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•1/ Images of the Australian Past: History on the Screen
What can you learn about a country’s past from watching films and television programs produced about its history? This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to Australian history, by exploring how film-makers and television producers have shaped the way Australians imagine their past. Rather than accepting these accounts on face value, in this course you will study Australian films and television mini-series as narratives produced at specific historical moments and in response to particular cultural concerns.
The course will cover three of the major themes of Australian history – convict heritage, the impact of war, and the fate of Indigenous Australians – through the lens of film. Instead of assessing historical films and mini-series on their artistic merit, the course will focus on the conditions of their production, the contemporary issues they seek to address, their reception and ensuing public debate, and the relationship between their concerns and existing historical scholarship. In this way, students will develop an appreciation of the history of particular issues and themes, their resonance in contemporary culture and reflect on the role of the historian in constructing public knowledge about the past. Films to be covered in the course include Breaker Morant (1980), Gallipoli (1981), Australia (2008), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002).
Eksamensform: A (hjemmeopgave)
•2/ Narrating the Nation
‘I was linked to history both […] actively-literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically and passively-literally, I was inextricably entwined with my world.’
(Midnight’s Children
)
Indian fiction often intertwines private and public stories to the extent that one may look at characterisations and plots as allegories that critique the role of the citizen in the ‘postcolonial’ nation. This course will focus on how the nation figures in a selection of Indian novels (written in English). India is inherently a hybrid and heterogeneous nation state held together by a homogenising national myth that builds on the ‘unity within’. The novels, however, each in their own way, question the national myth (and its ‘liberal dilemma’) and seek to excavate the ambivalently fragmented stories hidden underneath it. How do colonial legacies and nationalist discourses affect citizen lives, how are they shaped by, for example, the two major ‘divisive’ events of Partition in 1948 and the State of Emergency in 1975, and how do they cope with the current pressures of globalisation?
Texts: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981); Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (1988);
Rohinton Mistry A Fine Balance (1995); Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997);
Githa Hariharan, In Times of Siege (2003).
Eksamensform: B (mundtlig eks. med synops)
•3/ Foreign language acquisition Module 3A
Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy
In recent years more and more researchers and language teachers have stressed the central role of vocabulary knowledge in language use and language learning. In the course current theories of lexical competence, vocabulary acquisition and vocabulary teaching will be presented and discussed. Firstly, we will try to define and describe vocabulary. We will then investigate how vocabulary is acquired, stored and retrieved from the mental lexicon both from the perspective of the children learning their first language and learners learning a second- or a foreign language. One of the crucial questions here is how we can ensure that newly learnt vocabulary items are remembered and made available for production and reception. Moreover the role of incidental vocabulary learning through reading will be explored. Finally, a number of pedagogical issues relating to teaching materials, methods and vocabulary testing will be raised. Throughout the course the question of different research approaches will be addressed. For some of the participants the course might provide inspiration for research projects in relation to their thesis ('speciale'). The course will be conducted using a mixture of lectures, group work and discussion. Course material will be based on a course book and a number of empirical research articles
Eksamensform: A (hjemmeopgave)
•4/ The Word and The World in Paul Auster's Writing
Opening with the strong image of the writer alone in his room struggling to translate the world as he experiences it into words, we will identify, analyze and discuss such key concepts as 'Language', 'Space', 'Movement', 'Narration', 'Divestment' and the 'American dimension' across a selection of Paul Auster's narrative texts. Auster's new 'autobiographical fiction', Winter Journal, will be out in English in September 2012, and so, we will focus on 'Portraits of Self and Other' in particular. We will turn every word in "White Spaces" (Ground Work, 1990; http://phd.hum.ku.dk/trams/auster/), close-read Winter Journal and The Invention of Solitude, and study, among other writings, Hand to Mouth and The Book of Illusions
Eksamensform: A (hjemmeopgave)
•5/ Ordbøgerne, nettet og brugerne: Leksikografi nu og i fremtiden
På dette kursus sætter vi fokus på sammenhængen mellem traditionelle ordbøger og de nye informations¬kilder på internettet, herunder online-ordbøger og tekstkorpora. Vi vil se på forholdet mellem sprogbrug og sprognormer i de forskellige kilder, og vi vil sammenligne nettets sprogværktøjer med ordbøger på papir og på cd. Er nettet bedst når det gælder nye ord og betydninger? Hvordan bruger vi bedst ordbøger, og hvordan skaber vi de bedste ordbøger?
Kurset henvender sig studerende med interesse for hvordan ordbøger bliver til, og for hvordan man bedst udnytter det der står i dem – eller finder de oplysninger om ord som de ikke giver. Vi vil se kritisk på både en- og tosprogsordbøger og stille skarpt på leksikografiens teori og praksis som den tegner sig i netværks¬samfundet af i morgen.
