Course title: A Historical Survey of the Fantastic in British Literature
Instructor: Assoc. Prof. Iva Polak
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 1 and 3
Enrollment requirements: enrollment in Semester 1 and/or 3
Course description: The course offers a historical survey of OE, ME and ModE texts till the late 19th century that appropriate fantasy or the supernatural for various reasons. Each text is discussed in the framework of its socio-historical context to reflect, albeit tentatively, the implied listener/reader. Some literary works are analyzed alongside their cinematic adaptations. Theoretical underpinnings of the fantastic include discussing mimesis, the rhetoric of the real and unreal, terminological muddy waters (fantasy/the fantastic/Fantasy), and the notion of impulse, mode and genre.
Objectives: Awakening students’ awareness of the existence of fantasy from the very beginnings of English literature; detecting the shifts in the function of the fantastic in literature and culture; clearer understanding of theoretical underpinnings of the fantastic.
Course requirements:The final grade is based on continuous assessment which includes regular attendance (max. 4 unattended classes), preparation for and participation in discussions, and writing and timely submission of seven short written assignments. Each assignment comes with guidelines, prescribed length (c. 800-1500 words) and deadline. Students must receive a minimum passing grade for reach written assignment to successfully pass the course. Plagiarizing detected in a single written assignment will lead to failing of the course.

Weekly schedule
WEEK 1
Introduction to key problems: the notion of reality in different time periods; mimesis-mimetic; fantasy-fantastic
WEEK 2
What is fantastic in fantasy; historical positioning of the fantastic; fantasy as a mode and/or a genre; introduction into the theory of the genre (Todorov, Brooke-Rose,Chanady, Hume, etc.)
– Christine Brooke-Rose (Ch. 2); Kathryn Hume (Ch. 2 & 5)
Assignment 1
WEEK 3
The problem of locating the fantastic in Anglo-Saxon (OE) literature
Beowulf , c. 8^th c. (excerpts) – historical context, Anglo-Saxon listener and encoded reader; the problem of the real and the unreal; heroic or fantastic epic
WEEK 4
Beowulf (cont.) – relevance of epic for the development of fantastic literature
WEEK 5
Beowulf and Tolkien’s high fantasy; Tolkien. “The Monster and the Critic”
Assignment 2
WEEK 6
Fantasy and the Middle-Ages
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales  (“The Nun’s Priest’s Tale”) (1387-; Caxton 1st ed. 1476) – historical context, medieval forms, fable, fantasy of the so-called “simple forms” (Einfache Formen)
Assignment 3
WEEK 7
Sir Thomas Malory. Le Morte Darthur (1485): medieval intertext; from epic to romance; Arthuriana as myth and historiography; characters and narrative strands; Monthy Python and the Holy Grail (1975) dir. Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones
WEEK 8
No classes. Reading week.
WEEK 9
Fantasy and the Early Modern Period
William Shakespeare. The Tempest (1623) – Elizabethan worldview; Prospero’s magic and how to present it on stage and screen; application of Todorov
Assignment 4
WEEK 10
Cinematic adaptations of The Tempest: discussion of clips from Silent Shakespeare (1899-1901),  Prospero’s Books (1991) dir. Peter Greenaway, The Tempest (2010) dir. Julie Taymor; analysis of Forbidden Planet (1956) dir. Fred M. Wilcox
Assignment 5
WEEK 11
Fantasy in the Neoclassical Period
Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels (4^th voyage) (1726, 1735)– utopian literature (Plato, Thomas More), Menippean satire, fantasy and allegory, location and problems of the 4^th voyage;
Assignment 6
WEEK 12
Fantasy and the Victorian Period
Lewis Carroll. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) –Victorian children literature; nonsense verse (Jabberwocky); source of the supernatural
WEEK 13
Lewis Carroll. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – application of Todorov
Assignment 7
WEEK 14
Towards SF
H. G. Wells. The Time Machine (1895) – ‘impure’ SF, novum (Suvin)

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

Critical editions:
– Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Rhetoric of the Unreal. Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic, CUP, 1981. (Ch. 2)
– Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy, Garland Publishing Inc, 1985. (excerpts)
– Čapek, Karel. In Praise of Newspapers and Other Essays on the Margin of Literature, Allen&Uwin, 1951. Essays: “Towards a Theory of Fairy Tales”; “A Few Fairy-Tale Motifs”.
– Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis. Responses to Reality in Western Literature. Methuen. 1984. (Ch. 2 & 5)
– Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion, Routledge, 1981. (excerpts)
– Polak, Iva. Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction. Oxford:Peter Lang, 2017: Ch.1 & 2
– Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre”. College English. Vol. 34. No. 3, 1972: 372-382.
– Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Cornell UP, 1975.
– Tolkien, J.R.R. The Monster and the Critics and Other Essays, HarperCollins, 2006. Essays: “The Monster and the Critics”; “On Fairy Stories”.

