* required for all students
** required for students taking Option A (thesis option)
*** required for students taking Option B (coursework and project option)
ELL 512* Research Methods and Academic Writing
This course is designed to equip students with the knowledge of resources, research and technical skills, and ethical principles needed for writing essays in their graduate courses as well as for the M.A. thesis.
Coursework will engage them in the processes of producing and presenting a scholarly analytical essay: (1) in-class analysis and discussion of selected short texts; (2) required reading and discussion of a range of model published essays to understand the styles, orientations and techniques of critical writing; (3) research – finding and accessing specific and related general research material (online, in libraries and archives, and through other means), including lectures, essays, book chapters and dissertations; (4) selecting relevant and reliable sources; (5) integrating research material in academic writing – with emphasis placed on originality, intellectual property, and the absolute ethical necessity of avoiding plagiarism and related forms of dissimulation such as unattributed generalizations, summaries, and paraphrases; (6) international proofreading symbols and the editing process (including using various Microsoft Word editing tools); and (7) the logic and styles of format and citation in standard professional formats – MLA, Chicago, and APA.
In the course of the semester, students will be required to write at least one 15-25-page essay closely analyzing a text such as a poem, short story, artwork, or critical/theoretical article. This will involve comprehensively researching relevant primary, secondary and theoretical literature; handing in drafts to be assessed at specified intervals; revising, editing, polishing and abstracting according to feedback received; and submitting the completed, polished version as the final product.
ELL 580* Concepts in Theory and Criticism
This course surveys a range of trajectories in theory and criticism from the classical period to the contemporary, with a focus on late 20th-century and recent developments that are essential for understanding and engaging in contemporary interpretation and analysis of texts. Areas covered include classical, Enlightenment and romantic theories, Anglo-American and Russian formalism, structuralism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, historiography, marxisms, reader-response/reception theory, poststructuralism and deconstruction, postmodernisms, feminisms and gender theories, theories of race, ethnicity and nationalism, postcolonial theory, new historicisms, ecocriticism, cultural theory and ideological critique, transhumanism.
Readings include both theoretical texts and exemplary analyses; the focus is on understanding theories as modes of questioning how meanings are produced in the process of reading, and not as formulaic “approaches” to be “applied.” Course assessment is based primarily on examinations and critical analyses of texts.
ELL 590** Seminar [Option A]
For students taking Option A, this is the final coursework requirement prior to beginning thesis work (ELL 591 and ELL 599). Each student is assigned a seminar advisor for the duration of the course, and is required: (1) to write a substantive 15-20 page critical essay analyzing a text or texts, with original arguments, showing clear understanding of the theoretical and critical issues involved in the analysis, carefully researched with all sources fully indicated, acknowledged and cited in-text and in notes and references, and in a standard professional format; (2) to meet regularly with the advisor during the semester and submit drafts of the essay for feedback; (3) towards the end of the semester, to submit the essay to all the department faculty two weeks before a scheduled presentation date; (4) to give a 15-20 minute oral presentation of the essay (if presentation software is used, all source material including texts, paraphrases and images must be indicated and cited fully for each slide) to the department faculty and students, and respond to questions and criticisms, on the scheduled date. The essay and presentation are expected to reflect the knowledge, theoretical understanding, and critical skills and sophistication a student has acquired over the course of the program, and to be an indication of the quality of thesis work to be expected from the student; grading of the course will be determined by departmental consensus.
As the MA program focuses on theoretical and analytical work (including critiquing and reframing concepts and ideologies of history, genre, authorship and intention, of reading strategies, of meaning, and of the concept of literature itself) it is expected that the essay and presentation will reflect this orientation and also question the assumptions and validity of their own methods and frames of reference. For this reason, essays and presentations based on general historical reviews, biographical summaries, simplistic overviews of plots, themes, characters or symbolism, and formulaic or uncritical “applications” of a theory, are excluded from consideration.
ELL 592*** Project [Option B]
For students taking Option B, this is the final coursework requirement. During the course of the semester, each student is assigned a project advisor and is required: (1) to write a substantive 15-20 page critical essay analyzing a text or texts, with original arguments and showing clear understanding of the theoretical and critical issues involved in the analysis, carefully researched with all sources fully acknowledged and cited in-text and in notes and references, and in a standard professional format; (2) to meet regularly with the advisor during the semester and submit drafts of the essay for feedback; (3) towards the end of the semester, to submit the essay to all the department faculty two weeks before a scheduled presentation date; (4) to give a 15-20 minute oral presentation of the essay (if presentation software is used, all source material including texts, paraphrases, and images must be indicated and cited fully for each slide) to the department faculty and students, and respond to questions and criticisms, on the scheduled date. The essay and presentation are expected to reflect the knowledge, theoretical understanding, and critical skills and sophistication a student has acquired over the course of the program, and to be an indication of the quality of thesis work to be expected from the student; grading of the course will be determined by departmental consensus.
As the MA program focuses on theoretical and analytical work (including critiquing and reframing concepts and ideologies of history, genre, authorship and intention, of reading strategies, of meaning, and of the concept of literature itself) it is expected that the essay and presentation will reflect this orientation and also question the assumptions and validity of their own methods and frames of reference. For this reason, essays and presentations based on general historical reviews, biographical summaries, simplistic overviews of plots, themes, characters or symbolism, and formulaic or uncritical “applications” of a theory, are excluded from consideration.
ELL 599** Thesis [Option A]
Taken in conjunction with ELL 591. The thesis is a substantive, 60-120-page critical, analytical study of a selected text or texts, based on directed, independent research; the topic is approved by the student’s supervisor and the chairperson of the department, and the student is expected to meet with the supervisor and submit drafts of the thesis for feedback at regular intervals during the course.
The thesis is expected to demonstrate careful textual analysis, cogent argumentation, originality of thought, and engagement with relevant existing research and theoretical issues; all sources must be acknowledged in detail, and the thesis presented in the specified format.