Kurset er tværsprogligt (med dansk som undervisningssprog).
Grundbog: Bo Svensén: Handbok i Lexikografi (2004)
Eksamensform: A
•6/ Life-story, oral history and the archive of memory
Life-story telling, even as silent recollection, is always located socially and historically as well as psychologically. Consequently the recent study of life-stories cuts across disciplinary boundaries to reveal the structures that underlie spoken and (sometimes) written down versions of a personal past. This course considers what it means to create one, or many, such histories, as well as the ways in which historians, sociologists and anthropologists analyse such accounts. We pursue these theoretical considerations through various life-stories beginning from the 18th century.
Bibliography:
L. Abrams, Oral History Theory
Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745-97), The Interesting Narrative Ellen O’Neill, (born c. 1833) Extraordinary Confessions of a Female Pickpocket Munshi Rahman Khan (1874-1972), Autobiography of an Indian Indentured Labourer Donall MacAmhlaigh (1926-89), An Irish Navvy: the diary of an exile
Eksamensform: A (hjemmeopgave)
•7/ American fiction of the 1970s
In the United States, the 1970s were the continuation and culmination of a tumultuous era, a period of social and political upheaval. The war in Vietnam continued, ultimately ending in disaster. A revived and radical feminism manifested itself in political debate and public life. Violent terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground, the Black Panther Party and the Symbionese Liberation Army conducted campaigns of bombings, robbery, kidnapping and murder across the United States. The Watergate scandal threatened to overwhelm the American political process. Crime rates, including homicide, soared. A gasoline crisis followed the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, and as inflation rose steadily in the United States, the economy faltered. A declining working population in many major cities, including New York city, brought them to the verge of bankruptcy.
Yet, as is so often the case, these turbulent years were also characterized by a number of notable literary achievements. In this course, we will examine carefully some representative novels and short fiction of the 1970s. These will include Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, “Dreams” from Crossing the Border by Joyce Carol Oates, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, “Black Tickets” by Jayne Anne Phillips and other works that will be gathered in a compendium.
Eksamensform: A (hjemmeopgave)
•8/ The Writings of Oscar Wilde
Most people associate Wilde with flamboyant behaviour and paradoxical wit. This course will seek to give a far more multi-facetted picture of Wilde, as we study the wide spectrum of his writings from the late 1870s until his death in 1900: art criticism, poetry, short stories, drama, fairy-tales, the novel, together with his autobiographical writings. The course will position Wilde firmly within the English and French fin-de-siècle, and some time may also be devoted to discussions of the Danish reception of Wilde after his death.
Students are requested to acquire The Harper Collins one-volume edition of Wilde’s works before the beginning of the course: The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems & Essays, ISBN-10: 006096393X ISBN-13: 978-0060963934
Eksamensform: A (hjemmeopgave)
•9/ Modernism and the Search for National Identity: Framing America Through Art, 1900-1950
This course investigates the making, expression and dissent from the contours of the national mythology of the United States as expressed through American art and artists from the end of the Gilded Age to the beginning of the Cold War. American art has always maintained clear responses to the political, economic and social conditions of American life. During the first half of the 20th Century, artists collapsed boundaries between high art and junk art. Mass marketing and a communications revolution, the rise of photography and film, a jazz age, world wars, a Great Depression, American territorial ambitions, immigration and internal turmoil, and a thousand thousand nuanced events brought fresh perspectives and changed life to “the Modern” as New York City replaced Paris as the center of the art world.
Eksamensform: C (Course work and home paper)
•10/ Globalization in contemprorary writing about the U. S. south
This course will consider recent literary texts that situate the U.S. South within transnational contexts. In particular, we will look at writings—mostly novels but also short stories, non-fiction, and travel writing--that focus on the ways in which immigration and globalization have challenged and transformed traditional understandings of U.S. southern identity. By reading a range of primary texts produced by native southerners, non-southern U.S. writers, and international authors, we will map the changing terrain of what Leigh Anne Duck has termed “the nation’s region” as it is reshaped by an influx (and exodus) of global capital, and by the arrival of immigrants from around the world.
Early in the course, we will consider how recent literary representations of cultural and migratory flows between the Caribbean and the U.S. South relate to or riff on the work of earlier southern writers like Zora Neale Hurston. We will proceed to assess the ways in which literary representations of immigrants from Africa, southeast Asia, and Latin America complicate traditional notions of a “biracial” (i.e., white and black) U.S. South. We will also think about the ways in which these texts depict and critique the “sense of placelessness” which, according to postmodern theorists, characterizes a capitalist “international city” like Atlanta, and whether representations of immigrant communities in Atlanta, Miami, Memphis, and (post-Katrina) New Orleans offer an alternative vision of the (urban) US. South as an “international,” increasingly cosmopolitan locus.
