The online registration for 3rd-year BA students for elective courses (‘zajęcia fakultatywne’ and ‘zajęcia uzupełniające) will commence on Friday, October 2, at 7.00 pm (for ‘uzupelniajace’) and 8.00 pm (for ‘fakultatywne’) and close on Sunday, October 4, at 11.59 pm. In order to register students access the following website: usosweb.uni.lodz.pl.
Each student chooses one of:
Zajęcia fakultatywne A Zajęcia fakultatywne B Zajęcia uzupełniające There are limits to the number of students in the groups. In the case of denied access to the group, please make an alternative choice. Course descriptions can be found below:
Zajęcia fakultatywne A:
Prof. Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka
Dr Krzysztof Majer, A Tree of Night: The North American Short Story in the Dark Mode
The American literary tradition has a rich connection to the gothic mode. The religious imagination imported from Europe; the experience of settling a continent perceived as a wilderness, yet inhabited by other cultures; the tragedy of slavery – all these came into a collision with the rapid advances of modernity. The various ‘hauntings’ continue to disturb the literary imagination as it looks towards a bleak, uncertain future. The short story serves as a perfect lens for capturing American anxieties. Beginning with short fiction at the turn of the 20th century (e.g. Edith Wharton, Mary Wilkins Freeman), this course includes texts by post-war masters of the form (e.g. Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty) and by more contemporary practitioners (e.g. Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, George Saunders), exploring various relationship to gothicity.
Dr Katarzyna Małecka, Loss, Grief, and Bibliotherapy, PART 2
This course reviews and builds upon the elective course (“All but Death, can be Adjusted”: Loss, Grief, and Bibliotherapy) offered to second year BA students in the spring semester. In the current course, we will explore how literary and cultural representations of death-related issues can help grieving people as well as those who support them. The death of a loved one serves as a powerful memento mori, exposing our own fragility. By examining broader existential concerns such as the fear of death and frameworks like terror management theory, we will deepen our understanding of how human beings psychologically cope with mortality. We will look closely at how the bereaved navigate emotional, physical, and spiritual landscapes right after and long after significant losses.
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 elective may be more suitable. Active and consistent participation is required to pass the course.
Prof. Małgorzata Myk, Uncreative Writing — Appropriation, Repetition, Citation, and Authorship in 21st-Century North American Writing
This course asks what happens to literature when writers stop generating original expression and instead copy, retype, transcribe, and recombine existing texts? Taking its title from Kenneth Goldsmith’s book Uncreative Writing, this class examines a lineage of American writers who have treated language as found material rather than personal utterance—material to be moved, framed, sculpted, and recontextualized rather than invented from scratch.
Invested in the idea of “uncreative writing,” conceptually-inclined authors champion texts that interrogate such notions as originality, authorship, labor, and the value of writing in an age of information overload. Locating uncreative writing’s deeper roots in American modernism and postmodernism, ranging from Gertrude Stein’s repetitions and the cut-up techniques of William Burroughs to the poetics of FLARF and the Language poets, North American literary conceptualism invites a critique of the myth of romantic originality.
Throughout, we will also reflect on the political and ethical stakes of appropriation: whose language gets copied, who has the cultural authority to borrow text without consequence, and how uncreative writing intersects with debates over race, gender, and the archive. We will pay particular attention to controversies surrounding several of these writers’ projects, using them as case studies in the excesses and limits of conceptual gesture.
Assignments will include a brief response paper and a final creative-critical project in which students produce their own uncreative texts—transcriptions, appropriations, or constrained recombinations of existing material—accompanied by a reflective essay theorizing their process. No prior experience with experimental writing is required, but students should come prepared to question inherited assumptions about creativity, voice, and originality.
