visual presentations. Special attention will be paid to the reinscriptive practices in both textual criticism and film productions.
Objectives: The main objective of the course is to shed a new light on the traditional understanding and reading of the plays as well as on the plays themselves. An additional objective is to examine how Shakespeare’s texts function in a medium non-existent in Shakespeare’s time and how in both their textual and visual medium they are related to our present concerns.
Course requirements: Continuous evaluation: Class work (regular attendance at lectures and active class participation), a seminar paper (with an oral presentation), and two quiz– and essay—style exams on issues raised by plays covered in class and social and cultural issues as they relate to Shakespeare’s plays.

Week by week schedule:
Week 1: Introduction: Strategies of reading.
Week 2: Strategies of reading (continued).
Week 3: Shakespearean stage.
Week 4: King Lear: different readings with the emphasis on cultural materialist interpretation. Film clips: M. Elliott, Peter Brook, (BBC production).
Week 5: King Lear (continued).
Week 6: Othello: different readings with the emphasis on post—colonial and new historicist interpretations.
Week 7: Othello (continued).
Week 8: Mid—term exam.
Week 9: A Midsummer Night’s Dream: various reinscriptive practices in textual criticism and performance. Film clips: A. Noble, M. Hoffman, A. Popovski (Gavella Theatre production).
Week 10: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (continued).
Week 11: The Tempest: different readings with the emphasis on postcolonial interpretation Film clips: (the BBC production), D. Jarman, P. Greenaway (Prospero’s Books).
Week 12: The Tempest (continued).
Week 13: Concluding remarks.
Week 14: End—term exam.

Required reading:
– Orgel, Stephen, & A. R. Braunmuller (eds), The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, New York: Penguin, 2002.

– Barker, Francis, & Peter Hulme, “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con–Texts of The Tempest”, in: Drakakis, John (ed), Alternative Shakespeares. London & New York: Routledge, 1985; 191-205.
– Carter, Ronald, «The Renaissance: 1485-1660», in: Carter, Ronald, & John McRae (eds). The Routledge History of Literature in English. London & New York: Routledge, 1997; 57-126.
– Ciglar-Žanić, Janja, “Antikolonijalna Oluja: teorija i praksa suvremenih reinskripcija Shakespearea”, in: Neka veća stalnost: Shakespeare u tekstu i kontekstu, Zagreb: Zavod za znanost o književnosti Filozofskog fakulteta, 2001; 125-151.
– Dollimore, Jonathan, “King Lear (c. 1605–06) and Essentialist Humanism”, in Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984; 189-203.
– Girard, René, “The Course of True Love”, in A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare; New York & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991; 29-79.
– Greenblatt, Stephen J, “Learning To Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century”, in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, New York & London: Routledge, 1992, 16-39.
– Gurr, Andrew, «The Shakespearean Stage», in: Greenblatt, Stephen (ed), The Norton Shakespeare, New York & London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997; 3281-3301.
– Harrison, G. B, “Materials for the Life of Shakespeare”, in Introducing Shakespeare (3rd ed), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966; 29-75.
– Holderness, Graham, «Bardolatry: or, The cultural materialist’s guide to Stratford—upon—Avon», in: Holderness, Graham (ed), The Shakespeare Myth, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998; 02-15.
– Jones, Norman, “Shakespeare’s England”, in: Kastan, David Scott (ed), A Companion to Shakespeare, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999; 25-41.
– Kott, Jan, “King Lear, or Endgame”, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, transl. by Boleslaw Taborski, New York: Doubleday, 1966.
– Kott, Jan, “Titania and the Ass’s Head”, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, transl. by Boleslaw Taborski, New York: Doubleday, 1966; 213-236.
– Neill, Michael, “Unproper beds: Race, adultery, and the hideous in Othello”, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), 383—412.
– Newman, Karen, “‘And wash the Ethiop white’: femininity and the monstrous in Othello”, in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (1987), 2nd ed, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005.
– Tatspaugh, Patricia, “Performance history: Shakespeare on the stage 1660-2001”, in: Wells, Stanley, & Lena Cowe Orlin (eds), Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003; 525-549.
– Welsford, Enid, “The Fool in King Lear”, in: Kermode, Frank (ed), Shakespeare: King Lear, 1969; 137-149.

Recommended reading:
– Barber, C. L, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.

