DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE AND CULTURECOURSES 2018-19

1 ST SEMESTER ENGLISH FICTIONThis course aims at presenting a variety of genres, indicative of the artistic movements of their era, in diachronic succession and in relation to their historical and cultural parameters. Introductory lectures will include references to the timeline of the birth of the novel as well as excerpts from 18th-century prose by authors such as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. The rest of the syllabus will include a 19th-century novel, representative of realism, by Charles Dickens or George Eliot, as well as short stories (or even a novel) from the 20th century by authors such as Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, and Forster.

2 ND SEMESTER AMERICAN FICTIONThe course deals with American fiction from its first period of development through the 19th-century classics and onwards towards the postmodern and multi-cultural authors of today. The historical and cultural parameters of fiction are examined in conjunction with stylistic differences as these were expressed via the various literary movements, that is realism, symbolism, modernism and postmodernism. The course also aims to develop the students’ capacity for critical analysis of texts as cultural products and carriers of ideological and socio-cultural debates within the larger context of the era that produced them.

3 RD SEMESTER ENGLISH POETRYThis course has a twofold purpose. First, to familiarize students with the elements of poetry, such as imagery, figures of speech, rhythm, symbol, and other conventions that will help them read, analyze, and understand poetry. Second, to offer students a historical overview of British poetry, examining the ways in which authors have used the above elements to express ideas and emotions throughout the centuries. The course is offered in the form of a series of lectures, always in dialogue with the students. Texts are taken from a main anthology and leaflets (provided). For the evaluation of knowledge gained, there will be a final exam, as well as the opportunity for optional extra-credit research papers. Students evaluate the course anonymously through a final questionnaire.

CONTEMPORARY ANGLOPHONE THEATREThis introductory course examines contemporary anglophone plays through the sociohistorical cultural context of the 20th and 21st centuries. We analyze representative texts of various theatrical genres representing realism, expressionism, the epic, the theatre of the absurd, etc. The course aims at sensitizing students to the particularities of the dramatic form, as well as at the development of critical thinking. There are weekly classes with lectures and dialogue. Course material includes plays, lectures from invited

speakers, a photocopy pack with study questions and bibliographical lists. Students are encouraged to conduct further research on their own. The evaluation of knowledge gained is based on a final exam (80% of the grade) and on short critical essays (20%), written in the context of the critical essay workshop conducted separately as part of this course. The course will be evaluated through a questionnaire filled by the students at the end of the semester anonymously.

4 TH SEMESTER THEORY AND CRITICISM OF LITERATUREThe course examines the most important developments in 20th-century literary theory and criticism, from Russian formalism to New Historicism and Post-colonial theory. It focuses on select representative approaches to literature but also introduces students to a wide spectrum of schools and movements such as formalism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, cultural studies and so on. Emphasis is given to the reading of well-known texts by theoreticians and literary critics, as well as the application of those theories on literary text analysis.

AMERICAN POETRYThe course studies the tradition and development of American poetry from Bradstreet to Snyder, with the aim of a detailed, comparative analysis of the work of major American poets who helped shape the cultural face of their era in their search for a personal poetic style that would help them determine truths about themselves and express its connections with the wider conceptual space that is “America.” The main schools of thought influencing poetry, from Puritanism to Postmodernism, will be examined, along with overviews of the political and social developments that led to the formation and constant re-formulation of literary movements. Finally, class analysis focuses on the multiform nature of American poetry, that which created the “tradition of the new.”

5 TH SEMESTER THEORY OF CULTUREThe aim of this course is the definition of the various concepts and figurations of culture, through which critical approaches to cultural/textual phenomena and the understanding of the ways in which creative activities contribute to the quality of human life will be examined. Issues concerning the relationship of culture and society, “higher” and “popular” culture, as wellas the relations between sciences and the arts are investigated, while questions pertaining to the goals of cultural activities and the interaction among them are put forth and explored.

