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Amerikansk litteratur: Multi-ethnic Literature of the US
In his famous article “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot” for _The Nation_ in 1915, Horace Kallen stated, “At the present time there is no dominant American mind. Our spirit is inarticulate, not a voice, but a chorus of many voices each singing a rather different tune.” This course explores the multi-ethnic voices that provide more than just a reminder of the diversity of the United States, they both question and define its literary history. We will examine these various voices and locations that contribute to U.S. multi-ethnic literature from the Lower East Side ghetto in New York City, to the U.S./Mexican border, to the Native American reservation. Texts may include authors such as Abraham Cahan, Sui Sin Far, Gloria Anzaldua, Louise Erdrich, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, and others who ask us as readers to question inherent assumptions about American ideals. We will extend beyond traditional text to include other modes used by minority groups to form identities within the U.S. including photojournalism such as _How The Other Half Lives_ by Danish immigrant Jacob Riis, comics such as _American Born Chinese_ by Gene Luen Yang, and representations in film and on the stage. We will interrogate definitions of American identity by those on the border between multiple cultures, as well as examine the limitations of nation-based literature from the viewpoint of those writing from the margins.
Amerikansk litteratur: Place and Movement in American Fiction, 1915-1929
American fiction has been dedicated throughout its history to probing what it means to live in a particular place and to move from one place to another. In the first decades of the twentieth century, writers continued this exploration with newly developing, experimental literary techniques. This course investigates the representation of American place and mobility, 1915-1929, through the fiction of Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, and Edgar Lee Masters.
Primary reading list:
A Lost Lady (1923)
The Great Gatsby (1925)
Cane (1923)
Nick Adams stories (1923-33)
Summer (1917)
Passing (1929)
Spoon River Anthology (1915)
Britisk historie: Swinging Britain?British Politics, Society and Culture in the 1960’s
Few decades evoke such colourful images in the modern imagination as the 1960s: hippies, pop music, the mini skirt and youth revolt. Historians, politicians and social commentators all continue to tell dramatic, but competing stories of the sixties as an era of major social and cultural change, either for good or ill. For some it was a time of cultural and social liberalisation; Britain shed its Victorian conservatism along with the economic austerity of the depression and war years. For others sixties permissiveness symbolised the moral, spiritual and imperial decline that Britain underwent during this decade.
This module will consider the British experience of the 1960s. It will introduce students to some of the key political, social, and cultural changes of the decade, from developments in high governmental politics to changes affecting people’s everyday lives. Students will examine the competing narratives prevailing throughout sixties Britain: as the nation celebrated the new and the modern, politicians and social commentators worried about the decline of imperial power and the threat to social order posed by the new youth culture. The module aims to develop undergraduates’ experience of historiography. In this module students will address the contested question of the sixties as an era of revolution in Britain. They will consider the myths that have contributed to competing historical readings of Britain’s ‘swinging sixties’. Topics to be studied will include: post-war anxieties, intellectuals and the decline of Empire; post-war consumer society, education and the shaping of youth culture; ‘swinging London’, sixties popular culture, permissiveness and the counter-culture; the Labour government, immigration and the politics of race; poverty, class and the crisis of Labour; gender, ‘1968’ and women’s liberation.
Alongside secondary literature, students will examine social scientific surveys, journalism, oral sources, film, literature, and political writings and ephemera to assess the prevailing mood of the decade.
Britisk litteratur: Major Writings of Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf’s first forays into novel writing convinced her that the conventional narrative techniques of realism in use at her time failed to convey a true vision of reality, one which could liberate the individual from the tyranny of cultural stereotypes. This she saw as an important mission in a world which apparently had not learnt the terrible lesson of one Great War and was hurtling towards another. Her writing demands that its readers should be prepared to deconstruct (literally: take apart) their unexamined ideas concerning the nature of civilised society, of knowledge and education, of gender and sexuality, and plunge into a conceptual and perceptual ocean of shape-shifting and labile focalisation.
Woolf’s oeuvre is therefore concerned not only with the aesthetics of fiction but is also committed to a deeper understanding of society and its interaction with the individual. She was not only, or even mainly, a novelist, but a woman of letters, with an enormous production of essays, reviews, polemics, letters and journal-writing. In this course we will read first a selection of her shorter writings, both fiction and non-fiction, and then focus on three full-length works: A Room of One’s Own, To The Lighthouse and Orlando. Students interested in following this course should note that I will be giving a Brown Bag lecture on Virginia Woolf at the Faculty Library on November 29 and will welcome questions from students after the talk.
Postkoloniale studier: Postcolonial Travel Writing
Travel is one of the central experiences in colonial history and literature, involving both colonisers and colonised. Discovery, conquest, and commerce depend on voyages and have been reflected in many adventurous tales. This course will explore a corpus of postcolonial writings that revisit the age of imperialism. We will confront the question of how history and truth are constructed in these narratives, how impressions of otherness are conveyed, and how temporary travels relate to larger-scale displacement and migration. In the process, the act of reading as a form of armchair travel will come under critical scrutiny.
A corpus of short extracts from various works of imperial travel writers will be made available online. Texts discussed will include:
Abdulrazak Gurnah,Paradise
Rudy Wiebe,The Discovery of Strangers
Leslie Marmon Silko, Gardens in the Dunes
Cross-cultural communication and foreign language learning
This course explores cross-cultural norms for communicative behaviour from a foreign language learning perspective: rules governing how to regulate conversation and how to express different speech acts in a polite and appropriate manner. All these conventions of communication differ across cultures and social groups and acquiring pragmatic competence to deal with communicative needs is a difficult and often frustrating task for the foreign language learner. During the course we will look at research on cross-cultural communication across different language groups and discuss developmental studies of pragmatic competence and the transferability of pragmatic skills across languages. A number of theoretical and pedagogical issues related to teaching cross-cultural norms and different proposal for a classroom methodology will be discussed. The course will be conducted using a mixture of lectures, group work and discussion. Course material will be based on Yule, G. (1996) Pragmatics. Oxford University Press and a number of research articles.
Why choose a topic within Foreign Language Acquisition as one of your electives? It is of course an obvious choice if eventually you might want to teach English as a foreign language. However, knowledge of how native and non-native speakers manage cross-cultural communication is also useful for the language consultant. In addition, the course might inspire you to carry out a small scale empirical study for your BA-project, and it will serve as preparation for specialising in foreign language acquisition at the MA-level
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