As the MA program focuses on theoretical and analytical work (including critiquing and reframing concepts and ideologies of history, genre, authorship and intention, of reading strategies, of meaning, and of the concept of literature itself) it is expected that the thesis will reflect this orientation and also question the assumptions and validity of its own methods and frames of reference. For this reason, theses based on general historical reviews, biographical summaries, simplistic overviews of plots, themes, characters or symbolism, and formulaic or uncritical “applications” of a theory, are excluded from consideration.
On completion of the thesis, the student is required to submit it to a jury comprising the supervisor and at least one internal and one external member, and defend it in an oral exam; the jury may accept, reject, or suggest revisions to the thesis and extend time for the student to make changes accordingly, pending a subsequent decision.
The descriptions below provide general guidelines: courses offered and course content vary from year to year depending on faculty research interests and student needs.
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ELL 536 Classical Literature
This course considers a variety of texts from the classical period (roughly 1000 BCE to the fifth century CE), in terms both of their intrinsic interest and of their influences on later periods. Texts may be selected from various literary traditions and genres, such as the epic (Homer, Virgil), drama (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plautus, Seneca, Livius Andronicus), lyric poetry (Sappho, Anacreon, Pindar, Catullus, Ovid) or prose (Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus, Marcus Aurelius, Petronius, Athenaeus). Other topics covered may range from the works of early theorists of aesthetics (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Plotinus, Horace), historiographers (e.g. Hesiod, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Livy, Plutarch, Suetonius), or mathematicians and natural scientists (e.g. the Presocratics, Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolemy, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Pliny the Elder), to the development of technology, the visual arts, and the orders of architecture in Greece and Rome.
Some texts may also be considered in relation to broader transhistorical developments, such as permutations of theories of tragedy (e.g. from Aristotle to Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Camus and Deleuze) or comedy (e.g. from the Tractatus coislinianus to Schopenhauer, Freud, Baudelaire, Bergson and Foucault); recontextualizations of myths (e.g. reworkings of the Homeric epics from the Romantics to Joyce to Bearden; or versions of the myth of Pygmalion from Shaw, to Lerner and Loewe, to films such as Her and Ex Machina); the development of dramatic forms (from the classical period, to the commedia dell’arte and opera, to the Theater of the Absurd); or the preservation, transmission and transformation of classical texts through Syriac and Arabic translations from Ibn Ishaq to Al-Kindi, Al-Razi, Al-Farabi, and Ibn Rushd.
ELL 537 Medieval Literature
This course looks at some of the diverse textual forms of the medieval period, from drama, romances, epics and religious sermons to developments in music, science and philosophy.
From a British literary perspective, the focus may be on works such as Beowulf; Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and other sources of chivalry; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; liturgical drama or mystery, miracle and morality plays (e.g. The Castle of Perseverance, Everyman, Hilton’s The Ladder of Perfection, or Langland’s Piers Plowman); or Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, Parlement of Foules, Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde.
The course may also take a broader, European literary perspective, looking at a range of works in translation such as the lyric poetry of traveling minstrels (the troubadours, the minnesingers); Dante’s La Vita Nuova and La Commedia Divina, or Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato and Decameron; the Roman de la Rose (Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun); the Arthurian romances (Chrétien de Troyes in France; Wolfram von Eschenbach and Gottfried von Strassburg in Germany; works by women writers (e.g. The Book of Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies); folk literature (Reynard the Fox, Till Eulenspiegel); or epic traditions (e.g. the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Icelandic Eddas and the Völsunga saga, the German Nibelungenlied).
Alternatively, the focus may be on examples of non-western literatures, such as the Sanskrit plays of Kalidasa, Murasaki’s Tale of Genji from Japan, the Arabian Thousand and One Nights, or the Turkic Book of Dede Korkut and Nasreddin Hodja stories; or on philosophical developments in scholasticism and humanism (e.g. from Boethius, Augustine, Aquinas and William of Ockham to Avicenna, Averroes and Maimonides) and science (Grosseteste, Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus; the “golden age of Islamic science”).
ELL 538 Renaissance Literature
An exploration of key social, religious, historical, political, scientific and philosophical texts of the Renaissance, including the influence of the Neo-Platonists of the Florentine Academy such as Ficino, Pico de la Mirandola, Giordano Bruno and Vico, as well as the contributions of Erasmus, More, Luther, Calvin, Machiavelli and Montaigne to humanistic thought, educational systems and the rise of individualism.
The course will generally cover broad European contexts, such as the “sonnet tradition”, Petrarch and Italian humanism, the influence of Ovid on love poetry, Senecan revenge tragedy, comedies, history plays, or the impact of the plague and the theatre on people’s lives. The literary focus may be on the works of British writers such as Sidney, Drayton, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and Donne; or on traditions such as the American (e.g. from Columbus, Las Casas, Cabeza de Vaca, Pizarro and Cortés to Bradford and Winthrop), the Spanish (Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Lazarillo de Tormes and the pastoral and picaresque novels), the French (e.g. from the poetry of Ronsard and the novels of Rabelais to Perrault’s fairy tales), the German (the adventure novels of Grimmelshausen, the tragedies of Gryphius, Brant’s Ship of Fools), or the Italian (e.g. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto). The course may also look at a range of contemporary texts from non-Western literatures (e.g. the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Mayan Popol Vuh, the Turkic songs of Köroğlu and Karacaoğlan, or the Divan poetry of Fuzuli).
Alternative frames of reference include artists of the northern and Florentine Renaissance (the van Eycks, Bosch, Dürer, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, etc.); architectural innovations (e.g. Brunelleschi, Mimar Sinan); musical developments (the mass, motet, chanson, madrigal and canzona); the ramifications of the printing press (Gutenberg, Caxton); or developments in alchemy, science and medicine (da Vinci, Paracelsus, Vesalius, Brahe, Copernicus, Burton). Critical perspectives on the course may range from classic sociohistorical studies to new historicism.
