Students choose three Proseminars. Registration will commence on Friday 2nd October at 8pm and will close on Sunday 4th October at 11.59 pm. In order to register students access the following website: usosweb.uni.lodz.pl . Please refer to the timetable in order to ensure that the classes of your choice do not overlap. There are limits to the maximum number of students in groups. If the group of your choice is already full, please choose another one. You will find the course descriptions below.
Prof. Magdalena Cieślak, Human, Nonhuman, Other-Than-Human, More-Than-Human – Challenging Anthropocentric Perspectives in Literature and Media
Is human perspective the only way in which we can make sense of the world? Are human-centered narratives still valid as representations of our reality? Can we transcend the limitations of our own experience to conceptualize and interpret our existence? Literature and culture are the platforms to confront such questions and now, at the moment of entangled planetary crises of our making, revisiting those issues is becoming urgent.
For decades, the main influence on the planet has been exerted through human-initiated actions, producing local and global circumstances that are consequential for human and non-human lives. Fueled by the dynamic of cannibal capitalism, the civilization of the Anthropocene keeps producing narratives that deny, justify or normalize various manifestations of irreversibly catastrophic events, such as genocides, climate change or mass extinctions. I wish us to look at texts that question those narratives, and invite different perspectives of looking at our reality, and our place in it. By destabilizing the anthropocentric celebration of the notion of the human, those texts question the very category of the “human”, validating other lives and other stories, and reconfiguring our position in the planetary configurations.
Our theoretical point of departure will be the approaches of Jane Bennett (Vibrant Matter), Monika Bakke (“Nonhuman Somas”), Rosi Braidotti (The Posthuman, Posthuman Knowledge) and Donna Haraway (The Companion Species Manifesto and When Species Meet). Our discussions will revolve around various manifestations of non-human/other-than-human subjects, and will include the analysis of such texts as District 9 (dir. Neill Blomkamp), The Girl with All the Gifts (dir. Colm McCarthy), Octavia E. Butler’s “The Bloodchild”, Ursula LeGuin’s “The Author of Acacia Seeds”, and others.
Please note that most discussed texts and film include distressing content and occasionally graphic imagery.
Prof. Tomasz Dobrogoszcz, Representations of Trauma in Contemporary Literature and Film
The natural human reaction to a traumatic experience is to remove it from consciousness, seeking escape from unbearable nature of the event and the unbearable nature of the survival. But the moment of the escape from death has endless impact on the victim’s life. The ghosts of the past will not rest and keep haunting the victim until their stories are told. Remembering and telling the truth about the atrocities is necessary for healing individual survivors and for restoring the social order. At the same time, the testimony of the trauma does not only outline the violent nature of events, but also the elements which resist comprehension, because, as Freud claimed, a traumatic experience is not completely grasped when it occurs. In this way, the story of the trauma often becomes the story of a “belated experience”. This seminar will look at selected contemporary literary and cinematographic representations of trauma, both at the individual and the collective level. Writers discussed during the course (and during its continuation as a seminar) will include: T. Morrison (Beloved), E. Donoghue (Room), K. Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five), J.S. Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), I. Banks (The Wasp Factory), Y. Martell (Life of Pi), H. Jacobson (J), G. Swift (Waterland). We will review films including The Sweet Hereafter (dir. A. Egoyan), Blue (dir. K. Kieślowski), Manchester by the Sea (dir. K. Lonergan). The course will offer an overview of critical and theoretical approaches to the presentation of trauma in literature and film.
Prof. Katarzyna Ostalska, Digital milieu: SF, digital literature, and narrative games
The seminar is designed to examine “digital born” (Hayles) narratives, including multimedia literary works and narrative games created specifically for online environments, as well as selected works of SF whose conceptual frameworks have contributed to the development of digital narratives. The course therefore provides a systematic framework for analysing the differences between print and digital narratives, with particular attention to the distinctive aesthetic, formal, and interactive features that emerge in web-based media. Key aspects of digital narratives, including interactivity, immersion, and player agency to name but a few, will be explored in order to demonstrate how such forms broaden established understandings of literary production and extend the scope of interpretative research.