The course will situate the selected primary texts in relation to and dialogue with recent critical and theoretical work in U.S. southern studies and other relevant fields. In particular, we will read and discuss critical texts associated with the so-called “New Southern Studies.”
Primary texts will be selected from (NB: subject to change): V.S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South (1989); Russell Banks, Continental Drift; Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (1980); Erna Brodber, Louisiana (1994); Susan Choi, The Foreign Student (1998); Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (1998);Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992); Cynthia Shearer, The Celestial Jukebox (2005); Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (2009); Patrick Neate, Twelve Bar Blues (2002). Secondary reading will be assigned for the most part from a range of journals available electronically via the Royal Library
Eksamensform: C (kursusarbejde og hjemmeopgave)
•11/ Global Voices
Globalisation has become a buzzword of the contemporary age. It has been used at large in popular as well as in academic literature. It describes the flows of capitalism and market forces, the corrosion of the nation-state, the rise of transnational organisations. In general, however, the concept of globalisation refers to the processes by which previously distant parts of the world have become connected in historically unprecedented ways.
Globalisation has opened a gateway of new possibilities to the ways in which we think about identity and belonging. The intermingling of cultures across the globe, so the story goes, has effected a breakdown of traditional ways of thinking about cultural identity. The new cultural dynamics has engendered the rise of one common denominator for all, a supposed precondition of contemporary life; the ultimate (con)fusion of cultural identities; a breakdown of territorial and cultural boundaries. But what identities are available to us in this age of cultural volatility? Which identities are emerging from the new world order of multiculturalisms, ethnicities, internationalisms and transnationalisms?
These and related topics will be discussed during the course as it sets out to explore how we think and talk about cultural globalisation in contemporary literature. We will examine themes such as cosmopolitanism, migration, multiculturalism and tradition as they are reflected in contemporary novels, e.g. Tokyo Cancelled (by Rana Dasgupta), The Loneliness of Angels (Myriam J.A. Chancy) and Foreigners (by Caryl Phillips).
Course Readings: A course compendium will be available. Further reading to be announced
Eksamensform: B (Mdl. eksamen m. synops)
•12/ Communication, co-operation and conflict
Communication has a comfortable ring to it – we associate it with bonding, togetherness and affection. Theories of communication tend to stress the co-operative dimension, the mutual benefits and the utopian dimensions of human community that communication may point to. It is often assumed that whatever other difficulties there may be, human communication is something that can always win through.
Yet social processes are not invariably altruistic. For each individual the issue of personal success, if necessary at the expense of fellow communicators, also has a role to play. There may also be rivalry and tension between groups, and this may set the tome for intergroup communication. Then again, the individual’s freedom of action is circumscribed by group processes, so looking out for your own interests requires taking relations with interlocutors into consideration. Macciavellian thinking also requires communicative skills.
The course explores some of the pragmatic, linguistic and social issues that characterize different types of communication, focusing on the relation between conflictive and co-operative dimensions.. There will be a mixture of lectures, group discussions on set texts and student presentations. Among the issues discussed will be presupposition, cross-cultural and ethnic differences, status and power, and polarization. The set texts will be available (1) in the book Can you reach the salt. Pragmatikkens klassiske tekster (Carol Henriksen, Samfundslitteratur), (2) in the form of a class anthology available at ’Studenterafdelingen/PubliCom’.
Eksamensform: C (Kursusarbejde m. 24-timers hjemmeopgave)
•13/ Writing in a foreign language: Process and product
The aim of this course is to give participants a specialised background for discussing, evaluating and researching different aspects of writing in a foreign language. The focus of the course will be on writing processes and on the written product. Theoretical models of writing processes and empirical investigations of these processes in relation to writing in the foreign language as well as in the mother tongue will be dealt with. The written product will be discussed in relation to discourse analysis and in relation to empirical studies of student texts. To appreciate results of empirical investigations of writing in a foreign language, familiarity with various research methods is essential. Finally the question of the language learning potential of writing in a foreign language will be addressed.
Eksamensform: A, B eller C
•14/ William Shakespeare, An Introduction, Followed by a Reading of Selected Plays.
This course will teach you how to read Shakespeare's plays and give you an overview of the different kinds of drama he wrote, dealing with the categories of comedy, tragedy, history play, problem play and lyrical drama. We will also consider filmed versions of some of the plays.
Eksamensform: B (mdl.)
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