POSTWAR AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE ART This course maps important strands in post-WWII avant-garde and experimental art from the late 1950s to the present day. The emergence of happenings and Pop art in the late 1950s will constitute the point of departure for an examination of the work of experimental artists who worked across diverse artistic forms, practices and media. Seminar material will span the Black Mountain College, experimental cinema, feminism

and performance, conceptual art, earthworks, and more recent developments in Chicano, Asian-American, Native American art. We will work with a variety of sources and documents, including poetry, painting, photography, film, music, performance, installation, video, artists’ writings, and intermedial projects.

Teaching consists in lectures, as well as seminar activities and discussions developing connections across different artistic forms. Course material and bibliography can be accessed online on the e-class site. The course is assessed by coursework only. Students are expected to participate in TWO mid-term exams and submit a short research paper on any of the artists/works/themes explored in class. In the mid-term students are expected to write an analytical, critical essay, based on a critical commentary of a given text.

RACE AND BLACK IDENTITY IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATUREhttps://eclass.uoa.gr/courses/ENL443/The course will focus on the ‘problem of the ‘colour-line’ and on racial consciousness in African-American literature across a range of genres and forms of writing. We will begin with discourses on race and slavery during the revolutionary era. We will then turn to two representative texts of the slave narrative genre, in order to examine how Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs shape and create their discourses on slavery, race, and gender. (weeks 1 and 2) We will then focus on the Harlem Renaissance: particular consideration will be given to the construction of a racial identity in modernity, the treatment of the past, the gendered and the mulatto identity. (Weeks 3 to 5) After Harlem, we will examine the predicament of blackness and segregation in Richard Wright’s Native Son in resonance with James Baldwin’s critique of Wright’s novel. (Week 6)

The second part of the course begins with a reconsideration of the politics of the Black Arts Movement through the study of poems by Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni. (Week 7). The session will be followed by a discussion of the revisionist work of Rita Dove, Wanda Coleman and Harryette Mullen vis-à-vis the legacies and the genealogies of the African American tradition. The course will conclude with an examination of Toni Morrison’s return to the underside of Harlem in Jazz, and with a discussion of the quandaries posed by the cultural construction of race in Percival Everret’s Erasure.

It is advisable that you read the assigned readings before each class, as well as authors’ biographies in advance of each session. It is desirable if not essential that you become familiar with the richness of African American culture and tradition in order to approach critically the texts that we will study; you can access numerous links and resources on the e-class. During the term, keep up with updates on resources, additional material, bibliography, handouts, study questions, and session overviews. As this is an option course, it is desirable that you come to class prepared, and bring your questions and ideas. All seminar material can be accessed on the eclass.

The course is assessed by coursework and two midterm examinations that will be held during term-time. There will be no final exam in the end of the term for 5 th semester registered students. A final exam weighted at 100% will be held ONLY for external candidates (ΔΟΑΤΑΠ), for students who are in their fourth year, or who are nearing completion. There will be a resit examination in September.

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH LITERATUREIn this course, we will explore the interaction between literature and culture in a number of representative contemporary British literary texts. Defined in terms of chronology, “contemporary” refers to literature produced from around the 1960s to the present, but the course will also initiate a broader problematic on the notion of contemporaneity. More specifically, we will try to understand the ways in which literature responds to the social, cultural, political and economic phenomena that are contemporaneous with it, and that have radically changed Britain since the post-war period, as the old empire faded away. Our discussion will require a critical response to various discourses that bear on the contemporary, like Giorgio Agamben’s equation of the contemporary with the “untimely,” or other scholars’ understanding of contemporaneity as a project, rather than a given, of sharing time and respecting difference beyond Eurocentrism. We will have the chance to study three different literary genres: novel, poetry, and drama. Η ύλη διαρθρώνεται σε τρία λογοτεχνικά είδη, το μυθιστόρημα, την ποίηση και το δράμα. The novel has always been theorized as the genre most intimately linked to its historical and cultural context, and contemporary British fiction continues in this vein. British drama also preserves strong links with politics, it has challenged social norms throughout the second half of the 20th century, and in the 1980s and 1990s it became a privileged vehicle against the conservatism and neoliberalism that dominated during and continued after Margaret Thatcher’s government. Poetry, on the other hand, is usually deemed a “subjective” and introvert genre. As we will see, this by no means excludes its relation to society, and the altered mechanisms and techniques of British poetry after the Second World War, reflect radically changing social and cultural circumstances. The juxtaposition of different genres will allow us to better appreciate the various ways in which form and generic conventions mediate the historical moment of the work, and themselves become part of the work’s content. Contexts and topics that we will discuss throughout the course include: postcolonialism and its relation to race, immigration and multiculturalism; national identity; new concepts of sexuality, masculinity and femininity; class-consciousness; art’s reaction to the sense of loss of community and cynicism in the aftermath of Thatcherite politics. Primary and secondary readings will be uploaded on the eclass and students are required to study the texts in advance of each class.