NB. Students whose academic interests align with the topics outlined above are warmly invited to enrol; however, due to the nature of the classes, the number of participants cannot exceed the official group limit.
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.
Dr Katarzyna Małecka, On Love and Loss: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
This course explores the defining forces of human life: love, loss, and grief. Through a diverse selection of readings and media, we will examine historical and contemporary frameworks of attachment and mourning.
We will address the following questions:
· What have been the primary models of love and loss across the centuries?
· What are the core "ingredients" of love?
· What are the most common grief reactions and expressions?
· How does our capacity to love influence our capacity to grieve?
· How does our attachment style shape our grief?
· Do we fear death more if there is little or no love present in our lives?
· Why is love today so often labeled as a feeling that is impossible to find?
· How do linguistic conventions and gendered socialization script or silence the expression of love and mourning?
Additional discussion topics will be shaped by the participants and may include:
· Ecological grief: How does collective anxiety about climate change and global futures alter the way younger generations experience loss and anticipate mourning?
· Pop culture and modern heartbreak: How do contemporary narratives (grief memoirs, songs, TV shows) reflect our cultural obsession with death versus love and healing?
· Digital intimacy and burnout: How do modern dating apps, parasocial relationships, and digital fatigue reshape how we understand vulnerability, rejection, companionship, and long-term commitment?
This course explores topics that are intellectually and emotionally challenging. The course material can be beneficial but also highly triggering at times. While our classroom is a safe and respectful space, if you anticipate difficulty engaging with sensitive topics, a different course may be more suitable. Active and consistent participation is required to pass the course
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. Piotr Cap, Analyzing Disinformation Discourse
Disinformation acts as a strategic tool to secure, perform, and maintain social power by manipulating public opinion, promoting the speaker’s narrative, and simultaneously eroding their audience’s trust in alternative sources of information. Driven by a desire for influence, disinformation exploits and abuses language to create chaos and control its political outcomes, force social hierarchies and distinctions, and alter public behaviors. This proseminar provides a comprehensive account and a crucial update on disinformation, revisiting its status as a discursive concept and outlining ways in which to study modern disinformation practices at their production and reception stages. Extending the common focus on the concept as simply false news produced and disseminated with the intention to deceive, it describes disinformation as a broadly cognitive phenomenon and strategy that underlies discourse, defining its various ploys of manipulation and deception. Accordingly, students will learn about specific language formulas that force on recipients false worldviews and erroneous reasoning patterns, inducing them to replicate and spread further various false claims and opinions derived from these patterns. The analyzed data will come from the most urgent discourses of today, including the Russia-Ukraine and the US-Iran war discourses, as well as anti-migration discourses in the UK and Poland.
Prof. Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka
Prof. Krzysztof Kosecki, Language, Culture, and Communication
The proseminar focuses on the language-culture interface approached from the perspective of semantics, ethnolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics. The classes cover the following topics: elements of culture and communication; space and time across languages and cultures; sociolinguistics and varieties of language related to occupation, gender, and age; slang; euphemism in language; language of politics; borrowings and culture; prejudice and stereotypes in culture and language; language and culture in advertising; expressing emotions across languages and cultures; phonic languages vs. signed languages in the context of culture; individualism vs. collectivism.
Prof. Janusz Badio, Meaning in Interaction: Language, Context and Interpretation
This proseminar focuses on how meaning is created and interpreted in real spoken and written communication. We will work with short samples of conversations, institutional dialogues, interviews and online exchanges. A typical class will begin with a small piece of data and a concrete question: What is the speaker or writer doing? What supports that interpretation? What is left implicit? What does the next response tell us? We will compare possible interpretations, look for linguistic and contextual evidence, and then introduce the concepts that help explain what is happening. Topics will include communicative actions, indirectness, context, perspective, framing and interactional patterns.
The course is intended for students interested in language in use, communication, discourse and areas including translation, where meaning often depends on more than the words themselves. No specialist background or ready-made MA topic is required. Assessment will be based mainly on a small analytical portfolio built up during the semester, together with a brief presentation. The portfolio will bring together the analyses, questions and ideas you develop in class, helping you discover a research idea of your own and see how the data, questions and analytical skills you work with in the proseminar can naturally develop into an MA project.
