Seminaria dyplomowe 2017/2018:
Opisy seminariów dyplomowych w języku angielskim
Dr Justin Michael Battin: NEGOTIATING CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE UNITED STATES VIA ELECTRONIC MEDIA (1945-PRESENT)
This B.A. seminar will address the multifaceted relationship between cultural memory/memories in the United States and electronic media, conceived as both technological artifacts and as consumable texts. Students are invited to propose projects that position cultural memory as a multidimensional process that is formed, influenced, and negotiated via our everyday, recursive engagement with electronic media. Students are also encouraged to propose projects that investigate the impact of content creators, distribution outlets, regulatory agencies, audience(s), nostalgia, and/or the acute desire for regional/national preservation in relation to everyday media consumption. Potential topics to use as a starting point could include:
- Saturday Night Live and the Depiction of American Presidents
- Star Wars and the Resurgence of Binary Politics in the 1980s
- Feminism and the Disney Renaissance (1989-1999)
- Subscription Programming (HBO) and the Acquisition of Cultural Capital
- Back to the Future and Nostalgia
- Cinema’s Response to Television’s Emergence in the 1950s
Students will be expected to narrow their proposed topics following in-class discussions and an initial literature review.
Dr Anna Chromik: Visual arts / poetry / theory
Critical art strategies and their theoretical background are the focus of this hybrid seminar on art & poetry interpretation in the context of critical theory. The scope of interest of this seminar includes 20th century’s as well as contemporary art and poetry that critically engage issues of memory, power relations, modernity, gender, ethnicity and class. The requirement for the projects is to analyse selected texts and works of art in the context of ‘canonical’ critical theory texts in order to discuss about how artists challenge the power dynamics of their contemporary culture. A hesitant list of issues addressed by the course include: representations of femininity and motherhood; modernity / order / violence / the Holocaust; construction of meaning; constructions of gender; the body and power: frail / excluded bodies; strategies of memory and the obsession of the archive; site-specific and site-sensitive performance works, commodification of trauma, and others. Projects dealing with cinema and computer games will not be accepted.
Dr Karolina Lebek: CONTEMPORARY CULTURE AND THE NON-REAL
The focus of the seminar is on the manifestations of the non-real in contemporary texts of culture (literature, TV shows, film) in the light of literary theory and critical theory. These forms include such modes as fantasy, science fiction, climate change fiction, new weird, or horror. In particular, the seminar will explore strategies of world-building and storytelling in the construction of fantastic and extrapolated worlds as well as the rhetorical and critical engagement of such worlds with contemporary culture (myth studies, monster theory, aesthetic theory, narrative theory, the weird tale, material culture, animal studies and ecocriticism). The more detailed BA topics within the above framework will depend on students’ individual choices, but may concern specific texts of culture or specific problems and themes that will be examined across different texts and media.
Dr Marta Mamet-Michalkiewicz: CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH LITERATURES AND/IN TRANSLATION
This seminar is addressed to students who are interested in contemporary English literatures and cultures and also to students who are interested in translation studies. The purpose of this seminar is to invite students to examine literary texts in the light of literary theory, cultural studies and translation studies. hnic culture as well as to explore complex issues of immigrant experience in the United States. The areas of research may include but will not be limited to:
- multiculturalism
- globalization
- immigration
- ethnicity
- exile
- diaspora
- home and belonging
- translation in culture
- literary translation
- (in)fidelity in translation
Dr Bartosz Stopel: NARRATIVES ACROSS MEDIA
The seminar’s primary focus will be on aspects of narrativity and storytelling as manifest across various medium-specific environments such as movies, video games, tv shows, literature, graphic novels, etc. The suggested list of topic includes (but is not limited to):
-ways of meaning-making in particular media
-fictionality and worldbuilding
-narrative theory
-narrative tropes, structures, prototypes
Issues concerning experientiality of narratives:
-affect, empathy and emotions in the experience of narrative
-narration and cognition
-utility of stories
-aesthetics
Apart from the above, the seminar gladly invites students interested in other, related areas, such as video games studies, cinema, popular culture, literary theory, art theory or more traditional literary studies.
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