BRITISH TRAVEL WRITING IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURYΤhis course examines travel, exploration and wandering in “new worlds” as well as in Europe in the long eighteenth century, an era of great geographical expansion and major political, social and aesthetic changes in Britain. The selected readings, which include extracts from travel accounts, journals, letters, novellas and poems on four regions, Europe, America, Africa and Australia, do not simply record experiences but also play a part in shaping the world; at the same time, travel writing is shaped by the encounter with the foreign place and the Other and affected by issues of power, gender and class. Travel will form the lens through which we will view eighteenth-century and Romantic debates on topics as diverse as colonization, the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, religion, science, and progress.

The assessment will be based on two exams during the semester and a class project.

THE THEATRE OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMSTennessee Williams is one of the major dramatists to have emerged in the American theatre of the 20th century. He was part of the rich tradition of the Old South and one of the most prolific American writers who turned out plays, film scripts, short stories, poems, articles on theatre, memoirs, interviews.

The course will focus on several of his representative plays (The Glass Menagerie, Camino Real, Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, Sweet Bird of Youth), which inaugurated a new epoch in American—and not only—stage history. The themes and structure of the plays will be discussed and reference will be made to their performance history, to a selection of the writer’s own comments on his works, as well as to his non-dramatic writings, which contribute to a better understanding of the plays examined in class.

Handouts and select bibliography will be provided. The students will be encouraged to participate in class and use library material and electronic sources. There will be a final exam, an optional term paper and/or an optional presentation for extra credit. Theatre viewing, live or on DVD, is highly recommended, along with attending lectures by in-class guest speakers or lectures on theatre in general.

OSCAR WILDE: AESTHETICISM AND ITS LEGACIES IN THE LITERARY AND THEORETICAL THOUGHT OF THE 20TH CENTURYThis course will concentrate on the study of important critical, theoretical and literary works by Oscar Wilde, familiarizing students with the basic principles of aestheticism in Britain during the 1890s. Seminal philosophical questions will be addressed such as the affinity between truth and lying, the critic as artist, and the importance of art and the beautiful in the 20th century and the contemporary world. Major concerns of the course will be the exploration of the legacies of aestheticism in the first decades of the 20 th

century, and its impact upon the literary theory and critical thought of that century. More specifically, the course will establish the connections between Wilde’s aestheticism (and aesthetics) and crucial theoretical schools of the twentieth century, such as the New Criticism and Deconstruction.

This course will be a combination of lectures and seminar activities. Evaluation will be based on the student’s overall performance, optional written assignments (that will be presented in class), midterms and final exam.

FEMALE TRAGEDIESThis comparative course examines emblematic tragedies from late 19th-century Norway to early 20th-century Ireland, whose heroines inscribe the victimization of women by the patriarchal ideologies of the eras in which they were produced. While taking into consideration the increasing opportunities for female self-determination, it insists on the basic ideological principles that determine gender ‘normality’, which remained the same. Its methodological premise is that the male writers of these tragedies chose female figures as a privileged means by which they express their own interrogation of and dissatisfaction with the prevalent paradigm of relations of power in the social sphere. The inevitable victimization of the tragic heroines is brought about by their attempt towards

self-emancipation, which is socially forbidden, and especially by the exertion of the right to dispose of themselves sexually in the way they wish.