– Bradley, A. C, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, London: Macmillan, 1904.
– Brooker, Peter, & Peter Widdowson (eds), A Practical Reader in Contemporary Literary Theory, Harlow [etc.]: Prentice Hall, 1996.
– Bulman, James C (ed), Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, London & New York: Routledge, 1996.
– Ciglar-Žanić, Janja, Domišljato stvoren svijet: Barok u engleskoj književnosti, Zagreb: Slap, 2008.
– Ciglar-Žanić, Janja, Neka veća stalnost: Shakespeare u tekstu i kontekstu, Zagreb: Zavod za znanost o književnosti Filozofskoga fakulteta u Zagrebu, 2001.
– Cox, John D, & David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama, with an introduction by Stephen J. Greenblatta, New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
– De Grazia, Margreta, & Stanley Wells (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
– Dollimore, Jonathan; & Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, Manchester & New York: Manchester UP, 1985.
– Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.
– —   A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance, New York & London: Columbia UP, 1965.
– —  Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy, Toronto [etc.]: University of Toronto Press, 1996.
– Greenblatt, Stephen (ed), The Norton Shakespeare, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997.
– Harrison, G. B, Introducing Shakespeare (3rd ed), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966.
– Hattaway, Michael; Boika Sokolova, & Derek Roper (eds), Shakespeare in the New Europe. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994.
– Kastan, David Scott (ed), A Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
– Kermode, Frank (ed), Shakespeare: King Lear. 1969.
– Kott, Jan, The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition. Transl. by Daniela Miedzyrzecka & Lillian Vallee. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 1987.
– Loomba, Ania, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, Bombay [etc.]: Oxford UP, 1992.
– Lupić, Ivan, Prijetvorni subject: transtekstualni okviri Shakespeareovih soneta, Zagreb: L biblioteka Zavoda za znanost o književnosti Filozofskog fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 2007.
– McDonald, Russ, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents (2nd ed), Boston & New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2001.
– Parker, Patricia, & Geoffrey Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, London: Methuen, 1985.
– Schoenbaum, Samuel, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, New York & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
– Selden, Raman; Peter Widdowson, & Peter Brooker (eds), A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, London [etc.]: Prentice Hall, 1997.
– Styan, John Louis, The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977.
– Swift Lenz, Carolyn Ruth; Gayle Greene; & Carol Thomas Neely (eds), The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980.
– Tillyard, E. M. W, The Elizabethan World Picture, London: Chatto & Windus, 1943.
– Torbarina, Josip, “Predgovor”, in Shakespeare, William, San ivanjske noći. Transl. Milan Bogdanović. Redigirao Josip Torbarina. Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1970.
– Vickers, Brian, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
– Weimann, Robert, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Schwartz, Robert (ed). Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
– Wells, Stanley, & Lena Cowe Orlin (eds), Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003; pp. 391-410.

 

Aspects of American Romanticism (archive)

Aspects of American Romanticism
Književni seminar akademska godina 2011/12.

Zimski semestar
Dodiplomski studij (2-3. godina)
Naziv kolegija: Aspekti američkoga romantizma (A, 19. st.)
Nastavnica: Dr. sc. Jelena Šesnić
ECTS-bodovi: 6
Jezik: Engleski
Trajanje: 3. ili 5. semestar; zimski
Status: Izborni
Oblik nastave: 1 sat predavanja + 2 sata seminara
Uvjeti za upis kolegija: Upisan 3. ili 5. semestar studija
_______________________________________________________________________________________

Cilj kolegija:
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 African American 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.


Sadržaj kolegija:

  1. R W Emerson: essays (selection); Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (selection)
  2. H D Thoreau: Walden (selection); essays („Civil Disobedience“, selection)
  3. Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century
  4. Catherine Maria Sedgwick: Hope Leslie
  5. Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
  6. Herman Melville: Typee

Literatura:
A. Obvezatna
– Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad, Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1978.
(izbor)
– Pease, Donald. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural
Context
, Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987. (izbor)
– Pease, Donald, ed. National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, Durham: Duke
UP, 1994. (izbor)
– Rowe, John Carlos. At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. (izbor)
– Warren, Joyce, ed. The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women
– Writers
. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1993. (izbor)

Način polaganja ispita: Kontinuirana evaluacija (kolokviji: mid-term + final; 40% ocjene); seminarski rad (6-7 kartica teksta; 30 % ocjene); pohađanje, vježbe, prezentacija, aktivnost na satu (30 % ocjene).

 

 

 


Continue reading Aspects of American Romanticism (archive)

American postmodernism and popular culture-archive

Course title: American Postmodernism and Popular Culture
Instructor: Asst. Prof. Sven Cvek
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 2nd or 3rd year of undegraduate studies
Enrollment requirements: student must be registered in the 3rd 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.
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: Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (or another novel); Willam Gibson, Neuromancer; Don DeLillo, White Noise; Art Spiegelman, Maus; Douglas Coupland, Generation X; Thomas Pynchon, Vineland; Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues. Students will also be required to read the course reader (about 200 pages) that provides the historical context and theoretical background for the course.

