Department of Literature and Culture

DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE AND CULTURE

COURSES 2017-18

1ST SEMESTER

ENGLISH FICTION

This course aims at presenting a variety of genres, indicative of the artistic movements oftheir era, in diachronic succession and in relation to their historical and culturalparameters. Introductory lectures will include references to the timeline of the birth of thenovel as well as excerpts from 18th-century prose by authors such as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift.The rest of the syllabus will include a 19th-century novel, representative of realism, byCharles Dickens or George Eliot, as well as short stories (or even a novel) from the 20th centuryby authors such as Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, and Forster.

2ND SEMESTER

AMERICAN FICTION

The course deals with American fiction from its first period of development through the 19th-century classics and onwards towards the postmodern and multi-cultural authors of today. The historical and cultural parameters of fiction are examined in conjunction with stylistic differences as these were expressed via the various literary movements, that is realism, symbolism, modernism and postmodernism. The course also aims to develop the students’ capacity for critical analysis of texts as cultural products and carriers of ideological and socio-cultural debates within the larger context of the era that produced them.

3RD SEMESTER

ENGLISH POETRY

This course has a twofold purpose. First, to familiarize students with the elements ofpoetry, such as imagery, figures of speech, rhythm, symbol, and other conventions thatwill help them read, analyze, and understand poetry. Second, to offer students a historicaloverview of British poetry, examining the ways in which authors have used the aboveelements to express ideas and emotions throughout the centuries.The course is offered in the form of a series of lectures, always in dialogue withthe students. Texts are taken from a main anthology and leaflets (provided). For theevaluation of knowledge gained, there will be a final exam, as well as the opportunity foroptional extra-credit research papers. Students evaluate the course anonymously througha final questionnaire.

CONTEMPORARY ANGLOPHONE THEATRE

This introductory course examines contemporary anglophone plays through the sociohistoricalcultural context of the 20th and 21st centuries. We analyze representative texts ofvarious theatrical genres representing realism, expressionism, the epic, the theatre of theabsurd, etc. The course aims at sensitizing students to the particularities of the dramaticform, as well as at the development of critical thinking.There are weekly classes with lectures and dialogue. Course material includesplays, lectures from invited speakers, a photocopy pack with study questions andbibliographical lists. Students are encouraged to conduct further research on their own.The evaluation of knowledge gained is based on a final exam (80% of the grade) and onshort critical essays (20%), written in the context of the critical essay workshop conductedseparately as part of this course. The course will be evaluated through a questionnairefilled by the students at the end of the semester anonymously.

4TH SEMESTER

THEORY AND CRITICISM OF LITERATURE

The course examines the most important developments in 20th-century literary theory and criticism, from Russian formalism to New Historicism and Post-colonial theory. It focuses on select representative approaches to literature but also introduces students to a wide spectrum of schools and movements such as formalism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, cultural studies and so on. Emphasis is given to the reading of well-known texts by theoreticians and literary critics, as well as the application of those theories on literary text analysis.

AMERICAN POETRY

The course studies the tradition and development of American poetry from Bradstreet to Snyder, with the aim of a detailed, comparative analysis of the work of major American poets who helped shape the cultural face of their era in their search for a personal poetic style that would help them determine truths about themselves and express its connections with the wider conceptual space that is “America.” The main schools of thought influencing poetry, from Puritanism to Postmodernism, will be examined, along with overviews of the political and social developments that led to the formation and constant re-formulation of literary movements. Finally, class analysis focuses on the multiform nature of American poetry, that which created the “tradition of the new.”

5TH SEMESTER

THEORY OF CULTURE

The aim of this course is the definition of the various concepts and figurations of culture, through which critical approaches to cultural/textual phenomena and the understanding ofthe ways in which creative activities contribute to the quality of human life will be examined. Issuesconcerning the relationship of culture and society, “higher” and “popular” culture, as wellas the relations between sciences and the arts are investigated, while questions pertainingto the goals of cultural activities and the interaction among them are put forth and explored.

POSTWAR AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE ART

This course maps important strands in post-WWII avant-garde and experimental art from the late 1950s to the present day. The emergence of happenings and Pop art in the late 1950s will constitute the point of departure for an examination of the work of experimental artists who worked across diverse artistic forms, practices and media. Seminar material will span the Black Mountain College, experimental cinema, feminism and performance, conceptual art, earthworks, and more recent developments in Chicano, Asian-American, Native American art. We will work with a variety of sources and documents, including poetry, painting, photography, film, music, performance, installation, video, artists’ writings, and intermedial projects.