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House [1879]o Hedda Gabler [1890]

August Strindberg, Miss Julie [1888] John Millington Synge, The Shadow of the Glen [1903] Sean O’ Casey, Juno and the Paycock [1924]

6 TH SEMESTER

WILLIAM SHAKESPEAREThe aim of the course is to introduce students to Shakespeare’s drama through the analysis of representative plays taking into consideration the historical, social and theatrical context of the Renaissance society. Emphasis is also placed on the ways by which contemporary literary theories have affected the reading of his plays regarding the treatment of important issues such as gender, race, power relations.

BECKETT AND PINTER: TIME, IDENTITY AND THE “OTHER”The course examines representative plays by Beckett and Pinter within the context of the contemporary problematic regarding the relationship between theatre and society. We will study the different critical approaches to their work and primarily focus on the ways by which it disrupts the conventions of realism and the traditional understanding about political theatre. The course will deal with the philosophical and political concerns embedded in their plays and will concentrate on the treatment of time, space, power, guilt, punishment and the construction or dissolution of identity. Special attention will be given to the notion of the ‘other’ regarding the relationship between language and silence, consciousness and the unconscious, man and woman.

LITERATURE AND SOCIETY OF THE VICTORIAN PERIODThis course examines some representative novels of the Victorian era by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James in relation to the socio-cultural framework, set by authors such as Dickens, J.S. Mill, Darwin, Wilde, which shaped the themes and styles of the fiction of that period. Romanticism, realism, naturalism, and aestheticism will be discussed in relation to the themes of industrialisation, religion, the position of women, imperialism etc. that permeate the 19th century English novel. The final grade will be based on the students’ overall performance, written and oral assignments, and their grade in the final exam.

VICTORIAN POETRYVictorian poetry is influenced by both Romanticism and Neo-Classicism, while also paving the way for Modernism. Despite being more conservative than the 19 th Century English novel due to its conventional form and somewhat didactic tone, Victorian poetry displays interesting innovations, such as the “painterly” evocation of scene and realistic representation of emotion. The leading poets of the day such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti

are concerned with the same topical issues as the novelists, such as the rapid pace of social change and the Empire, class and gender relations, and the challenge of scientific progress to religion and morality. However, there is also a tendency for these poets to sometimes take refuge in an idyllic nature and/or mythical past that appears less unsettled and conflictual than 19th Century Industrialized England. Hence, this kind of poetry reflects certain typical responses of the period to the challenges of the modern world and lends itself particularly to cultural or historicist analysis.

The course takes the form of weekly planned lectures/seminars that allow for dialogue to develop in class. Besides the set texts themselves, the study materials include photocopied handouts and a list of printed and electronic sources. Assessment is based on the final examination and an optional, supervised, term paper. Finally, the students have the chance to express their views on the instructor and the course by filling out a special anonymous questionnaire.

TRANSATLANTIC ROMANTICISM This course introduces students to the fascinating field of Transatlantic studies, which explores literary and cultural connections among Atlantic-rim literatures. Our own focus will be on the dialogue, contacts, tensions and exchanges between Britain and America during the long Romantic century (1767-1867). Examining Romanticism from a transatlantic perspective sheds new light on communities of authors beyond national boundaries, and beyond the confines of national literary canons. Alongside canonical authors of British and American Romanticism (Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Hawthorn, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau etc.), we will be looking at a number of figures who played a central role in major political and cultural debates that dominated the Romantic movement, such as republicanism, the empire, human rights, abolitionism, and women’s rights (Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Margaret Fuller, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano among others). The historical and political problematic will remain active throughout the course, even when we approach topics whose political dimension is not immediately obvious. In the case of “Nature”, for example, we will discuss new historicist objections to Wordsworth’s worship of nature at the expense of history, nature and radical politics in Shelley, Emerson’s reflections on nature as inseparable from his preoccupation with the historical and political issues of his day (slavery, race, revolution, nationhood and America), Thoreau’s writing about nature as a means to engage the oppression of the working-class in contemporary America. Similarly, transatlantic gothic exchanges will be read in light of the critique of power and human rights. We will read political texts, poetry, essays, drama, and novel, emphasizing the importance of generic experimentation as a hallmark of the Romantic era and aiming at a global appreciation of our course’s topics through the variety of different genres. Both primary and secondary readings will be uploaded on the eclass and students are required to study the texts in advance of each class.