All texts shall be made available in electronic format.

 

 

 

 

Course title: The History and Paradigms of American Studies 2 (Grgas, 2013-14)
Instructor: Stipe Grgas
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Enrollment requirements: enrollment in the 8th and/or 10th semester
Course description: This course is a companion course to the course History and Paradigms of American Studies1 which investigated the origins of the discipline of American Studies. Its purpose is to explore the developments within the discipline up to the present day. To generalize, the main development since the founding of the discipline has been the questioning of the holistic approach to the object of study and the essentialist conceptualization of the United States. The latter practitioners of the field have reinscribed into the discipline the voices and experiences of those who were left out of the earlier paradigms and have likewise argued for the contextualization of the United States into the global context. The course will not only review these interventions but will also seek to show how they have been attended by an engagement with different theories, from poststructuralism, gender studies to Marxism.
The course is obligatory for American Studies majors.
Course requirements: regular attendance, participation in class discussions, written assignments and a final seminar paper. At the end of the course the students will be given a written exam.
Sylalbus:
The course will begin by describing how the so-called New Americanists challenged the prevailing methodology and reigning orthodoxies of the so-called „myth and symbol school“. It will be shown how the socio-political realities of the sixties impinged upon the agenda of the discipline and forced it to take cognizance of the heterogeneity of American society and address issues of race, ethnicity, gender, religious affiliation, regional specificity and to a lesser degree class. The second group of themes that the course will take up will deal with the transnational turn in American studies which targets the role the US has played on the global scene excavating the history of American imperialism, the contact zones and borders established throughout this history. The final cluster of issues that the course will take up will attempt to map the present state of the discipline and the way it has attempted to come to an understanding of contemporary American policies, developments within the US and how these have impacted upon our world.
Readings (alternations possible)
– «American Studies at a Crossroad: A Conversation with Donald Pease, Roby Wiegman and John Smelcer» http://ragazine.cc/2011/12/discourse-american-studies/
– Bronner, Simon J. «American Studies: A Discipline». Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012), s.v. „American Studies: a Discipline“ (by Simon J. Brooner), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=809 (accessed August 17, 2012).
– Castronovo, Russ and Susan Gillman 2009. States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. pp. 1-54.
– Denning, Michael 1986. „’The Special American Conditions’: Marxism and American Studies“, American Quarterly, vol.38.no.3 (1986): 356-380.
– Fisher, Phillip 1991. The New American Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
– Grgas, Stipe 2013. „American Studies and the Canonization of Thomas Pynchon“. journal-borderlands . serbianamericanstudies.rs
– Radway, Janice A., Kevin K. Gaines, Barry Shank and Penny Von Eschen 2009. American Studies: An Anthology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. (selection)
– Rowe, John Carlos 2012. The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library. Open Humanities Press. http://www.scribd.com/doc/132330117/Rowe-The-Cultural-Politics-of-the-New-American-Studies
– Shapiro, Stephen 2001. „Reconfiguring American Studies?: The Paradoxes of Postnationalism“. 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies. Issue 8/ Summer 2001.

In addition to these theoretical texts the course will understake a reading of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland focusing upon the issue how the author in this text prefigures the present moment of the United States.

 

Dr Jelena Šesnić

Literary Seminar (MA Level): The History and Paradigms of American Studies 2

Spring 2012

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Syllabus
Course description: This is a companion course to the History and Paradigms of American Studies 1 which thus continues to examine the changes in the methodology of American Studies since the 1970s. Major developments in this respect are poststructuralist theory, new historicism, feminist and gender studies (from Marxism to psychoanalysis), ethnic, postcolonial and border studies, transnational turn and cultural studies. These approaches will be exemplified by representative scholarly essays and tested in turn on the appropriate primary texts. The course is obligatory for American studies majors (8^th semester); elective for all other MA students.

