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Amerikansk litteratur: American literature: American Literature, Culture, and the Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1935
This course surveys American literature and culture through the lens of the Atlantic Monthly, once the nation’s most influential literary magazine. Although we will begin earlier, our focus is the first decades of the twentieth century. Class time will include both discussions of individual literary texts and broader conversations about developments in the Atlantic and American culture at large.
Reflecting their identity as texts first published in a magazine, our readings will be numerous but short, including fiction, poetry, and essays. Authors include Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Antin, Charles Chesnutt, Zitkala Sa, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. The exception is Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, which we will read serially over the course of 12 weeks, mirroring the way its original readers first experienced it as a serial novel.
We will look at how the Atlantic responded to different literary movements, including regionalism, realism, and modernism. We will consider the contradictions built into its identity: the persistent but vexed participation of women; the tension of being a national periodical while retaining a Bostonian flavor; between carving out a distinct American cultural identity while continuing to look to Europe; between promoting a high-culture reputation while striving for a mass-market circulation. We will also touch on its involvement in some of the controversies of its time, including Indian policy, African American education, immigration, urban reform, and women’s rights. As time allows (especially in student presentations), we will attend to “peritexts”: readers’ letters, editorial comments, advertisements, etc.
Secondary reading includes excerpts from Richard Brodhead’s important study, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America; Susan Goodman’s anecdotal history Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and its Writers; Ellery Sedgwick’s memoir Happy Profession (1946); Michael Lund’s America's Continuing Story: An Introduction to Serial Fiction, 1850-1900, and Anne E. Boyd’s “'What! Has she got into the "Atlantic"?':
Eksamensform C aktiv undervisningsdeltagelse samt 24-timers opgave
Amerikansk litteratur: Holocaust and Representation
This course considers some of the major problems that historians, novelists, poets, filmmakers, and theologians have encountered and articulated in their attempts to give adequate expression to the catastrophe (Shoah) suffered by European Jews under the National Socialist regime in Germany. Does this event, or series of events, exceed the capacities of cognition and language? Or do writers assert the incomprehensibility and inexpressibility of the Holocaust at their peril? We will take up Adorno’s dictum that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, review the 1980s debates on historical revisionism, and interpret the hermeneutical and mythological tactics of two influential Jewish theologians. The majority of the semester will be dedicated to discussion and close analysis of literary strategies of representation, from Primo Levi’s documentary autobiography to W.G. Sebald’s oblique narratives and Maurice Blanchot’s insistence that the Holocaust cannot be represented.
Eksamensform C, aktiv deltagelseog 24-timers opgave
Amerikansk litteratur: Tell about the South: The Fiction of William Faulkner
This MA course will concentrate on a range of novels and short stories by the writer who is widely regarded as the most important U.S. novelist of the twentieth-century, William Faulkner. As the title of the course suggests, we will concentrate in particular on Faulkner’s representation of the U.S. South via his “little postage stamp of native soil”: the town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County (based to a large degree on Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford in Lafayette County, Mississippi). We will read and discuss some of the major novels of Faulkner’s “canonical” period (1929-1942) including The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932) and Absalon, Absalon! (1936). However, we will also attend to the latter part of Faulkner’s long career, encompassing the “Faulkner revival” that began in 1946, the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, and Faulkner’s complicated role as a public speaker and essayist during the Cold War and Civil Rights Movement. The sub-themes we will consider include Faulkner’s representation of U.S. southern history from slavery to the emergence of a modern, urbanizing “New South”; his modernist approach to issues of representation; race, class, and gender relations; Faulkner’s fiction as literary geography; and Faulkner’s influence and legacies.
Primary texts will be selected from the following long list (NB: subject to change): The Sound and the Fury (1929); Sanctuary (1931); Light in August (1932); Absalon, Absalon! (1936); The Wild Palms/If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1938); The Hamlet (1940); Go Down, Moses (1942); Collected Stories (1950); Requiem for a Nun (1951); The Town (1955); The Mansion (1960).
Eksamensform A hjemmeopgave
Amerikansk litteratur: The American Short Story
The national art form,” as the author Frank O’Connor called it, the short story has for two centuries flourished in the United States, attracting many of America’s finest writers.
In this course, we will consider the ancestry and development, contexts and criticism, modes and component elements, and types and techniques of the short story as it has manifested itself in American literature.
We will read and analyze stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Saul Bellow, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, and others, drawn from The Heath Anthology of American Literature and from a compendium compiled especially for the course.