REPRESENTATIONS OF LONDONThe goal of the course is to investigate how the city of London was portrayed in a variety of texts (fiction, essays, poetry, drama, painting, travel-writing and film) produced from the early 17th to the late 20th centuries. The course examines London in its textual, historical and geographical manifestations, seeking to create a sense of the development

and constant transformation of London and to establish the place of the city in contemporary social and political debate. Areas of exploration will include the impact of trade and immigration on the city; the marketplace and the rise of consumerism; xenophobia and cosmopolitanism; city places and urban identities; commodities and the urban subject; sex and the city and London as a world city.

AMERICAN DRAMAThis course explores the aesthetic and ideological character of 20th -century American drama through an analysis and discussion of representative plays by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder and others.

TERRORISM AND LITERARINESS IN 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY THOUGHTThis course studies the phenomenon and the different aspects of terrorism through the examination of philosophical, literary, political texts as well as artistic forms from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will address the affinity between literary/philosophical thought and the concept of terror and terrorism, also posing the question of the interrelatedness between aesthetics and terrorism and the role of ethics in this debate. Furthermore, the course will try to elucidate the problem of (terror)ism through art and vice versa—radical art as terrorism. A number of twentieth and twenty-first-century thinkers/artists will be discussed, such as Zizek, Baudrillard, Hamid, Conrad, Burgess, Beigbeder, Lyotard, De Lillo, in conjunction with major eighteenth-century philosophers such as Immanuel Kant or Edmund Burke. In addition, contemporary thought will be employed to cast light on, interpret and problematize real terrorist acts--acts of irrational, extreme violence—in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The course takes the form of a seminar. In-class dialogue and critical thinking are strongly recommended. Evaluation will be based on the student’s overall performance, an optional written assignment (that will be presented in class), midterms and final exam.

7 TH SEMESTER

IDENTITY, HISTORY, AND THE NATION IN PLAYS BY ANGLOPHONE PLAYWRIGHTSThe course investigates the ways by which representative English-speaking playwrights deal with the issue of cultural identity in plays written during the 20th century. Discussing plays by W.B. Yeats, Brian Friel, Amiri Baraka, Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill and others, we investigate the role played by language, history, nation, gender and race in the construction of identity. The dramatic style each writer adopts will also be analysed as well as the politics the plays support.

MODERNISM: THEMES AND STYLE This course offers a study of English Modernism considered within the historical, cultural, and social framework of the first part of the twentieth century. This period is generally thought to contain a particularly dense concentration of experimentation and innovation in literary form and theme as writers struggled to come to terms with drastic

socio-political changes before and after World War I. Texts to be studied include novels by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, poetry and literary criticism by T. S. Eliot, as well as important critical essays on literary form and social developments.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWEThe course examines representative texts by Christopher Marlowe, three plays, The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus and Edward II, and the epyllion Hero and Leander. We will read the texts closely and intensively, exploring Marlowe's relentless critique of his era, involving state power, class conflict and sexual desire. The course will also introduce students to the cultural and political contexts of Marlowe's writings, as well as to contemporary critical approaches to Marlowe, and raise questions such as: What kind of poetry, action and spectacle did Marlowe put on stage? What kind of expectations did he target in the audience? Where is he imitating antiquity and where is he introducing novelty? We will discuss these questions through a range of topics, including faith, ambition, conscience and desire. The assessment will be based on a midterm exam and a research paper.

WOMEN WRITERS: FROM APHRA BEHN TO EMILY BRONTËThe course examines the ways in which gender is registered in the works of emblematic English women writers from the late 17th to mid-19th century in various genres such as, for example, drama, fiction and essay. The aim of the course is to examine how the relations between the two sexes are constructed in connection with the dominant ideology concerning femininity, which, despite certain differentiations, remains essentially the same. It focusses on female subjection and on forms of resistance to it as these emerge from the literary works, despite their seeming alignment with notions of gender ‘normality’. In the novels, the interrogation of the dominant gender paradigm is offered primarily by female sexual desire while, at the same time, the essays express the demand for sexual equality in the social sphere.