 

 


Irish culture 2013-14

Dr. Aidan O’Malley, visiting lecturer
Subject: Modern literature
Course title: Irish culture
ECTS credits: 6
Language: English
Duration: 1 semester
Status: elective
Course type: lectures, seminars
Prerequisites: enrolment in 3rd / 5th semester
Course requirements: regular attendance and active participation in discussion; class presentation, to be developed into a 1500-2000 word essay; mid-term and end of term written exam.
Course description: This course provides an overview of Irish history, politics, literature and culture more generally, with the focus on the period from the late-nineteenth century to the present. Particular attention is paid to the intersections of political and cultural impulses that led to the creation of the two states in the twentieth century—the Republic and Northern Ireland—and to understanding how both subsequently operated as states. To do this, the course explores how ideas of what constituted Irish identity have been proposed, have come to assume hegemonic force, have been debated and resisted through political and cultural activities, as well as through modes of historical interpretation.
Objective: The course intends to further students’ skills in understanding how literary and other cultural texts interact with political and historical events. To this end, students will be introduced to some of the major texts in twentieth-century Irish literature and history. They will also be introduced to some of the major debates in Irish Studies such as postcolonialism, revisionism and nationalism.

Syllabus:
Week 1: Locating Ireland
Lecture: Overview of Irish history and culture up to the 19th century
Seminar: Images and ideas of Ireland
Week 2: Colonialism and Nationalism
Lecture: 19th-century Irish nationalism
Seminar: Celticism and cultural nationalism; readings from Renan and Arnold

Week 3: The Literary Revival
Lecture: The Revival and the founding of the Abbey Theatre
Seminar: W.B. Yeats, On Baile’s Strand

Week 4: The Myth of the West
Lecture: The role of the west in the Irish imagination
Seminar: J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World

Week 5: The Founding of the Free State
Lecture: 1916; The War of Independence; The Civil War
Seminar: Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock

Week 6: The Creation of Northern Ireland
Lecture: Unionism; World War II; The founding of Northern Ireland
Seminar: Frank McGuinness, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme
Week 7: The de Valera Years
Lecture: The cultural and social life of the Free State
Mid-term exam

Week 8: Being Irish in English
Lecture: The creation of an Irish identity in English
Seminar: Michael Hartnett, ‘A Farewell to English’
Week 9: John McGahern, Amongst Women
Lecture: Amongst Women: Capturing the dynamics of mid-20th century rural Irish life
Seminar: Documentary, John McGahern: A Private World

Week 10: Gender in Ireland
Lecture: Women and gender in the Republic and Northern Ireland
Seminar: Eavan Boland, selected poems and sections from Object Lessons

Week 11: The Northern Irish ‘Troubles’
Lecture: The history of the ‘Troubles’
Seminar: Film, Paul Greengrass, dir., Bloody Sunday

Week 12: The Artistic Response to the ‘Troubles’

Lecture: The Northern Irish literary ‘renaissance’
Seminar: Selected poems from Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon

Week 13: Ireland and the World
Lecture: Emigration; Immigration; the EU
Seminar: Daniel O’Hara, dir. Yu Ming is ainm dom; Roddy Doyle, ‘The Pram’, from The Deportees and Other Stories

Week 14: Irish Music
Lecture: From Carolan to boy bands
Seminar: Joe Cleary, ‘The Pogues and the Spirit of Capitalism’; Moynagh Sullivan ‘Boyz to Men: Irish Boy Bands and Mothering the Nation’
Week 15: Representing Ireland
Lecture: Historiographical debates
Seminar: Roy Foster, ‘The Problems of Writing Irish History’; Joe Cleary, ‘Irish Studies, Colonial Questions: Locating Ireland in the Colonial World’ End of term exam

Required reading:
W.B. Yeats, On Baile’s Strand
J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World
Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock
Frank McGuinness, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme
John McGahern, Amongst Women
Other texts listed in the syllabus will be available for photocopying as a Reader.