ELL 539 17th Century Literature
A survey of some of the defining moments in an era where British literary production ranges from the later works of Shakespeare (the romances) to the plays of Dryden and the “comedy of manners” in the Restoration period, including the works of such playwrights as Etherege, Farquahar, Wycherley, Behn and Congreve; European philosophical writing from Bacon to Hobbes to Leibniz; and scientific literature from Harvey to Newton.
The course generally covers literary texts by British authors such as Milton, Webster, Dryden, Jonson, the metaphysical and the cavalier poets, but may also take a broader transnational perspective, engaging with early American writers (e.g. Smith, Bradstreet, Rowlandson, Mather), or with European contemporaries such as Lope de Vega, Calderón and Cervantes in Spain; Bergerac, La Fontaine, and the plays of Corneille, Racine and Molière in France; or Grimmelshausen, Opitz, and the tragic drama in Germany.
Other contexts may include some of the formative philosophical texts of the Age of Reason on certainty, freedom, and the relation between thought and the physical world (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Pascal, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz); or selections from the writings of early physical and natural scientists such as Kepler on planetary motion, Galileo on heliocentrism, Harvey on blood circulation, van Leeuwenhoek on microscopy, Hooke on cells, Boyle on gases, Descartes on reason and the laws of nature, and Newton on motion, gravity, mathematics and optics.
ELL 540 18th-Century Literature
The eighteenth century, the “Age of Enlightenment,” is a period of conceptual as well as political revolutions, and presents an extraordinarily rich variety of foundational texts and transnational interactions in diverse fields, from literature, music and philosophy to economics, politics and the natural sciences. The focus of this course varies, but in general it will provide students with an understanding of the local and international significance of these revolutions in thought and society, as well as their implications for developments over the next two centuries and up to the present.
From the perspective of English literature, topics covered may range from the mock-heroics and satires of Pope and Swift, the poetry of Gray and Young, the essays of Addison and Steele, and the literary criticism of Samuel Johnson, to the development of the novel by such writers as Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Goldsmith, Sterne and Burney, the origins of the gothic in Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis, and the beginnings of Romanticism in Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The course could also look at selections from American literature, such as Franklin’s Autobiography, the political writings of Paine and Jefferson, the writings of colonised native Americans and slaves (Occom, Wheatley), or the early American gothic (Charles Brockden Brown).
Other areas of focus in the period might include Enlightenment rationalist philosophers (Locke, Berkeley and Hume in Britain, LaMettrie, Rousseau, Sade, Voltaire and Diderot in the French tradition; the Jena Romantics, Kant, Lessing, Herder and Hamann in the German); the development of classical musical genres through the works of composers such as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Gluck; or the systematization and advancement of chemistry and other scientific disciplines.
ELL 541 19th Century Literature I
This course will survey some of the developments in literature at the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century. From a British literary perspective, it may trace the emergence of Romanticism (the poetry of Blake, Coleridge, Wordworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron) through continental philosophy and Idealism (e.g. the works of Kant, Rousseau, Schelling, Fichte and Schopenhauer; early existentialist thought in Kierkegaard); or explore some of the fiction writing of the period (e.g. the pioneering novels of Scott, Austen, Godwin, Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley). Alternatively, it could concentrate on the contexts of revolutionary historic changes and the prolific prose writing of the period, looking at the writings of Burke, Paine, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft. The course may also be approached from an international perspective, focusing on developments in American literature (e.g. Emerson’s essays, the short stories of Irving and Poe, the novels of Cooper, Hawthorne and Melvillle, the poetry of Longfellow, Whitman and Dickinson); or in other traditions such as the German (e.g. Goethe and Schiller, Sturm und Drang, the lyric poetry of Heine and Hölderlin, the short stories of Hoffmann and Kleist); the French (e.g. the novels of Stendhal, Balzac, Dumas père, Sand); or the Russian (Lermontov, Pushkin, Gogol).
Other cultural contexts may range from movements in art (Neoclassicism; Romanticism, the Biedermeyer style and Barbizon school; the beginnings of Impressionism and photography) and music (Rossini, Donizetti, and the bel canto opera; Chopin and parlor music; Schumann, Mendelssohn and Liszt) to developments in technology (e.g. the invention of batteries, and gas and electric lighting, the typewriter, the telegraph, the postage stamp, the steam engine, Babbage’s calculator) and science (e.g. Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements, Dalton’s atomic theory, advances in geology by Lyell, Agassiz and others, Darwin’s voyages to the Galapagos Islands).
ELL 542 19th Century Literature II
This course looks at some of the developments in literature from around the middle to the end of the nineteenth century. A traditional British approach to the course might follow the development of the novel as a genre through the works of Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, Eliot, Gaskell, Trollope, and Hardy; or look at the aesthetics of the period as manifested in the poetry of the Rossettis, Tennyson, the Brownings, Arnold, and Hopkins. The course could also concentrate on groundbreaking scientific, philosophical, and political writings of the time such as those of Darwin, Carlyle, Engels and Nightingale, and explore their influence in the fiction of Morris, Wells, Doyle, and Carroll; or consider material out of the mainstream, such as Victorian erotica and dime novels.
Alternatively, or in conjunction with these, the course could look at developments in other national traditions, such as those of North America (e.g. the later poetry of Whitman and Dickinson, the essays of Douglass and Washington, short stories of Twain, London, Gilman and Wharton, or the prose fiction of James, Dreiser, Crane and Chopin), France (Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud; Hugo, Flaubert, Jules Verne, Zola, Huysmans, Maupassant), Germany (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx and Engels), the Nordic countries (Strindberg in Sweden, Ibsen in Norway, Anderson’s fairy tales in Denmark) or Russia (Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov).
As this is a formative period in the history of modern cultural and scientific discourse, the course may also consider the historical contexts and ramifications of its art (Victorian art, the Pre-Raphaelites, Realism, Naturalism, the Arts and Crafts movement, Symbolism, Post-Impressionism, Art Nouveau) and music (opera, program music, the concerto, varieties of nationalism and orientalism; Verdi, Gilbert and Sullivan, Wagner, Brahms, Debussy, Stravinsky), as well as advances in technology (e.g. the telephone, the phonograph, the internal combustion engine, the bicycle) and science (Darwin’s work on natural selection, Mendel’s on heredity, Pasteur’s on microorganisms; discoveries in physics and chemistry by Maxwell, Curie and others).