Aphra Behn, The Rover May Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

Pride and Prejudice Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women

CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE—AMERICA POST 9/11: NARRATIVES OF TRAUMA AND RETURNThis course unfolds around verbal and visual texts produced in the context of post 9/11 America, with a view to exploring the literary and artistic responses and investigating the socio-political and cultural issues raised in the U.S. in the aftermath of the WTC attacks. The underlying premise is that, albeit initially heralded as a product of rupture, following the "obliteration" of language, post 9/11 literature constitutes, in fact, a re-vision: it (re)turns to previous literary tropes and strategies; reiterates cultural practices and battles of the past; and reflects social concerns and anxieties that have permeated the American society throughout the post-war years. Students are invited to examine diverse texts (three novels, short stories, a poem and a graphic novel—alongside the inherent to the

event genre of photography), and engage critical discourses which will allow them to address the following questions: how is the trauma of 9/11 reflected in American literature and the arts? What cultural forces and issues mark and shape the contemporary moment in American literature and culture? How do these tensions and frictions relate to the U.S. post-9/11 position in an increasingly transnational world, both prior and following the attacks?

POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE AND FILM: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE BARBARIAN AGAINST RACE THINKINGThe current tide of war refugees and the policies of the EU that turn a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean attest to the need to continue to critique the humanist heritage of colonial modernity in order to move beyond a certain idea of Man that circumscribes the question of the human and her rights. The course will focus on the work of authors, critics and artists that argue that the idea of the human that is sustained as a currency for measuring the humanness of other humans has not been deconstructed enough. At least, it has not been done so in view of the co-occurrence, some times convivial and more than often polemical, of this heritage of humanism with the cosmogonies (Sylvia Wynter) of the millions of humans that were seen as barbarians and savages, that is, as the “mixture of the half-created and the incomplete” (Wynter) and were assigned the “bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos” (Achille Mbembe). What about the human lives and their forms of livity that have been represented as biologically inferior according to what Wynter calls the “pseudoscientific concept of the human as an evolutionary selected being”? The course will focus on texts that delink the human from the “overrepresented white Man” (Wynter) and engender a poetics of the human against race thinking that has categorized human beings and divided them into superior and inferior, civilized and savage, higher and disposable beings. By examining the ways the selected writers and artists deconstruct the representation of the Other to the western Man as the barbarian and the savage, we will also probe the human histories and stories these texts represent by way of asking the questions about being that race thinking has blocked, namely the questions about “how as humans we attain to human beingness and do so now in a profane or secular rather than sacred modality” (Wynter).

BODILY FICTIONSThis course will explore, through the critical examination of various works of 20th century U.S. literature, the ways in which contemporary authors have expressed their view of, revision of, and relation to, the human body in all its variables. Given the anthropological view that culture (and therefore art) emerges as a reaction to natural stimuli, the body, being an all-pervasive presence in human affairs and the source of many existential parameters (including pleasure, pain, identity, procreation and mortality), features large in canonical literature worldwide, especially in the western world where feminism has reinscribed the importance of the body in all aspects of private and public discourse, and most markedly in the U.S., where, according to Jean Baudrillard in America, the cult of the body has been in full effect for several decades as a constituent element of American culture. The tribulations and the transformations bodies undergo within the endless realms of fiction em-body metaphorically and

metonymically the myriad questions of theme, form, philosophy and function in the said art form, as a subject as well as a tool (from Plato’s idea of “engendered” textuality in the Symposium to Hélène Cixous’s theory of “writing the body” and Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”).

SUBJECTIVITY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LABORING-CLASS WOMEN’S POETRYThe course examines representative texts of eighteenth-century British laboring-class women poets in conjunction to the social, economic, and political changes that took place in Britain at that time. Based on contemporary theories of subjectivity, the course will analyze the ways in which eighteenth-century British laboring-class women poets struggled to articulate their identity as regards social class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion. Through an analysis of representative poems by Mary Collier, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Elizabeth Hands, Janet Little, etc., the course will shed light on the effort made by these poets to emulate their contemporary (male) literary tradition as well as strongly subvert it.

