Od 3 października g. 20.00 do 5 października g. 23.59 odbędzie się rejestracja przez system USOS na proseminaria na I roku studiów magisterskich. Do rejestracji potrzebne są dane do logowania w systemie USOS otrzymane podczas rekrutacji.
Każdy wybiera trzy grupy przedmiotu „Proseminarium” (Są to zajęcia wprowadzające do seminarium magisterskiego, w kolejnym semestrze będą Państwo wybierać jedne z tych zajęć jako kontynuację.)
Uwaga: zajęcia w niektórych grupach odbywają się w tych samych godzinach. Prosimy przed zapisaniem się upewnić się, czy zajęcia wybranych grup nie pokrywają się czasowo.
W grupach obowiązują limity miejsc. W przypadku wyczerpania się limitu miejsc prosimy o zapisanie się do innej grupy. Uwaga: zajęcia proseminariów rozpoczną się dopiero po zakończeniu rejestracji.
Opisy proponowanych zajęć znajdują się poniżej.
Prof. Andrzej Wicher, Anglophone fantastic literature
The proseminar concerns the fundamental principles of writing a master's thesis. Still, its primary topic is Anglophone fantastic literature, as well as its conceptual background, namely, the basic categories of religious and mythological studies. Thus, we will discuss matters such as the fundamental categories of religious thinking, the definition of myth and its original functions, the sacrificial and initiatory rituals, the notion of the uncanny in psychoanalysis and literature, the concept of the monstrous double as it appears in fantastic literature, the mechanism and significance of the passage from the empirical to the alternative world and the relationship between those two worlds, and the utopian, dystopian, and anti-utopian motifs in fantastic and mainstream literature.
Prof. Tomasz Dobrogoszcz / prof. Magdalena Cieślak, Anthropocene, Capitalocene and After. Images of Now and the Future in Contemporary Literature and Film
We are currently living in a new geological epoch which has the “potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience”. Since in several recent decades the main influence on the planet has been exerted through human-initiated actions, scientists have called this period the Anthropocene. The neoliberal turn in world economy has only exacerbated the gulf between the elites who control the means of production and the exploitable/expendable masses. In today’s world corporate capitalism is the dominant socioeconomic system, and it affects all human and non-human lives of the planet. Since we are effectively living in an ongoing apocalyptic reality, with genocides, climate crisis, and mass extinctions being increasingly harder to ignore, we wish to revisit (post)apocalyptic scenarios to find ways of dealing with the anxieties of our time. The seminar proposes to look at works of fiction presenting various critical landscapes and examine how they explore, as well as manage, our cultural, social and political fears. Contesting the heroic narratives of survival and rebirth, the seminar texts will instead acknowledge the vulnerability and precarity of human existence at the moment of crisis.
With the critical background of Heather J. Hicks (apocalypse and post-apocalypse), Rosi Braidotti (posthuman knowledge), Donna Haraway (Chthulucene and tentacular thinking) and Nancy Fraser (cannibal capitalism), we propose to discuss such texts as: Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood), Stone Gods (Jeanette Winterson), Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer, and Alex Garland, dir.), District 9 (dir. Neill Blomkamp).
Please note that most discussed texts and film include distressing content (end-of-the-world narratives) and death-related (occasionally graphic) imagery.
Prof. Alicja Piechucka, Film and Feminism: The Condition of Women and the Women’s Movement in American Cinema
The aim of the proseminar is to examine selected examples of American films in terms of how they present the situation of women in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Chronologically speaking, the history of cinema coincides with that of the feminist movement, since both flourished in the 20th century. Nevertheless, American cinema – and cinema in general – is often accused of stereotyping, marginalizing and misrepresenting women and adopting the perspective of heterosexual men, who constitute the overwhelming majority of film directors. The proseminar is intended as an exploration of American films which do not exemplify such tendencies. The focus will be on cinematographic works which feature multidimensional female characters, depict women as fully fledged human beings and tell the viewer something about the condition of women and the changes it has undergone in the last 100 years. Importantly, the films discussed will also be scrutinized with special reference to how they reflect the main postulates of the four waves of feminism.
Prof. Katarzyna Ostalska, Blue and Green(post)Humanities in contemporary digital and traditional literature, narrative-based games, films and art
21st century studies in literature and culture operate on an interdisciplinary level, fusing humanities and science, in consequence, the boundaries between disciplines seem to be more permeable than ever. 21st century literature has transcended printed pages and it has expanded onto the digital milieu as well social media. Furthermore, it has also abandoned human-centred perspectives and environments, entering the ones (i.e. oceans, seas) that can be perceived as challenging or even hostile to human life. Even so, water interconnects all the human and non-human bodies; machines as well cannot function without it (i.e. cooling down the servers). With the above in mind, the proseminar aims to study the environments of the seas, oceans and plants located within a broader scope of the “more-than-human” narratives. In this vein, water and plants are regarded as agentic in their own right and studied in relations to humans, via their entanglements with all other organic and non-organic beings and entities. The proseminar will examine the selected literary and digital works, newly emerged online genres and narrative-based games, operating in aquatic and plant milieux.