Teaching consists in lectures, as well as seminar activities and discussions developing connections across different artistic forms. Course material and bibliography can be accessed online on the e-class site. The course is assessed by coursework only. Students are expected to participate in TWO mid-term exams and submit a short research paper on any of the artists/works/themes explored in class. In the mid-term students are expected to write an analytical, critical essay, based on a critical commentary of a given text.

RESTORATION COMEDY

This course examines Restoration Comedy in the context of political and cultural changes brought about by the restoration of the Suarts to the throne in 1660. Emphasis is placed on gender representations in a game of power in which the aristocratic male sexual and political ascendancy inscribes the Puritan and business-oriented middle classes’ defeat as impotence. Hence, the winners of the Civil War are humiliated in a kind of comedy that celebrates male cuckolding, homosocial bonding and cynical materialism, especially in Etherege and Wycherley, while a shift to moral values is noted in Congreve’s late comedies which privilege men’s romantic love over sexual appetite.

19TH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

This course examines the rise of literature, the emergence of the figure of the writer, and the inception of an American literary canon that came to include women and African-Americans in the antebellum period (1830-1865) in the United States. The claims about a distinctive national literature in the US emerged in a period that was marked by divisiveness and racial conflict, the movement for women’s rights, and the movement for the abolition of slavery. The writers who responded to the call and claims about a distinctive national literature in the antebellum period, probed the antinomies of American expansionism in works that critically engage questions of race, gender, the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery, and the growth of American capitalism: through a focus on the issues of race, enslavement and slavery, freedom and bondage, democracy and revolt, individualism and transgression, we will examine a diverse range of texts by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown and Herman Melville. Sessions will take the form of lectures, and seminar discussions, combining close readings, cultural and historical analysis, as well as readings based on a variety of theoretical and critical perspectives.The course is assessed by coursework only. Students are expected to participate in TWO mid-term exams and submit a short research paper (circa 1,500) on any of the authors/texts/themes explored in class. In the mid-term students are expected to write an analytical, critical essay, based on a critical commentary of a given text.

19th-20th CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE

No description provided to date.

THE CIVIL WAR OF THE 1960S

This seminar will examine a range of writers who define the cultural matrix of the nineteen-sixties in the US. Beginning with the bohemian protests of the Beats we investigate the struggle for expression of a number of cultural perspectives: the beginning of the women’s movement, civil rights and Black Power, and the anti-War movement among others. We will follow the various “counter-cultures” from birth through maturity to decline (in some cases), and conclude with some attempt to assess the disputed legacy of the Sixties for literature and culture. Students will be expected to participate in class, write one formal essay (optional), and complete a final exam.

6TH SEMESTER

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The aim of the course is to introduce students to Shakespeare’s drama through the analysis of representative plays taking into consideration the historical, social and theatrical context of the Renaissance society. Emphasis is also placed on the ways by which contemporary literary theories have affected the reading of his plays regarding the treatment of important issues such as gender, race, power relations.

BECKETT AND PINTER: TIME, IDENTITY AND THE “OTHER”

The course examines representative plays by Beckett and Pinter within the context of the contemporary problematic regarding the relationship between theatre and society. We will study the different critical approaches to their work and primarily focus on the ways by which it disrupts the conventions of realism and the traditional understanding about political theatre. The course will deal with the philosophical and political concerns embedded in their plays and will concentrate on the treatment of time, space, power, guilt, punishment and the construction or dissolution of identity. Special attention will be given to the notion of the ‘other’ regarding the relationship between language and silence, consciousness and the unconscious, man and woman.

LITERATURE AND SOCIETY OF THE VICTORIAN PERIOD

This course examines some representative novels of the Victorian era by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James in relation to the socio-cultural framework, set by authors such as Dickens, J.S. Mill, Darwin, Wilde, which shaped the themes and styles of the fiction of that period. Romanticism, realism, naturalism, and aestheticism will be discussed in relation to the themes of industrialisation, religion, the position of women, imperialism etc. that permeate the 19th century English novel. The final grade will be based on the students’ overall performance, written and oral assignments, and their grade in the final exam.