ELL 543 20th Century Literature I
The first half of the twentieth century, generally referred to as the modernist period in literature and art, is a period when artists started to challenge established forms of representation and experimented with new ways of expression that involved abstraction and uncertainty. This course will be directed to the ways in which literature and art of the time interacted with historical and social changes, as well as with advancements in science such as quantum physics, relativity and psychoanalysis. From the perspective of literature, topics discussed might range from poetry (war poetry, the works of Yeats, Eliot, the Imagists, e. e. cummings, Neo-Romantic and Movement poetry) to stream of consciousness and other structural and thematic characteristics of fiction by major English, American and European writers, such as Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Robbe-Grillet, Bataille, Kafka and Proust; to the philosophical writings of Sartre, Camus, Freud, etc.
Depending on the preferences of the lecturer in a particular semester, other areas of focus in this course might include various streams of modernism in art (Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Cubism and Expressionism, etc.); cinema and photography as new artistic modes of expression; changes in architectural design (Wright, Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus school, etc.); developments in classical music in the form of atonality and polytonality seen in the works of composers such as Schoenberg, Satie, Stravinsky, etc.; and discussions on jazz.
ELL 544 20th Century Literature II
Continuing the discussion in ELL 543 (20th-Century Literature I), this course will address literary and artistic techniques developed in the second half of the twentieth century. The course generally covers a variety of literary texts from different genres, including the poetry of English, Irish and American poets, such as Harrison, Heaney, the Black Mountain poets, the Beat generation, the New York school, Rich, Duffy; postmodern and postcolonial fiction by English and American writers (Ackroyd, Swift, Carter, Winterson, Barth, Barthelme, Federman, Vonnegut, Rushdie, Ishiguro, Kureishi, Coetzee, etc.) with an emphasis on postmodern narrative techniques, such as metafiction, parody, pastiche, intertextuality and frame-breaking; magic realism and Latin American fiction; and drama from the Theatre of the Absurd (Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Albee, Pinter) to postdramatic and in-yer-face theatre. In the analysis of texts, thematic issues such as class, race, ethnicity and gender as well as experimentation with new forms of expression might be taken into consideration.
The focus of the course may also be on visual arts, including the art of Latin American artists, such as Rivera and Kahlo, on abstract expressionism, pop art; eclecticism in architecture; postmodern cinema and the Hollywood film industry; and stylistically diverse music and performance arts.
ELL 545 Contemporary Literature and Culture
The description of this course will change with new developments in the art and literature of the twenty-first century. One focus of the course will be on graphic fiction; another on experimental poetry, fiction and drama by contemporary English, American and European writers. The course may also cover issues concerning new ways of writing and reading processes, the materiality of the page and the book in literary trends since the invention of the internet, developments in electronic literature, digital writing and blogs, cybercultures; intertextuality and the ways in which contemporary literature engages with older texts (such as adding zombies to Pride and Prejudice); or scientific and medical issues viewed from literary, artistic and cultural perspectives.
ELL 546 Literatures in English
This course may engage with texts in two overlapping areas: literature by writers outside Britain and the United States or by émigrés, produced or widely circulated in English; or literature in English produced in former British colonies (excluding the United States).
The first area includes works from former French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and other colonies, and may include such writers as Djebar, Khadra and Jelloun in North Africa; or Borges, Neruda, Paz, Márquez, Fuentes, Llosa, Amado and Lispector in South America. The course may also choose to consider texts from other countries which have been written in English or acquired global mainstream circulation in English translation, such as the works of Japanese writers like Mishima, Ōe, Murakami and Ishiguro; or of the Chinese authors Gao Xingjian, Mo Yan, Ha Jin, and Amy Tan.
The second area covers a wide range of literature affiliated with postcolonial studies and the study of Commonwealth literature, which may provide other perspectives. Texts to be discussed may include works by such writers as Naipaul and Hodge (Trinidad); Kinkaid (Antigua), Rhys (Dominica), Seth, Rushdie and Mukherjee (India), Kureishi (Pakistan), Ondaatje (Sri Lanka), Thiong’O (Kenya), Tutuola, Achebe, Soyinka and Okri (Nigeria), Coetzee, Fugard and Gordimer (South Africa); or Mahfouz and Saadawi (Egypt).
The course may choose to look at common motifs and historical experience in the selected texts, or study differences in the geopolitical and cultural contexts of writing and circulation; or in language, and literary style; or explore various theoretical perspectives across national traditions.
ELL 547 World Literatures
Although narrow, politicized ideas of “national literature” and disciplinary boundaries still persist in some states’ educational authorities and universities, the study of literature today extends beyond bureaucratic restrictions and nationalistic ideologies: the literary history of a geographical area cannot be isolated from its broader regional and global context, where ideas and texts have continually been disseminated in the service of imperial, colonial and globalizing ideologies, or through travelers, copyists, translators, educational systems, and new technologies.
This course therefore provides a contemporary introduction to a vast field of study, to help students broaden their perspectives towards a realistic international, pluralistic and cosmopolitan approach to literature. The material covered varies considerably: the course may be taught as a cross-cultural study focused on a genre (e.g. the epic, fairy tale, lyric poem, magic realism, film, sound or visual expression); on a theme (e.g. conceptions of divinity, death, familial and social structures, the exile, travel literature); on a period or episteme (e.g. European and American romanticisms), on a philosophy (e.g. existentialism, transhumanism), or from the perspective of broad theoretical concerns such as issues of rights, sexuality and gender, colonialism and postcolonialism, etc.
ELL 548 Period Studies – Special Topics I
ELL 549 Period Studies – Special Topics II
These two courses provide an opportunity for a specific focus on aspects of a period which may be studied in less detail in the broader Period Studies or Genre Studies courses – e.g. transnational literary influences, marginal genres, scientific, artistic or political texts and movements, etc.