Prof. Justyna Stępień, Sensory Futures: Activating Ecological Scenarios in Cultural Practices
In response to the accelerating climate emergency, injustice, and inequality, this transdisciplinary seminar invites you to critically explore how artists, scholars, and thinkers imagine and speculate about ecological futures. Using perspectives from critical posthumanism, ecocriticism, new materialism, and Indigenous knowledge systems and practices, we will scrutinise critiques of anthropocentrism and humanism to develop new ways of understanding our relationship with the environment. Through a diverse range of media practices – including films, visual and digital arts, TV series, and digital games, as well as theoretical and literary essays – we will examine how contemporary cultural practices address global challenges. By the end of the course, you will have acquired a vocabulary of ecological concepts and a deeper understanding of how cultural practices influence debates around our environmental crisis. Ultimately, this seminar aims to inspire you to participate in critical discussions that shape our turbulent times.
Dr Anna Jarosz, English Pronunciation: Theory, Practice and Research
In this course students will fall back on their knowledge of English phonetics and phonology in order to explore the crucial role of pronunciation in intelligible spoken communication. The course will start with a brief overview of key concepts (intelligibility, comprehensibility, nativeness, accentedness) in pronunciation research, theoretical perspectives on L2 phonetic acquisition as well as traditional vs modern approaches to pronunciation learning/teaching. Then, we will analyse the most important variables (both learner- dependent and independent) affecting success in the pronunciation learning process and the cutting-edge research findings regarding pronunciation instruction. We will also discuss the difficulties related to pronunciation assessment, technology use in pronunciation instruction, social aspects of accentedness and the ethics of L2 accent reduction.
Prof. Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka, Doing things with words in social contexts
The seminar focuses on language as a type of action in professional and other social contexts. The students will get familiar with a number of socio-pragmatic variables and research methods that can be used in linguistics projects. Accepting that speech is a type of action we are naturally interested in the varied interactions between language and society, therefore the course will give the opportunity to investigate the relationship between linguistic variation and social factors such as (national, ethnic or gender) identity, class and power, code choices in bi-dialectal or bilingual communities (e.g., Spanglish), attitudes towards language and culture.
We will also explore selected aspects of communication in professional contexts (e.g. legal, medical, academic, or journalistic varieties) and explore implications with regard to how sociolinguistic issues can be used in teaching English as a foreign language. Theoretical issues will be illustrated with sample research tasks. The course is relevant for students interested in the nature of meaning in natural language, which includes face-to-face interaction, but also interaction found in fiction, literature, multimodal contexts, computer-mediated communication, and professional settings and the ones whose BA projects involved speech action in a phonetic perspective.
Prof. Łukasz Bogucki, Non-literary Translation: Concepts, Practices, Challenges
This course deals with all things translation, except for the translation of literature. Topics covered include:
• audiovisual translation and media localisation, including accessibility
• simultaneous and consecutive interpreting
• automated translation, including GenAI tools
• legal, medical and technical translation
• sworn / certified translation
• translation workflows
• translation and interpreting competence
• cultural untranslatability in non-literary texts
• translating humour and language variety
As translation typically involves two languages, sufficient knowledge of both English and Polish is required
Prof. Janusz Badio, Exploring English through Cognitive Grammar: from sentences to texts and interaction
Invitation:
This proseminar offers a fresh, engaging look at English through the lens of cognitive approaches to language. Instead of memorizing abstract rules, we will discover how grammar reflects the way people think, imagine, and communicate in everyday life. Using accessible ideas and examples from Cognitive English Grammar by Radden and Dirven as our central text, the class will focus on the key notions of cognitive grammar and their relevance for studying meaning. While the main emphasis will be on the handbook itself, we will also point to ways in which its concepts can be extended to real texts, media, and interaction, showing how meanings are shaped by perspective, metaphor, and context. Students will gain a grounding in these ideas and, at the same time, see how they might be applied in their MA seminar work - whether in language teaching, translation, discourse analysis, or research.
Guided tour:
Building on the chapters of the handbook, we will see how “sentence-level” topics can open into much wider contexts. The study of categories and reference suggests how texts and media frame issues; cognitive operations like metaphor and metonymy shed light on headlines, campaigns, or everyday storytelling; and work on aspect, tense, and modality offers ways to explore how people create timelines, express possibility, or negotiate authority. Analyses of nouns, quantifiers, and modifiers invite questions of naming, framing, and evaluation in discourse, while sentence patterns and spatial relations provide tools for examining agency and perspective in texts ranging from conversations to travel blogs. In class we will concentrate on the textbook itself, but these examples will serve as illustrations of how each theme may inspire future MA projects that go beyond the single sentence to embrace interaction, culture, media, and lived communication.