8 TH SEMESTER

THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURY POLITICAL NOVELFocusing on three political novels from the 19th and 20th Centuries—Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1853), Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)— the course will explore how the political novel unmasks and critique while also participating in techniques of power and social control that are typical of the modern world.

More specifically, Bleak House will be viewed as a dialogic (“dual”) narrative which, besides the classic omniscient narrator, incorporates a female narrator-protagonist who raises gender issues relating to the Victorian construction of the subject. Besides exploring the social critique that arises from its representation of the British legal system, students will also evaluate Bleak House as an example of a detective novel, paying particular attention to the ideological work which such fiction typically carries out. The Secret Agent will yield similar readings to Bleak House as a detective novel, while also raising ideological issues relating to the way fiction and journalistic writing represent different forms of political extremism, especially modern terrorism. The Secret Agent will be used to reveal the way the political is habitually psychologized by the genre, yielding melodrama and domestic tragedy, at the cost of social critique. Through Orwell’s topical Nineteen Eighty-Four, the course will explore how the political novel typically engages with various contemporary concerns such as the problem of electronic surveillance, the biopolitical control of the subject, the question of state propaganda, and the relationship between violence and power.

The course takes the form of weekly planned lectures/seminars that allow for dialogue to develop in class. Besides the set texts, the students will be provided with photocopied handouts and study material. Assessment is based on the final examination and an optional, supervised, term paper. Finally, the students have the chance to express

their views on the instructor and the course by filling out a special anonymous questionnaire.

JACOBEAN THEATRE This course examines representative Jacobean tragedies which register the multifaceted crisis the English society is going through in the beginning of the 17 th century. This crisis is deeply political and ideological, since James Stuart is attempting to introduce the basic principles of absolute monarchy in the governance of a kingdom and its institutions. In the theatre of that time an actually subversive discourse is developed, one that attempts to balance between a seeming adherence to the dominant ideological mandates of the era and their covert questioning. The tragedies are analyzed under this light in combination with the study of the theory of absolutism, while emphasis is given in the representation of the two sexes and the reversals introduced by authors on the subject precisely to pint out the overall crisis in values.

The course consists of weekly lectures implemented by lengthy class dialogue aiming to relate the content of this course to the cultural representations the students themselves carry as regards gender relationships and practices. Students are urged to use audiovisual material and to take on optional research projects under the supervision of the instructor. Course material includes one main and one supplementary textbook, plays, handouts, and a supplementary bibliography, both printed and electronic. There is also a folder with selected critical essays and books on reserve in the library. Student evaluations are based on the final written exams and on the optional projects, and course evaluation is achieved through the submission of an anonymous written questionnaire by the students at the end of the semester. This course examines representative Jacobean tragedies which register the multifaceted crisis the English society is going through in the beginning of the 17th century. This crisis is deeply political and ideological, since James Stuart is attempting to introduce the basic principles of absolute monarchy in the governance of a kingdom and its institutions. In the theatre of that time an actually subversive discourse is developed, one that attempts to balance between a seeming adherence to the dominant ideological mandates of the era and their covert questioning. The tragedies are analyzed under this light in combination with the study of the theory of absolutism, while emphasis is given in the representation of the two sexes and the reversals introduced by authors on the subject precisely to pint out the overall crisis in values.

The course consists of weekly lectures implemented by lengthy class dialogue aiming to relate the content of this course to the cultural representations the students themselves carry as regards gender relationships and practices. Students are urged to use audiovisual material and to take on optional research projects under the supervision of the instructor. Course material includes one main and one supplementary textbook, plays, handouts, and a supplementary bibliography, both printed and electronic. There is also a folder with selected critical essays and books on reserve in the library. Student evaluations are based on the final written exams and on the optional projects, and course evaluation is achieved through the submission of an anonymous written questionnaire by the students at the end of the semester.

COMPARATIVE LITERATUREThe aim of Comparative Literature is the study of parallel phenomena, ways of thinking and interpretations of the world in various cultural systems, as these are portrayed in the philological traditions of different countries studied. The course examines the theoretical grounding of comparative literature, its terminology, its historical development, its relation to other scientific and creative fields and its methodologies. Use is made of both theoretical and critical texts by Artaud, Bassnet, Guillén, Koutsoudaki et al., but also of literary texts which are comparatively examined (Molière and W. Wycherely, A. Camus and T. Williams, T.S. Eliot and G. Seferis, et al.).