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2. INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
ELL 531 Literature and Film
An examination of relations between literary texts and cinematic representations, focusing on concepts and theories that serve as frames of reference in both media, considered as distinct forms of representation, as well as in their intertextual relations. Thus, on the one hand, this course could deal with a variety of literary genres and their adaptations, such as the epic, novel, play, or poem; or on the other hand, with the adaptation process of a single genre; or with a single author or text with numerous adaptations.
However, as the aim of the course is to move beyond traditional fidelity and adaptation studies, its broader focus will be on understanding the fluidity as well as distinctions in the relationship between the two media and between verbal and visual representation, by considering aesthetic and structural parallels, analogies, variations and contradictions; framing, editing, and fragmentation; style, genre and subject matter; narrative codes and techniques; temporality and spatial constructs; allusion, pastiche and appropriation; and contexts of circulation and reception varying from television to the cinema to digital media.
Course material may therefore include literary texts from classical drama to contemporary popular fiction; scripts and cinematic representations in various genres from experimental film to recent releases; and review articles as well as theoretical and critical essays, from statements by early directors, to the writings of auteur theorists, to contemporary discussions in media and cultural studies and social, political, scientific, and literary theory.
ELL 550 Literature and the Visual Arts
Designed to discuss paragones or encounters between the so-called sister arts, literature and visual arts, this course will survey relevant critical writings of Plato, Horace, da Vinci, Sidney, G. E. Lessing and the Romantics, and then move on to a discussion on definitions of the concept of ekphrasis in the 20th century, with reference to the work of Mitchell, Krieger, Heffernan, and others. In particular, the discussion of critical texts on ekphrasis will provide a foundation for students to analyze poetic and fictional works by major English and American poets (Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, the Pre-Raphaelites, Ashbery, Auden, Larkin, O’Hara, Duffy, Nichols), and fiction writers (Wilde, Ackroyd, Chevalier).
Apart from ekphrastic texts, another focus of the course may be on the ways in which visuality is incorporated in literature, through the analysis of visual poetry by poets such as Herbert, e. e. cummings, Thomas and Ferlinghetti, and graphic fiction; or the reverse, where the visual arts make use of words, as in Cubist and Dada collages, the paintings of Magritte, postmodern word art, and contemporary graffiti art.
ELL 551 Literature and the Performing Arts
This course provides a contextual overview of selected critical developments in the field of performing arts, encompassing live performances of recitation, speech and song, dance, and acting.
In general, this course comprises different approaches to literary works in different mediums. The course could be conducted taking into account the interaction between literary works and different performing arts, such as ballet, opera, modern dance and theatre. The course will adopt a broad, global and cross-cultural approach, considering diverse origins and variations of dramatic performance; specific areas of focus may include such genres as Greek rhapsodic recitations and other oral narratives, European street theater, pantomime, and the carnivalesque; the evolution of shadow puppet theater from the Chinese pí yĭng xì and Indian Killekyata to the Japanese Bunraku, the Indonesian Wayang gulek and the Ottoman Karagöz and Hacivat; the development of musical performance (e.g. the origins of poetry in song, medieval and Renaissance liturgical and folk music, the commedia dell’arte and opera in Europe, nineteenth-century classical developments, modernist music and noise, developments from jazz through rock and hiphop, contemporary explorations in electronic music); or the permutations of dance (from tribal and ritual motions to the ballet and modern dance; Duncan, Cunningham, Tharp) and performance art (e.g. from the Cabaret Voltaire to Anderson, Abramović and Stelarc).
The course will also provide a range of critical and analytical frames of reference, ranging from sociological and anthropological discussions, to semiotic, poststructuralist, gender, postcolonial, and reader-response theories, to issues in transhumanist and posthumanist thought.
ELL 552 Literature, Science and Technology
Literary works in every historical period refer to contemporaneous developments in science and technology, developments which are central to genres such as science fiction and cyberpunk; in addition, with the current rapid pace of scientific and technological developments, there is an increasing need for students in the humanities to acquire general literacy, some depth of knowledge, and terminological precision in these areas.
This course explores some key developments in the history of science and technology, both in the contexts of their own systemic terms, and as they are reflected in written, visual, cinematic, and other texts. The focus may be on ideas in diverse fields, such as the evolution of disease and treatment (e.g. from Hippocrates to modern medicine and gene therapies, to the placebo effect and the quackery of “alternative medicine”); or developments in mathematics (e.g. from the Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Chinese through the Arab world and the European Renaissance to cryptography, systems theory and artificial intelligence); or models of the universe (e.g. from Democritus to Gödel, Einstein, Feynman and Hawking); or concepts of the human being in relation to the animal or machine (e.g. from Descartes and LaMettrie to Darwin, Lakoff, Pinker, Minsky, Tipler, Kurzweil, and developments in cognitive science and transhumanist thought); or the relations between science, skepticism and humanism (e.g. Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, Shermer).
ELL 553 Interdisciplinary Studies – Special Topics I
ELL 554 Interdisciplinary Studies – Special Topics II
These two courses provide an opportunity for students to study the relations between literary studies and other disciplines. The Interdisciplinary Studies courses may deal with such areas as literature and politics, literature and music, literature and digital media, etc.
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3. GENRE STUDIES
ELL 560 Studies in Poetry
This course provides an analytical approach for appreciating poetic forms and genres from different periods and cultures. The course will address various techniques by which poems have traditionally been constructed: figures of speech (metaphor, metonymy, symbol, allusion, paradox, irony etc.) and musical devices (alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhyme, meter); the narrating voice and the persona; and a variety of poetic structures (the sonnet, lyric poetry, narrative poetry, dramatic monologue, etc.). In addition, it will look at ways in which new experimental forms and genres which have developed over the last century (such as visual or sound poetry) have questioned or subverted traditional poetic structures and categories.