REPRESENTATIONS OF LONDON

The goal of the course is to investigate how the city of London was portrayed in a variety of texts (fiction, essays, poetry, drama, painting, travel-writing and film) produced from the early 17th to the late 20th centuries. The course examines London in its textual, historical and geographical manifestations, seeking to create a sense of the development and constant transformation of London and to establish the place of the city in contemporary social and political debate. Areas of exploration will include the impact of trade and immigration on the city; the marketplace and the rise of consumerism; xenophobia and cosmopolitanism; city places and urban identities; commodities and theurban subject; sex and the city and London as a world city.

ROMANTICISM

The course examines texts of various literary genres (poetry, prose, but also some nonfiction) produced in the era of Romanticism in Britain. Its aim is, on the one hand, the detailed study of those texts, their revolutionary formal traits, their narrative structures and the overall “revolution” that the literature of Romanticism brought on through its expressive and ideological strategies. On the other hand, it wishes to examine how those texts position themselves within the wider framework of the British Romanticism, placing emphasis in the way the texts are inscribed within the multiple and definitive (for the course of European history) theoretical, political, and social dimensions of the movement.

7THSEMESTER

IDENTITY, HISTORY, AND THE NATION IN PLAYS BY ANGLOPHONE PLAYWRIGHTS

The course investigates the ways by which representative English-speaking playwrights deal with the issue of cultural identity in plays written during the 20th century. Discussing plays by W.B. Yeats, Brian Friel, Amiri Baraka, Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill and others, we investigate the role played by language, history, nation, gender and race in the construction of identity. The dramatic style each writer adopts will also be analysed as well as the politics the plays support.

POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE AND FILM: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE BARBARIAN AGAINST RACE THINKING

The current tide of war refugees and the policies of the EU that turn a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean attest to the need to continue to critique the humanist heritage of colonial modernity in order to move beyond a certain idea of Man that circumscribes the question of the human and her rights. The course will focus on the work of authors, critics and artists that argue that the idea of the human that is sustained as a currency for measuring the humanness of other humans has not been deconstructed enough. At least, it has not been done so in view of the co-occurrence, some times convivial and more than often polemical, of this heritage of humanism with the cosmogonies (Sylvia Wynter) of the millions of humans that were seen as barbarians and savages, that is, as the “mixture of the half-created and the incomplete” (Wynter) and were assigned the “bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos” (Achille Mbembe). What about the human lives and their forms of livity that have been represented as biologically inferior according to what Wynter calls the “pseudoscientific concept of the human as an evolutionary selected being”? The course will focus on texts that delink the human from the “overrepresented white Man” (Wynter) and engender a poetics of the human against race thinking that has categorized human beings and divided them into superior and inferior, civilized and savage, higher and disposable beings. By examining the ways the selected writers and artists deconstruct the representation of the Other to the western Man as the barbarian and the savage, we will also probe the human histories and stories these texts represent by way of asking the questions about being that race thinking has blocked, namely the questions about “how as humans we attain to human beingness and do so now in a profane or secular rather than sacred modality” (Wynter).

BODILY FICTIONS

This course will explore, through the critical examination of various works of 20th century U.S. literature, the ways in which contemporary authors have expressed their view of, revision of, and relation to, the human body in all its variables. Given the anthropological view that culture (and therefore art) emerges as a reaction to natural stimuli, the body, being an all-pervasive presence in human affairs and the source of many existential parameters (including pleasure, pain, identity, procreation and mortality), features large in canonical literature worldwide, especially in the western world where feminism has reinscribed the importance of the body in all aspects of private and public discourse, and most markedly in the U.S., where, according to Jean Baudrillard in America, the cult of the body has been in full effect for several decades as a constituent element of American culture. The tribulations and the transformations bodies undergo within the endless realms of fiction em-body metaphorically and metonymically the myriad questions of theme, form, philosophy and function in the said art form, as a subject as well as a tool (from Plato’s idea of “engendered” textuality in the Symposium to Hélène Cixous’s theory of “writing the body” and Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”).

THE CITY IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Unlike early 20th century images that depict that city as a result of rational planning and a topos of hierarchy and homogeneity, later representations of the city emphasize its plastic nature as well as its empowerment of subjective individualism. The aim of this course is to examine the changing faces of the city and their impact on the life of the individual. Though emphasis is given on the literary-critical perspectives on contemporary city, sociology, social and political geography, architectural theory as well as different types of cultural studies like film theory, gender studies, ethnic and postcolonial studies are taken into consideration, all of which revealing the interdisciplinary character of the field of urban studies.