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Language and identity
Language is fundamental to cultural identity; its social function is vital and it not only fosters group identity, it also helps exclude others. The course will look at some of the major aspects of the relationship between language and identity as well as the role of language in the construction of national, religious and gender identity.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and relativism will be the point of departure for a course that will also include excerpts from works as diverse as Ernst Cassirer's An Essay of Man and John E. Josephs Language and Identity as well look into recent studies.
Contemporary Australia
Contemporary Australia is offered at the University of Copenhagen during the autumn semester of 2011 in partnership with the National Centre for Australian Studies (NCAS) at Monash University in Melbourne br/> http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ncas/
As the title suggests, Contemporary Australia introduces students to the political, social, cultural, environmental and economic factors currently shaping Australia. Through a comprehensive seminar program, Contemporary Australia explores current debates on issues such as race relations, the environment, immigration, international relations and national identity/ies. The unit seeks to develop in students a critical understanding of the historical forces that have shaped these - and other – prominent issues currently being debated in contemporary Australia.
English and American Postmodern Writing
While the Modernists experimented with new modes of literary expression, Postmodern writers went a step further and began a radical dismantling of established norms and traditions. They undermined the power of the author and left the reader in charge of the completion of the text, frivolously, they cut back and forth between different kinds of writing, and they stole, shamelessly, from writers who came before them. But they have opened the literary and cultural scene of the Western world to new, exciting horizons.
We will be studying a selection of texts by such writers as John Fowles, Julian Barnes, John Barth, Jeanette Winterson and Paul Auster
Dickens and the Workings of the Novel
In the year when the world celebrates the bicentenary of Charles Dickens (1812-70), here is an opportunity to study his work in detail. In most courses the length of his great novels inhibits their inclusion in the curriculum, and so students tend to be familiar only with the shorter ones, which are the lesser ones. It is only over eight hundred pages or more that one can see Dickens at his most brilliant, as a master-strategist of narrative momentum, subordinate intricacies and digressions of comedy and terror. We will therefore study on this course only three novels, but three of the longest and greatest novels in English, or any other language: Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House. Close attention will be paid to language, in particular to adverbs such as 'meanwhile' that indicate parallel narrative threads with their separate spaces and times. From this kind of myopic lexical attention we will acquire some sense of how Dickens builds up a fictional world that can correspond in its complexity to the social, industrial and technological developments of the mid-nineteenth century.
All texts will be read in the Oxford World's Classics edition.
Contemporary America and the 2012 Presidential Election
This course focuses on the issues of contemporary American society, politics and culture as it engages a cosmopolitan and reactionary world since the end of the Cold War. While this course looks widely across and into the condition of contemporary America, the emphasis is placed on the Bush and Obama presidencies. Much of our discussion will revolve around issues raised by the candidates in the presidential election and its immediate aftermath. We will often begin our discussion with the front page of the New York Times, Foreign Policy, New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Economist or another reputable source
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