ELL 561 Studies in Short Fiction
This course will survey the origins and history of the short story, from its beginnings in the oral tradition and anecdotes of the classical period, through medieval stories, and seventeenth to eighteenth-century gothic tales, to its formalisation as a genre in the nineteenth century and its development through the twentieth century to the present. The focus may be on the traditions of interpretations of particular works and collections that have received considerable critical attention (e.g. Hoffmann’s tales, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Kafka’s short stories, Borges’s Labyrinths and Fictions, the short fiction of Barthelme, Barth, Garcia Marquez, Lispector, or Mishima); or on selected works from the vast range of works in this genre across national traditions.
As the course aims to increase students’ interpretative and close reading skills, it will move beyond the technical characteristics of the genre, where works vary considerably among authors and traditions, to consider a range of critical perspectives, both from scholars focusing on the genre – such as Patea, May, Jarrell, Lohafer, Ferguson, Wright, Rohrberger, Gerlach, Reid, and Siebert – and from other readers adopting diverse frames of reference, ranging from formalism and structuralism, marxisms and social theories, to feminisms, psychoanalytic and cognitive science perspectives, poststructuralist theories, etc.
ELL 562 Studies in the Novel
This course deals with the emergence and development of the novel, and with various theoretical approaches to defining its genre. Traditional British accounts of the genre sometimes follow Ian Watt’s claim that the novel originated in the eighteenth century; however, from a contemporary perspective, early examples of the genre include Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, written in eleventh-century Japan (and often referred to as the world’s first novel), Makrembolites’ Hysimine and Hysimines in twelfth-century Constantinople, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel in mid-sixteenth-century France, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote in early seventeenth-century Spain (often referred to as the first European novel). Theories of the novel today also take into account the complex relations between verse and prose, as well as between history, fiction and “realism” in different periods; and the dissemination of texts in the oral and manuscript traditions as well as print and digital media. The novel can therefore be seen as developing out of other genres such as sacred or mythological texts (e.g. the Torah, the Bible, the Koran), epic poems from Gilgamesh to Beowulf, Roman prose narratives such as Petronius’s Satyricon, and medieval and Renaissance romances such as Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and Boccaccio’s Decameron.
The course will provide an overview of some of the structural and thematic subgenres of the novel (e.g. the epistolary novel, Romantic and Surrealist novels, the graphic novel; the picaresque, the Bildungsroman, the gothic; historical, sentimental, utopian/dystopian, crime, fantasy, romance, the Western) as well as a sense of their historical contexts. In addition, students will be exposed to a range of perspectives on the novel – structuralist, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, etc. Course material may focus on a particular period, national tradition or sub-genre, and will include theoretical readings discussing the genre, ranging from early studies by Watt, Bakhtin, Lukács, Auerbach, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Barthes and others, to the work of contemporary scholars like Daniel Schwarz, Nancy Armstrong, Marthe Robert, Deidre Lynch, Rachel Schmidt, Michael McKeon and Franco Moretti.
ELL 563 Studies in Drama
This course provides, in addition to specific areas of focus, a contextual overview of developments in theatre. It may take a traditional British literary perspective, looking at areas such as medieval, Renaissance, Jacobean, Restoration, or nineteenth-century drama, or twentieth-century variations (e.g. absurdist and modern theatre, post-dramatic and in-yer-face drama); or an American perspective, from nineteenth-century minstrel shows and the burlesque through vaudeville to twentieth-century explorations of realism, social issues and psychology (e.g. O’Neill, Miller, Williams, Hughes, Albee, Mamet, Kushner, Hellman, Shange, Fornes).
It may also address other national traditions, such as the French (e.g. from Corneille, Molière and Racine to Jarry, Ionesco, Artaud, Beckett and Arrabal); Germanic (from Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, Tieck and Kleist to Maeterlink, Brecht, Weill, and Berg), Italian (from the commedia and Ariosto to Pirandello and Fo), Nordic (Ibsen, Strindberg), Russian Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gorky, Gogol, Mayakovsky) or the Japanese (the Kabuki, Noh, and Kyogen traditions).
The course will also provide a range of critical and analytical frames of reference, from classical definitions of tragedy and comedy to contemporary issues in semiotic, poststructuralist, gender, postcolonial, and reader-response theory.
ELL 564 The Gothic
The Gothic may be considered as a literary genre related to Romantic sensibilities and fantasy literature, or as a broader aesthetic form that that can be traced stylistically or thematically from medieval architecture and art to opera, film, and contemporary fashion. This course may therefore focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British canonical works from Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) through Stoker, Lewis, Mary Shelley, Radcliffe, and Le Fanu, to Reeve and Gaskell; or on aspects of other Gothic traditions, such as the American (the tales or novels of Irving, Brockden Brown, Poe, Hawthorne and Melville), French (the works of Sade, Lautréamont, Nerval, Bataille; Diderot, Leroux, Gautier, Hugo, Maupassant, and the roman noir; the films of Méliès, Cocteau, Epstein and Vadim); German (the Schauerroman or “shudder novel”; plays by Schiller, stories by Hoffmann and Kleist, German expressionist film); or Russian (Tolstoy, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Bulgakov). Alternatively, or as a counterpoint, the course could address twentieth and twenty-first century productions such as Lovecraft’s stories, gothic romance, American southern gothic, modern gothic (Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson), 1970s comic books, Stephen King, film noir and Gothic horror films (Hammer Horror, Tim Burton, Guillermo Del Torro), and Gothic rock music, and fashion.
Critical perspectives on the Gothic may range from analyses of related concepts such as Burke’s definition of the sublime, Freud’s work on the uncanny, Kayser on the grotesque, Foucault on madness, Ariès on death, Kristeva on abjection, Praz on the erotic sensibility and Toufic on vampires; to studies by scholars on such topics as redefining the genre (Gilbert and Gubar, Punter, Sedgwick); gothic psychology (Todorov, Wood, Clover, Carroll), the aesthetics of horror (Freeland, Lowenstein); the Gothic carnivalesque and habitus (Jones); economic contexts (Clery); escapism and counternarratives (Byron, Punter); the American Gothic (Ringe, Goddu); issues of gender and sexuality (Moers, Anolik, Smith, Heiland, Becker, Haggerty); or ghost and crypt effects (Abraham and Török, Derrida, Berthin).