Highly recommended: The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story by Martin Scofield (2006).
Background reading: From Puritanism to Postmodernism by R. Ruland and M. Bradbury (1991), and The American Short Story – A Critical History edited by Gordon Weaver (1983).
Eksamensform A hjemmeopgave
Britisk litteratur: Art for Art’s Sake and late nineteenth-century aestheticism
The term ‘L’art pour l’art’ (art for art’s sake) has conventionally been associated with the Preface to Théophile Gautier’s novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), although the term nowhere appears in the text. This course aims at mapping different manifestations of art for art’s sake and aestheticism in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as British writers and artists were in close dialogue with recent developments in France. We shall explore the phenomenon of aestheticism through poetry, painting, art criticism, fiction, and operetta, and perhaps we shall know a little more about leading a life devoted to beauty and the gratification of the senses by the end of the course.
Texts will include poems by Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire (in English translation), Algernon Charles Swinburne and D.G. Rossetti; paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Frederic Leighton and J.A.M. Whistler; Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873); Gilbert and Sullivan, Patience (1881); J.A.M. Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1886); J-K Huysmans, Against Nature (1886); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).
Eksamensform A hjemmeopgave
Britisk og amerikansk litteratur: Autobiographical Writings by Four Contemporary Novelists
Readings and discussions of:
Doris Lessing's Under My Skin (1994) centering on Lessing's childhood and youth in Africa and her leaving Africa to live in London and become a writer,
Siri Hustvedt's The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves (2010) focusing on her fits of shaking and migraines and the connection between her bodily experiences and her creativity as a writer,
Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011) about her life from childhood when she was adopted by a formidable strong "mother" and a weak, sympathetic "father" to her becoming a writer, her recent breakdown and search for her birth mother,
Paul Auster's Winter Journal (2012) in which he looks back at his life and relations with his parents and his son and other significant persons and focuses especially on bodily sensations and experiences.
All four writers in writing about their lives incidentally cast light on their works and writings.
Eksamensform C aktiv undervisningsdeltagelse samt 24-timers opgave
Amerikansk historie: American Mosaic: A Transnational narrative on US Immigration
The United States of America has always been a nation of immigrants, a verity so repeatable and repeated that the statement has become a cliché. The American Dream and Creed are ideas that stem from immigrant hopes, experiences and transnational understandings. In the 21st Century there have been profound changes in immigration patterns and immigrant life which include paradoxes in the ways people migrate, are welcomed or incarcerated, assimilate or remain “foreign,” and reflect the transnational identities attendant to the physical and virtual border crossings of our era. This course seeks to make sense of the complex and controversial issues involved in making a national/transnational/global identity from a diverse group of humans. We will look at place and space and examine sociological political theories to see how host and sender countries together create a people who have been described by immigration scholar Alejandro Portes as an ever young, new, and “permanently unfinished” society.
Eksamensform A hjemmeopgave
Amerikansk historie: The American Century: 1898-2001
The American Century: 1898-2001 provides an in-depth exploration of the transformation of the nation from the Spanish American War to the 9/11 Terrorist attacks. Recently “complete” as a continental power in 1898, the U.S. had become the unchallenged “hyperpower” by 2001 – or so it might have seemed. The course charts the relationship between America’s internal and external growth. Political, economic, social, and cultural viewpoints will be covered, using an interrogative and explanatory method towards primary sources and secondary explanations. This method will allow us to contemplate critically how and by whom history is studied and constructed.
Eksamensform A hjemmeopgave
Britisk historie: Film and Society in Postwar Britain
BA: Semester 2 2012-13. Film and Society in Postwar Britain The medium of film offers us the past in its imaginative constructions, its assumed values, its varied landscapes. Film allows too a rare chance for encounter with distant lives, with localities now long disappeared. By thinking creatively and analytically about film – documentary, independent, big budget – we can consider competing versions of nationhood. The individual films, cycles and genres of cinema that we will consider in this course reveal, then, something of the historical developments and current preoccupations that have shaped postwar Britain.