Optional references:
The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vols. I-V, (Derry and Cork: Field Day and Cork University Press, 1991 and 2002)
Irish University Review, vol. 33, no. 1, (2003), ‘New Perspectives on the Irish Literary Revival’
Irish University Review, 35: 1 Spring/Summer 2005, (Special John McGahern issue)
The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 17:1, July 1991, (Special John McGahern issue)
The Irish Review, 4, Spring 1988, (Nationalism and Revisionism Symposium)
Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster: New Updated Edition, (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2001)
George D. Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, 3rd ed., (London and New York: Routledge, 1995)
Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, XXVI: 104, November 1989, pp. 329-351
Ciaran Brady, (ed.), Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1938-1994, (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994)
Malcolm Brown, The Politics of Irish Literature: from Thomas Davis to W.B. Yeats, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972)
Terence Brown, (ed.), Celticism, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996)
Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-1985, (London: Fontana, 1985)
Steve Bruce, God Save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988)
Clare Carroll and Patricia King, (eds.), Ireland and Post-Colonial Theory, (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002)
Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990)
Roy Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland, (London and New York: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001)
Roy Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, (London: Penguin, 1988)
Roy Foster, ‘The Problems of Writing Irish History’, History Today, 34: 1, January 1984, pp. 27-30.
Roy Foster, ‘‘We Are All Revisionists Now’’, The Irish Review, 1, 1986, pp. 1-5.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983)
Ernest Gellner, Culture, Identity, and Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996)
Joseph J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Ben Levitas, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Nationalism, 1890-1916, (Oxford University Press, 2002)
David Lloyd, Ireland After History, (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999)
F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890-1939, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)
Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town, 3rd ed., (London and Boulder, Colorado: Pluto Press, 1993)
Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992, (Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2000)
W. J. McCormack, (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)
John McGahern, Memoir, (London: Faber, 2006)
Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: A Mirror up to Nation, (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997)
Lionel Pilkington, Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People, (London and New York: Routledge, 2001)
Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness, (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994)
William Irwin Thompson, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916, A Study of an Ideological Movement, (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1972)

Victorian Literature: Genres and Issues (arch.)

Course title:  Victorian Literature: Genres and Issues
before 2020/21

Instructor: Prof. Borislav Knežević
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 3rd and 5th, 4th and 6th
Enrollment requirements:  Introduction to English Literature

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, gender ideologies, 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 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
2. week: Poetry Tennyson
3. week: Poetry: Robert Browning; Elizabeth Barrett Browning

4. week: The novel: Dickens. Great Expectations
5. week: Dickens, Great Expectations. Gaskell, “Our Society at Cranford”
6. week: Gaskell, North and South.
7 week: First Quiz.  Gaskell, North and South
8 week: Gaskell. Cannadine
9 week: Social ethnography: Frances Trollope. Thackeray.  Mayhew.  Social criticism: Carlyle.
10 week: Ruskin.  J.S. Mill
11 week: Criticism: Arnold.  Essay due.
12 week: Poetry:  Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
13 week: Poetry:  D.G. Rossetti
14 week: Poetry: Arnold
15 week: Second quiz.            

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

Nonfiction prose:
Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” “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)

Novels:
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

Optional reading:
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor
J.S. Mill, from The Subjection of Women
Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market”
Raymond Williams, “People of the City” from The Country and the City
Hilary Schor, “If He Should Turn to Beat Her: Violence, Desire and the Woman’s Story
in The Great Expectations
Jay Clayton, “Is Pip Postmodern? Or, Dickens at the End of the Twentieth Century”
Edward Said, “Dickens and Australia”
David Cannadine, “A Viable Hierarchical Society,” from The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain


Continue reading Victorian Literature: Genres and Issues (arch.)

Contemporary American Novel (arch.)

Course title: Contemporary American Novel
Instructor
: Prof. Stipe Grgas

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:
John Barth, The book of Ten Nights and a Night

Don DeLillo, Falling Man
Jonathan Foer, Extremely Loud &Incredibly Close
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
DeLillo, Cosmopolis
Cormac Mc Carthy, The Road

 