ELL 565 Science Fiction and Fantasy
This course examines works of speculative fiction and their allegorical relations with contemporary society. Elements of the fantastic in literature can be traced from ancient beliefs in magic, gods, monsters and other supernatural entities and spaces, mythological stories and sacred texts, through medieval and Renaissance romances, and seventeenth and eighteenth-century allegorical fables, fairy tales and children’s stories, to the long Romantic period, when fantasy literature became established as a broad genre of fiction. The overlapping genre of science fiction has a similar history, dating back to times when beliefs in fictions were more intertwined with empirical realities or historical facts than they are today, and evolving, along with the progress of science as a means of understanding the world, as a mode of speculation: early elements of the genre can be seen in such works as Lucian of Samosata’s True History from second-century Syria, Ibn Tufail’s Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (twelfth-century Spain), Kepler’s Somnium (seventeenth-century Austria), and Godwin’s The Man in the Moon (seventeenth-century England).
The course considers the origins of the genre as well as its subsequent development, but with a particular focus on twentieth and twenty-first-century works, looking at a variety of texts from literary and artistic works to graphic novels, television programs, films, and electronic games. Texts, including film and other adaptations, will be selected from a range of authors of fantasy (e.g. Burroughs, Lewis, Lovecraft, Tolkien, LeGuin, Pratchett, Rowling, Martin) and science fiction, including cyberpunk and transhumanist fiction (e.g. Verne, Wells, Čapek, Heinlein, Bradbury, Herbert, Clarke, Asimov, Gibson, Octavia Butler, Ballard, Dick, McMaster, Asher, Nagata, and Banks).
Topics covered may range from AI, space and time travel, the end of the world, to feminist utopias, chaos theory, new worlds and species, ecological disaster and holocaust; critical perspectives on the genre and specific works will be provided by essays written or collected by such scholars as James Gunn, David Hartwell, Robert Scholes, Bruce Sterling, Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, Marvin Minsky, Donna Haraway, Max More, Ray Kurzweil, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, Bruno Latour, and Katherine Hayles.
ELL 566 Mystery and Detective Fiction
This course explores works in the genres of mystery and crime fiction – including in various subgenres such as detective fiction, police procedurals, courtroom dramas, and psychological thrillers – in terms of their technical devices and characteristics such as characterisation, suspense building and plot structure, their “literary” qualities, and their relation to other genres of fiction. Material covered may range from originary nineteenth-century texts to twentieth-century postmodern variations and recent developments; to selected episodes of radio and television series, films, and trial transcripts.
The focus of the course, depending on the semester, may be on works by authors in the British and Anglophone traditions (e.g. Collins, Doyle, Chesterton, Christie, Sayers, Alllingham, Marsh, Creasey, Rankin, McCall Smith, Rendell); in the American tradition (e.g. Poe, Gardner, Chandler, Hammett, Leonard, Nabokov, Auster, Highsmith, Leon, Paretsky); or selected from various traditions, such as Leroux, Gaborieux, Aveline, Lemaitre, Grangé, Aubert, Vargas (France); Simenon (Belgium); Dürrenmatt (Switzerland); Zafón, Montalbán (Spain); Eco (Italy); Larsson, Sjöwall, Wahlöö (Sweden); or Safa, Ümit, Serbes, and Pamuk (Turkey).
The course will also consider a range of literary theoretical perspectives on the genre and on specific works, written or collected by such critical readers as Barthes, Caillois, Hartman, Holquist, Irwin, Lacan, Merivale, Most, and Sweeney.
ELL 567 Genre Studies – Special Topics I
ELL 568 Genre Studies – Special Topics II
These two courses provide an opportunity for a specific focus on aspects of genre which may be studied in less detail in the broader Period Studies or Genre Studies courses. The Special Topics courses may deal with specific genres such as oral literature, tragedy and comedy, the romance, the Bildungsroman, the fragment, magic realism, cyberpunk, etc., or with broader theoretical issues such as the construction and canonization of genres and genre theory.
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B. CULTURAL STUDIES COURSES
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ELL 555 Issues in Contemporary Culture
This course covers a range of contemporary concerns in the context of globalization and rapid developments in technology, as they are discussed in academic contexts as well as in local, regional, and international print, visual and digital media. The focus will be on analyzing the possibilities and limitations of institutional modes of belief and thought, and on developing informed rational perspectives on these concerns, in particular as they become frames of reference for interpreting literary, visual, and other kinds of texts.
Course material – critical essays, media reports including blogs and online texts, films, etc – will vary from semester to semester as new issues emerge and become points of focus; however, in general, readings and discussions will deal with a variety of critical current topics, such as climate change and environmental concerns; human rights and protest movements; war, borders and citizenship; displacement, migration, refugees and identities; international law, terrorism, and nationalism; governmentality and societal structures; the uses and effects of news and social media; ideologies, belief systems and censorship; science and pseudoscience; medicine and health; and developing technologies and ethical issues.
ELL 502 Gender Studies
This interdisciplinary course challenges students to engage with texts from the humanities and the social, natural, and physical sciences which question universalizing or stereotypical conceptions of gender and sexuality. It looks at how issues of gender, sexuality, race, class and ethnicity intersect; to what extent social or biological factors may inform “identities” based on these conceptions, and how gender roles serve to shape individual identities, agencies, and structures of power.
Selected literary, cinematic, media and other kinds of texts, both mainstream and fringe, will be analyzed as cultural artefacts which interpret and question how such identity-forming constructs are produced, shaped and controlled in different historical and cultural contexts.
As a corollary, the course will self-reflectively consider to what extent cultures, psychologies and ideologies of reception (i.e. conceptual moments in criticism and theory, readers’ frames of reference) affect the way these texts and contexts are read and presented. Course material will therefore also include a range of critical and theoretical perspectives in such areas as feminist, masculinity, queer, and transgender studies; postmodern, postcolonial, psychoanalytical, and cognitive theories; critical race and legal theory; gynocriticism, gendered writing and canon formation; and social and legal activism.