 

Course requirements: regular attendance; participation in class discussion; in-class and home assignments; oral presentation (10 min); 2 seminar papers (6-7 pp./ ca 2000-2500 words each + bibliography); final test (mandatory, non-negotiable, continuous assessment). Grade break-down: Seminar papers 50 %; final test 30 %; the rest 20 %.

 

Readings (alterations possible):

 

Primary texts

1. Thomas Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-2; selected chapters)

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefVirg.html

(E-text centre, U of Virginia Library)

2. Lenora Sansay: Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808)

3. Edgar Allan Poe: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA98/silverman/poe/frame.html

(American Studies at the UVa)

4. Henry David Thoreau: Walden (1845; selected chapters)

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/thoreau/walden/index.html

(American Transcendentalism on the Web)

5. Herman Melville: „Benito Cereno“ (from The Piazza Tales, 1856)

http://www.esp.org/books/melville/piazza/contents/cereno.html

6. Harriet Prescott Spofford: „Amber Gods“ (1863)

http://faculty.pittstate.edu/~knichols/beads.html

7. Sandra Cisneros: „Woman Hollering Creek“ (1991)

Syllabus (alterations possible)

 

March

Week 1: Introduction: European vs US Americanists; perspectives, focus and methods:

Chenetier, Fluck, Pease

Week 2: from national to imperial American studies (Aravamudan)

Week 3: Poststructuralism: Thoreau, Walden (Benn Michaels)

Week 4: Thoreau, Walden; towards New Historicism (Michael Gilmore)

April

Week 1: New Historicism: text and contexts; Bercovitch and the American Renaissance

Week 2: New Historicism and the “New Americanists”: EA Poe: Pym (D. Pease)

Week 3: New Historicism: EA Poe, cont.

Week 4: New Historicism into transnational American studies: Herman Melville: “Benito Cereno” (Sundquist, Warren)

Week 5: De-centring American studies: ethnic studies; Jefferson, Notes (Erkkila)

May

Week 1: Jefferson, Notes (cont.)

Week 2: Feminist criticism and the canon: Baym; Harriet Prescott Spofford: “Amber Gods”

Week 3: Feminist into gender studies; border studies: Anzaldúa; Cisneros

Week 4: Is there a transnational American studies? Leonora Sansay: Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo

June

Week 1: Transnational American studies: Sansay, cont.

Week 2: American Studies and cultural studies: is there a method? Guest lecturer: Dr. Sven Cvek (American Studies Program, Zagreb)

Final test.

 

Relevant Internet sources:

EAAS web-site (European Association for American Studies): see links

ASA web-site (American Studies Association): see links

ALA (American Literature Association): see links

MLA (Modern Languages Association): see links

MELUS (US-based) and MESEA (European-based): see links

American Studies Journals on the Web

Full-text journal databases: J-stor, Project Muse, EBSCO, Oxford Journals, Blackwell, etc.

 

List of journals:

American Literary History; American Quarterly (ASA); American Literature (ALA)

PMLA (MLA)

European Journal of American Studies (e-journal, EAAS; see other national AS associations)

New Literary History; Boundary 2; Representations

MELUS

The Transnational Journal of American Studies (e-journal)

The 49th Parallel (e-journal)

Neo-Americanist (e-journal)

Course title: Architext in postmodern British literature
Instructor: Asst. Prof. Vanja Polić
ECTS credits: 6
Status: elective
Semester: 7^th and 9^th semester
Enrollment requirements: enrollment in the 7^th or 9^th semester

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

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

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

Week by week schedule

Week 1: general introduction into modernism; basic theories of postmodernism
Week 2: architext (G. Genette)
Week 3: M. Cunningham The Hours – historical contextualization of the template (V. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway) and contemporary intertextual deviations in The Hours
Week 4: M. Cunningham, The Hours – analysis continued
Week 5: Will Self, Dorian – aestheticism and decadence of the template (O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray) and hypertext
Week 6: Will Self, Dorian – analysis continued
Week 7: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels and British 18^th century as hypotext of the postmodern novel
Week 8: Midterm exam
Academic writing skills (guidelines for writing research paper)
Week 9: Michael Coetzee, Foe – pseudofeminist and postcolonial reinscription of D. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
Week 10: Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman – Gulliver’s Travels as hypotext – reconstruction of Gulliver’s possible world from the fourth journey
Week 11: Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman – analysis continued
Week 12: Alasdair Gray, Poor Things or postmodern Frankenstein by M. Shelley
Week 13: Alasdair Gray, Poor Things – analysis continued
Week 14: wrap-up discussion

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

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

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