History of English Drama from Mass to City Play

Course: History of English Drama from Mass to City Play (2P/1S, 6 ECTS)
Status: elective
Teacher: Tamara Petrić, assist.
Semester: Fall term 2012/ 2013
Lecture and seminara
Language: English
The final grade in this course will depend on the following considerations: (1) a short essay/ term paper; (2) regular attendance and active participation; and (3) two exams.
Objectives: The purpose of this study—unit is to introduce students to the immediate social contexts of English medieval and renaissance drama and enable them to map out England’s political and economic interests at various points in history. Staging conditions of the Easter mass, medieval drama’s liturgical beginnings, provide insight into the role of Benedictine monasteries – the place of origin of liturgical drama — in England’s international wool and cloth trade, while the processional form and mercantile display of the Corpus Christi play helps us follow bouts of inter—class conflict and cooperation within regional market towns of late—medieval East Anglia and Yorkshire. The cultural and imaginative geography of the Levant/ the Eastern Mediterraneani and the Middle East, as well as the Baltic in the miracle or saint’s play betrays the increasing importance of foreign trade to Plantagenet economy, while Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean Mediterranean plays help us map out England’s political and economic interests in an increasingly global world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly England’s stake in the eastern Mediterranean and Atlantic trades and the Ottoman threat to the preeminence of Venice as a key mediator in Mediterranean trade. Morality plays construe an idealized feudal contract in the face of an emerging early modern state and the shift toward market dependency, Tudor comedies are concerned with import—export imbalance in inflation—plagued England, while the Jacobean city comedy censures the increasing social mobility facilitated by an influx of money due to piracy and Atlantic slave trade.
Outcomes: In addition to its function as an advanced introduction to early English drama, this course is designed to help students develop their abilities as readers, researchers, writers, and thinkers. By the end of the semester, students should be able to demonstrate their proficiency with such skills as close reading, library research, use of evidence, and argumentative logic.

Tentative schedule of readings and assignments.
Weeks 1 & 2
. An Easter Resurrection Play from the Regularis Concordia of St Ethelwold (c. 965—975) and a Pantomime for Easter Day performed in the Abbey Church/ Monastical Church at Durham (England)

– “The Crusades and Eastern Europe, ca. 1100—1550”, in Mortimer Chambers, Raymond Grew, David Herlihy et al, The Western Experience (1974), 2 vols, 5th ed, New York, St Louis, San Francisco et al: McGraw—Hill, 1991; 381—415.
– “The Quem Quaeritis Trope”, “A Pantomime for Easter Day”, “An Easter Resurrection Play”, and “The Orleans Sepulcher”, Medieval and Tudor Drama (1963), ed. John Gassner, New York: Bantam Books, 1987; 33—43.
– John M Wasson, “The English Church A Theatrical Space”, A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, New York: Columbia UP, 1997; 25—37.
– Roger E. Reynolds, “The Drama of Medieval Liturgical Processions”, Revue de Musicologie, Vol. 86, No. 1 (2000); 127—142.
Weeks 3 & 4. The Wakefield Muder of Abel/ Mactatio Abel
– The Muder of Abel/ Mactatio Abel
, in Medieval and Tudor Drama (1963), ed. John Gassner, New York: Bantam Books, 1987; 57—71.

– Anne Higgins, “Streets and Markets”, A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, New York: Columbia UP, 1997; 77—92.
Weeks 5 & 6. The Croxton Play of the Sacrament
– The Play o
f the Sacrament, in Early English Drama (An Anthology), ed. John C. Coldewey, New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1993; 274—305.

– Lisa Lampert, “The Once and Future Jew: The Croxton ‘Play of the Sacrament’, Little Robert of Bury and Historical Memory”, Jewish History, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2001), 235—255.
Weeks 7 & 8. Mankind; mid—term exam (in—class).
Mankind, in Early English Drama (An Anthology), ed. John C. Coldewey. New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1993; 105—135.
– Ineke Murakami, “Mankind: Publicizing the New Guise”, Moral Play and Counterpublic: Transformations in Moral Drama, 1465—1599, New York: Routledge, 2011; 18–44.
Weeks 9 & 10. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, in William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel i A. R. Braunmuller, New York: Penguin Putnam, 2002; 1710–1751.

– Shannon Miller, “Topicality and Subversion in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus”, Studies in English Literature, 1500—1900, Vol. 32, No. 2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring, 1992), 287—310.
Weeks 11 & 12. Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. N. W. Bawcutt, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1978.

– Lisa Jardine, “Alien Intelligence: Mercantile Exchange and Knowledge Transactions in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta”, Reading Shakespeare Historically. London: Routledge, 1996; 98—113.
Weeks 13 & 14. Ben Jonson, Volpone, or the Fox
– Ben Jonson, Volpone, or the Fox, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1, 4th ed, ed. M. H. Abrams, New York, London: W. W. Norton, 1979; 1115—1210.
– William R. Dynes, “The Trickster—Figure in Jacobean City Comedy”, Studies in English Literature, 1500—1900, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Spring, 1993); 365—384.
– Suzanne Westfall, “’A Commonty a Christmas gambold or a tumbling trick’: Household Theater”, A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, New York: Columbia UP, 1997; 39—58.
Week 15. Elizabethan playhouses; concluding remarks; final exam.
– John Orrell, “The Theaters”, A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, New York: Columbia UP, 1997; 93—112.