FACT AND FICTION: THE SLIPPERINESS OF “TRUTH” IN RENAISSANCE LITERATUREThe course focuses on two important and related strategies of Renaissance literature: the boundary between fact and fiction, and the slipperiness in any truth claim as concerns the Divine, the material world, and the self. A variety of “literary” and “non-literary” texts will be studied. An “anatomy” of Renaissance England (1500-1640) as regards its politics, art, religion, and science will be conducted in relation to the above-mentioned foci.

AMERICAN MODERNISMThis course will aim to examine various forms of American modernism that developed in the early years of the twentieth century and sought to perform a radical break from earlier conventions so as to reflect the socio-cultural, economic and financial turbulence of the interwar times. Modernism saw an explosion of literary innovation and unfolded in conversation with several phenomena of modernity: new forms of social and economic integration, but also expatriate life and displacement; new modes of perspective and experience emerging from psychology, philosophy, and the visual arts; changes in urban structures; an ambivalence towards a technologically innovative mass culture; and new political discourses that altered understandings of race and gender. In view of all this, the course will pursue an interdisciplinary study of this moment by looking at literary and critical texts, but also painting and photography; it will explore aesthetic experimentation, but also alternative visions of modernism that engage ideas of progress, race and the advent of technology. Lectures will underscore the dynamic relationship between literature and history—including the history of visual arts, politics and ideas; they will consider questions of genre, and will consider a variety of topics, including the "middlebrow" and “high art” modernism, transnational mobility, and the shifting pressures of gender, race, ethnicity, and class during the modern era.

POSTMODERN AMERICAN DRAMAThe aim of this course is to familiarize students with the distinctive qualities of postmodern American drama, in terms of themes as well as aesthetics. The purpose is twofold: on the one hand, through the study of contemporary plays students will be led to attain a thorough understanding of the theoretical trends and practical modes that define the postmodern moment, while on the other particular attention will be given to the ways in which contemporary American playwrights position themselves and their artistic output vis-à-vis the current socio-political and cultural context. The course focuses on

how these playwrights answer back to the peculiarities of this moment while they themselves also contribute decisively to fashioning out the very contours of postmodernity. Areas of interest develop around the predominance of the image at present and along with problematics of race and/or gender, as well as attempts at re-writing/ erasing history and occasions of (dis)empowering the word on stage, are examined through the works of playwrights such as Sam Shepard, Adrienne Kennedy, Arthur Kopit, Jean-Claude van Itallie, David Mamet, Suzan-Lori Parks.

Students are expected to participate actively in class discussions. In addition, they will be asked to react and comment on excerpts from filmed productions of the plays studied. Students will have access to a list of bibliography, while the assessment is based on two critical essays (optional) and a final exam.

CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH FICTION: DEVELOPMENTS IN THEME AND STYLEContemporary English literature is characterized by a striking pluralism which reflects,on the one hand, various social developments in every aspect of life and, on the other, themulticultural makeup of English society after World War II. The course focuses onrepresentative novels and short stories by major authors of the late 20th century and aimsat exploring and identifying key thematic and stylistic trends that marked the fiction ofthe period. Works by Iris Murdoch, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro,and others will be studied in detail from a theoretical and socio-historical perspective, andtopics examined will include national identity, representations of history, the postcolonialera, gender, sexuality, and art. The final grade will be based on the students’overall performance, written and oral assignments, and their grade in the final exam.

MEMORY, NARRATION AND THEATRICAL REPRESENTATION--GERMANOUThe course studies 20th century representative plays which dramatize memory and its impact on human psychology. We are going to investigate the ways by which both memory and amnesia contribute to the construction of identity, the diverse plots that writers invent to accommodate the act of retrieval and how the imagination alters the events of the past in the gesture of recollection to serve present needs. Playwrights to be studied include David Hare, Brian Friel, Samuel Beckett and others.