Zajęcia fakultatywne B:
Prof. Piotr Stalmaszczyk, Language Contact and Language Change in the British Isles
The aim of this course is twofold: first, it will discuss and analyse patterns of language contact in general, and in the British Isles in particular; second, the course will present selected items in the linguistic history of the British Isles. Language contact and language change will be investigated within the historical and contemporary processes in the British Isles (concentrating especially on the Celtic languages and the Celtic Englishes).
The following issues will be discussed in more detail: understanding language contact and language change; Celtic peoples, their history, culture, literatures and languages; history of Celtic languages; decline of the Celtic languages; informal introduction to Modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh; Celtic influence on English vocabulary and grammar; language revival (especially the case of Cornish and Manx) and recent developments; sociolinguistic issues in the history of Celtic languages; problems of defining and delimiting language and dialect; language contact and culture.
Additionally, the analyses will also cover new vocabulary and word-formation processes connected with such developments as Brexit, the pandemic, political correctness, and other recent socio-political developments.
The course is accessible to students intending to specialise in language/linguistics and literature/culture.
Final requirement: short research essay on selected issues in language contact and language change.
Mgr Mark Tardi, Contemporary American Women Writers & The Innovative Necessity
This is a once-in-a-lifetime discussion class that will include an in-class visit by an internationally-renowned American women writer. Innovation has been the pulse drum of American literary, artistic, and economic endeavors since the mid-19th century, and as such, we will consider the context that produces and the effects of innovation within contemporary American literature. How do contemporary innovative writers expand our view of earlier innovators and canonical figures, such as Dickinson, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Stein, or Whitman? How do innovative and hybrid literary works reflect contemporary concerns? What is the relationship between innovation and racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic differences? How are technology, sexuality, humor, or emotional register conceptualized? The work of writers Nathalie Handal, Don Mee Choi, Sandra Cisneros, Jennifer K. Dick, Miranda July, Natalie Diaz, Paula Vogel, and Sarah Ruhl and others will be discussed. Some sessions will be augmented by creative writing exercises, essays, films, and other materials as necessary
Prof. Wit Pietrzak, “You’re a Freak, like Me”: Madmen, Misfits, Psychopaths in British and Irish Literature
In its breakneck race for technological advancement and improvement of the general living standards, the Western civilisation has developed norms that are to promote certain ideals among particular social groups. It is those groups that have come to delineate the category of normality, which in broad terms can be taken to denote a pattern of behaviour that ensures the greatest usefulness of an individual to a given society. Madman, vagabond, outcast, misfit and eventually socio- and psychopath – these terms have been applied to behaviours that do not conform to the accepted image of a citizen of the enlightened West. Granted those individuals are of no use to their societies, they have oftentimes been welcomed in the province of literature, which is, as a certain misfit once asserted, “essentially useless.” Assuming modes of behaviour that elude simple explanation and problematise the existent social taxonomies, such transgressive types merit in-depth consideration. During the course we will focus on some of the following:
- (ab)normality as (anti)category
- images of violence as social criticism
- (anti)aesthetics of violence
- sexual/ethnic outcasts in a rampant society
Prof. Tomasz Dobrogoszcz, Anthropocene and its discontents: more-than-human casualties of corporate capitalism
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”. Over the past several decades the main influence on the planet has come from human-driven activity, which led scientists to designate this period as the Anthropocene. However, many of the uncontrollable destructive effects that our civilisation has produced should be linked with capitalism. Today, corporate capitalism, a profit-driven, exploitative socioeconomic system, affects all human and non-human lives of the planet. The neoliberal turn in the global economy has deepened the divide between the elites who control the means of production and the masses who are rendered exploitable and expendable.
The seminar will examine selected films and prose fragments that portray the negative effects of capitalist economy on unprivileged human and more-than-human others, represented, directly or symbolically, as aliens (N. Blomkamp’s District 9), organisms created through biotechnologies (D. Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas), machines/cyborgs (J. Winterson’s The Stone Gods), racially/economically disadvantaged individuals (J. Peele’s Get Out and Us), and postcolonial subjects (N. Okorafor’s short stories). The course will also explore photomontage as a socially and politically engaged art form and as a potential means of challenging dominant ideologies. We will examine these works within the theoretical frameworks of ecocriticism and posthumanist studies, which suggest going beyond the anthropocentric perspective.