ELL 503 Film Studies
This course will study film on various levels: through its historical development as a technology through celluloid, silent film, “talkies,” and television to digital media; as an evolving form of aesthetic expression with its own categories and genres, from early experimental film to mainstream blockbusters, art cinema, independent films and the avant-garde; as a cultural product, and as a mode of communication shaped by historiography, film theory, and institutions.
The focus may be on technical aspects of film such as techniques of cinematography (mise en scène, cinematography, lighting, soundtrack, camera position and movement, and editing); or on the history and development of a certain genre (e.g. experimental film, animation, documentary, feature film – horror, western, science-fiction); or on the work of particular directors (e.g. Buñuel, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Fellini, Lynch, von Trier, Almodóvar, Greenaway, Kubrick, Spielberg, Jarman, Frears, Holland, Coppola, Bigelow).
Representative films across national boundaries, depending on the focus of the course, will be screened for close textual analysis and discussion (in some cases with filmscripts); and critical perspectives provided through readings of works by directors (e.g. Brakhage, Epstein, Eisenstein, Greenaway, Herzog, Rainier), film theorists (e.g. Kracauer, Benjamin, Mulvey, Silverman, Clover, Pollock, de Lauretis, Deleuze, Žižek), and a range of other literary and cultural critics.
ELL 556 Media Studies
This course will look at a range of communication media including oral, print, performance, photographic, broadcast, cinematic, and digital forms and practices. The course may focus on various areas such as visual culture and cyberculture, the history of the media industry, the functions and audience effects of mass media, institutional contexts, rights and privacy issues, or countercultures, social movements, and protest mechanisms.
Course material will include examples drawn from newspapers, magazines, television, Hollywood cinema, advertising, and the Internet, analyzed to determine in what ways meanings, realities and beliefs are reflected or constructed, shaped and perpetuated through media images, sounds and texts.
A variety of theoretical and analytical perspectives will be provided through readings of works by scholars and critics, from Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, Benjamin, Barthes, Baudrillard, Foucault and Bourdieu, to McLuhan, Berger, Hall, hooks, Birkerts, Ellis, Fiske, Groys, Assange, and Snowden.
ELL 557 Cultural Studies – Special Topics I
ELL 558 Cultural Studies – Special Topics II
As cultural studies is a constantly evolving field, these two courses offer students the opportunity to learn in depth about new and growing areas of study, and to acquire a critical and theoretical perspective on cultural analysis. Current developments that may be focused on in depth in the Special Topics courses include research on demographics and cultural transformations; issues of climate and environment; ideologies and belief systems; the influence of information technologies on local, regional or global economic and political systems and policies; or different subjects and emerging issues that may be addressed more generally in the other Cultural Studies courses.
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C. THEORY AND CRITICISM COURSES
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ELL 580 Concepts in Theory and Criticism
[see Required Courses above for description]ELL 581 Intellectual History
Intellectual history studies the interdisciplinary development of ideas and patterns of thought in relation to other ideas, changes in language and discourse, and social and cultural contexts; as well as the role of intellectuals and institutions in shaping and critiquing knowledge.
As the study of literature cannot be separated from the contexts in which texts are produced, disseminated and received, this course provides a range of perspectives on how histories are generated, interpreted, used and revised, as well as on the fallacies of “historical reconstruction” and the problematics of “official,” “scientific” or “objective” histories. The aim is to raise students’ awareness of the contingent nature of facts and evidence, and of the context-dependence of interpretive acts as well as texts; and to provide them with a critical, self-conscious approach to the use of historical sources and other materials.
Course material may include selected texts by scholars defining the field of inquiry, such as Lovejoy, Cassirer, Berlin, Collingwood, the Annales historians, White, Popper, Skinner, Grafton, Pocock and LaCapra; as well as examples of linguistic, sociological and other approaches to reading and writing history drawn from across the field (e.g. Derrida, Foucault, Bourdieu, Ariès, Furet, de Certeau, Badiou, Rancière, Passeron, Niethammer, Huntington, Fukuyama).
ELL 582 Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Ethnicity and Nationalism
This course examines the ways in which individual and group identities are socially constructed, encoded and represented, the structures of power involved in developing and maintaining identities, and factors that affect these structures such as biology, climate change, history, geopolitics, and cultural traditions, beliefs and myths.
Texts may be drawn from various disciplines to show the development of contemporary lines of thought, as the course considers literary, cinematic, media-based, socio-political or other forms of representation through historical or theoretical frames. As many of these overlap, a broad range of perspectives will be covered: on gender and sexuality (e.g. Krafft-Ebing, Haraway, Singer, Sharpe, Foucault, Spivak, Wittig, Bryson, Ferguson, Anzaldua, Ahmed, Halberstam, Puar, Nancy Fraser, Butler); on ethnicity (e.g. Weber, Geertz, Glazer, Bell, Balibar, Hobsbawm); and on nationalism (e.g. Renan, Giddens, Gellner, Anderson, Anthias and Yuval-Davis). Other frames of reference, such as issues of class, race and age which also come into play in the development of identities will also be discussed in context.
ELL 583 Theory and Criticism – Special Topics I
ELL 584 Theory and Criticism – Special Topics II
These two courses provide opportunities for students to study particular areas of theory and criticism in detail. They may focus on particular areas of theory (e.g. deconstruction, gender theory, postcolonial theory, critical legal studies, transhumanism); on the oeuvre of one or more philosophers, theorists or critics whose works have broad literary and interdisciplinary implications (e.g. Arendt, Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Habermas, Chomsky, Deleuze, Zizek, Berger, Butler, Latour, Luhmann, Sloterdijk, Giddens, Weber, Tajfel, Bandura, Lakoff); or on debates around selected critical ideas (e.g. theories of mimesis, of irony, of metaphor, of the sublime, of history; the concept of the subject; philosophies of language, theories of art, architecture or music).