Bibliography:
A. Aldgate and J. Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present J. Chapman, Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film P. Leese, Britain since 1945: aspects of identity
Eksamensform A hjemmeopgave
Postcolonial:
The Break-Up of “Greater Britain”: The Global Origins of the Crisis of Britishness
This course addresses the legacies of Britain’s imperial past through an examination of the interconnections between the unraveling of the British Empire and the so-called ‘Break-Up of Britain’. Over the past four decades, the future of the United Kingdom has been increasingly called into question; indeed predicting the ‘end of Britain’ has become something of a national pastime (itself a distinctive marker of ‘being British’). It is difficult to pin-point precisely when the idea of an imminent implosion of Britishness gained currency, but Tom Nairn’s Break-Up of Britain (1977) is rightly regarded as a key landmark, while innumerable books and articles since that time have added weight to his prophecy. The idea has become manifest in the politics of ‘devolution’ in the Welsh and Scottish assemblies , and popularized in titles such as Peter Hitchens’ The Abolition of Britain (1999), Nairn’s own After Britain (2000), and Andrew Marr’s BBC documentary (and accompanying book) The Day Britain Died (2000).
This course seeks a wider explanation for the perceived crisis of Britishness, through an examination of the fate of ‘Greater Britain’ – arguably the world’s first global civic idea. The notion that Britishness transcended geography, uniting a world-wide community of British subjects, was one of the major casualties of the end of empire. Studying the demise of British civic culture throughout the many self-styled ‘British’ communities the world over offers a new perspective on developments in the UK in recent decades. Among the case studies to be considered are the collapse of fiercely loyal British communities in South Africa in the face of Akrikaaner nationalism in the 1950s and 60s; the struggle over British symbols and identity in Canada in the post-WWII era amid fears of absorption into the United States; the crisis of Britishness in Australia and New Zealand under the pressure of European integration and global decolonization; and the changing attitudes towards loyalist communities in the West Indies, Kenya and Hong Kong in the wake of empire.
The course theme is the subject of an independently-funded research project based at the Institute for English, German and Romance Studies. It will be taught interchangeably by members of the project team, all of whom will take part in weekly seminars and discussions. It therefore represents an innovative approach to research-based teaching.
All course materials will be made available online for the students to access
Eksamensform A: Fri skriftlig hjemmeopgave
Postcolonial: DETTE KURSUS ER AFLYST:Crossing Borders - Imaging Globality in Contemporary Film
Postcolonial: Caryl Phillips in the 21st Century
In this MA-course we will be reading a selection of recent texts by black British writer Caryl Phillips and discuss what we might call his “new world order”. The course is particularly interested in debating topics such as hospitality, the figure of the stranger, national and individual identity, racism, belonging, and types of ownership. As a theoretical perspective on such debates we will draw on Jacques Derrida’s thoughts hostility and hospitality, Ali Rattansi’s exploration of racism, and a selection of essays by Zygmunt Bauman on the complex figure of the stranger.
Reading list:
Joseph Conrad’s story “Amy Foster” (1901) and Caryl Phillips: In The Falling Snow (2009), Foreigners (2007), Dancing in the Dark (2005), A Distant Shore (2003), extracts from essay collections A New World Order (2001) and Colour Me English (2011); Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford UP: 2000); Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP: 2007); Zygmunt Bauman (selection of essays)
Eksamensform B mundtlig med synopsis
Dette kursus bliver ikke oprettet i F13: English Linguistics: Rearranging Wor(l)ds: A Creative Writing Course
Foreign language acquisition: Cross-Cultural Pragmatics and Foreign Language Learning
Eligible for: “Kandidatuddannelsen i Engelsk med gymnasierettet profil” 2008, Module 3A & Module 4, Module 1, 15 ECTS, “Kandidatuddannelsen i Engelsk” Modules 1 to 4, 15 ECTS – and also a possibility for “Gymnasierettede KA-Tilvalg i Engelsk Module 2 & Module 4, 7.5 ECTS.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 and discuss developmental studies of pragmatic competence and the transferability of 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. 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
Foreign Language Acquisition: Focus on Form
This course in foreign language acquisition aims is to give participants a theoretical background for
evaluating various aspects of the teaching of English as a foreign language in the Danish sixth-form
college. We therefore need to address current theories of foreign language learning and of
communicative competence and the processes underlying the use of the foreign language in relation
to production as well as reception. However, the course will mainly focus on recent research
addressing what it takes to get learners to improve their language proficiency i.e. to get them to
focus on form. Analysis and evaluation of learner language/data will be used for illustration of the theoretical concepts throughout the course. The course will be conducted using a mixture of lectures, group work and discussions. Readings will mainly consist of a number of research articles on the course topics, selected from scholarly journals.
Eksamensform B: mundtlig med synopsis
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