Discussed films and texts may occasionally include some distressing content (violence, death, sexuality).
Zajęcia uzupełniające:
Prof. Kamila Ciepiela, English Grammar beyond the Sentence
In this course, we will explore how English grammar helps us build meaning, organize information, connect ideas, and shape communication across entire texts and conversations. Instead of looking at sentences as isolated grammatical units, we will examine how they work together to create larger stretches of meaningful discourse.
The course builds on your existing knowledge of English syntax and takes it a step further. You will learn to see grammatical constructions not simply as structures that are correct or incorrect, but as choices that speakers and writers make for particular meanings, purposes, and communicative contexts.
Throughout the course, grammatical constructions will be examined from three complementary perspectives: form, meaning, and function in discourse. You will develop advanced knowledge of English grammar while also learning to analyze how grammatical choices operate in authentic texts and communication.
Dr Magdalena Szuster, How Plays Work – contemporary American musical theatre and drama
In this course we will look, in very broad terms, at what makes a play and/or a performance work by investigating the various aspects that contribute to the commercial success of a play and its artistic merit. To do so, we will look at some of the most prominent works of American playwrights (mid 20th century to the present) and explore the negotiation between the particularities of the plays in a broader context.
The in-class discussions will be based on assigned readings (articles, plays) and various movie adaptations. The students will also have an opportunity to acquire practical knowledge in stage production (in cooperation with The Music Theatre of Łódź/Teatr Muzyczny w Łodzi). As the course focuses on creative thinking and no final exam is required, active participation and constructive contribution to classroom conversation are crucial.
Prof. Małgorzata Myk, Extreme States in New North American Writing.
Broadening students’ knowledge of contemporary American Literature, the course offers insights into current developments in XXI-century North American writing that focuses on different states of extremity: social, political, economic, as well as technological. How does literature respond to the extreme global phenomena of ongoing wars, climate catastrophe, the pandemic, late-capitalism, fascism, racism, or Artificial Intelligence? How are forms of writing in the United States changing and evolving in response to psycho-political pressures and social challenges produced by such realities?
We will try to approach these questions reading and discussing some of the most thought-provoking and formally innovative texts by 21st-century North American authors, including Robert Fitterman, Alison Cobb, Divya Victor, Tan Lin, Joey Yearous-Algozin, Kevin Davies, Craig Dworkin, Mark Nowak, Andrea Brady, Kim Rosenfield, and Syd Zolf, among others.
Readings will be supplemented by critical and theoretical commentaries on the status of texts in the present-day technologically mediated environment. The class expands the selection of canonical and mainstream works discussed in the American Literature Survey Course by introducing cutting-edge experimental or avant-garde texts that have also significantly transformed the landscape of American writing in recent years.
Dr Joanna Kosmalska, Translating Across Media: Multimodality & Intersemiotic Translation
How do we create meaning when we combine different media such as speech, text, images, sounds, gestures or props? What happens when we translate a text into images, sounds or film? These are some of the questions we will explore in this course on intersemiotic translation and multimodality. The course follows a workshop format and includes exercises designed in collaboration with the artist Tomasz Wochna. Through a series of hands-on activities, it introduces participants to the theory (Jakobson, Kress, Vidal & Campbell) and the practice of translating between different media (e.g., translating a film into a novel, a video game into a film, a text into emojis, or a song into sign language) and creating multimodal texts (such as memes or digital poetry). During the sessions, participants will translate a poem into pantomime and pictograms, analyse and create memes, and produce a video essay. Fluency in both English and Polish is required.
The course includes a guest lecture by Arianna Autieri (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) and online sessions with lecturers from abroad. It draws on the research of the Experiential Translation Network.
