Od 6 października g. 19.00 do 8 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.
Wszyscy studenci wybierają 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: w pierwszym tygodniu semestru proseminaria nie odbędą się ze względu na rejestrację.
Opisy proponowanych zajęć znajdują się poniżej.
1. prof. dr hab. Andrzej Wicher, Proseminar on English Literature
The course prepares the students for a literary MA seminar, and for writing their MA theses. It deals also with interpretation of literary texts, particularly the texts belonging to medieval and Renaissance literature, and modern fantasy. Additionally, it concerns selected theoretical problems of fantastic literature.
2. dr hab. prof. UŁ Katarzyna Ostalska, Immersive world-building: more-than-human literary narratives (animals, plants, AI) in textual and digital multiverses
The seminar aims to study narratives that were both traditionally printed and “digital born,” multimedial, literary works, created to be experienced specifically in the online milieu. Consequently, the course offers a systematic approach to understanding the differences between print and digital narratives, highlighting the distinctive characteristics of the latter which emerge in the web environment. The methodological approach applied to such analyses goes beyond a human-centred perspective (anthropocentric), focusing on AI (artificial intelligence), animals, plants, machines and the way how they all co-create alternative realities. The seminar is going to explore the “possible worlds theory” in relation to the speculative genre and digital literature. The research material involves speculative literature (SF), digital writing, games and videos. When studying how immersive worlds are brought into being, the seminar offers an analytical perspective that enhances a broader understanding of what literary works are, expanding in such a way the interpretative research areas.
3. dr hab. prof. UŁ Tomasz Dobrogoszcz, Aliens, Crakers and Machines: corporate capitalism and its underdogs
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. Yet most of the uncontrollable destructive effects that our civilisation has produced should be linked with capitalism. In today’s world corporate capitalism is the dominant socioeconomic system, and it affects all human and non-human lives of the planet. The neoliberal turn has only exacerbated the gulf between the elites who control the means of production and the exploitable/expendable masses. The seminar will look at some novels and films which portray the capitalist oppression of the unprivileged others, represented, directly or symbolically, as aliens/animals (M. Faber’s Under the Skin, N. Blomkamp’s District 9), organisms created through biotechnologies (K. Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, D. Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, M. Atwood’s Oryx and Crake) and machines/cyborgs (J. Winterson’s The Stone Gods, the Wachowskis’ The Matrix). We will examine them in the theoretical contexts provided by ecocritical and posthumanist philosophical positions that suggest going beyond the anthropocentric perspective.
4. dr hab. prof. UŁ Alicja Piechucka, Film and Feminism: The Condition of Women 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, for example Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides or Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise. 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.
5. prof. dr hab. 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 accessibility
- simultaneous and consecutive interpreting
- game localisation
- machine translation
- legal, medical and technical translation
- sworn / certified translation
- translation tools
- translation and interpreting competence
- cultural untranslatability in non-literary texts
- translating humour
As translation typically involves two languages, sufficient knowledge of both English and Polish is required.
6. dr hab. prof. UŁ Martin Hinton, Understanding Modern Communication
The aim of this course is to introduce students to aspects of linguistic theory and how they can be applied in the analysis and understanding of contemporary communication. Over the semester, we look at a range of modern communication forms, including advertisements, Tweets, and memes, as well as political speeches and newspaper columns. We discuss and describe them in the light of pragmatic, rhetorical, and cognitive approaches to meaning, always seeking to test the adequacy of established theory to the task of understanding modern, multi-modal and inter-textual communication. The course encourages a critical approach to these theories and is designed to prepare students for conducting research into a wide range of discourse types during their masters level studies.
7. Prof. dr hab. Piotr Cap, From the ‘oppressive leftists’ to ‘true patriots’: Populist rhetoric of conflict in the contemporary Polish and European discourse
This proseminar explores linguistic patterns of conflict, crisis and threat generation in state-political discourse of post-2015 Poland, positioning the main strategies in line with the populist rhetorical trends dominating right-wing radical and exclusionary discourses in contemporary Europe. It demonstrates that crisis construction, conflict generation and threat management have been at the heart of Polish state-level policies since the Law & Justice (PiS) party came to power in October 2015. The L&J’s threat-based policies are enacted in multiple public discourses focusing on home as well as international issues. The present seminar places its lens on (a) parliamentary discourse directed at parliamentary opposition leaders, (b) presidential and party ‘rhetoric of despise’ against the people opposing the L&J government, (c) narratives contesting Poland’s relations with EU institutions at Brussels, and (d) tension-perpetuating discourse targeting Russia and Germany – before and after Russia’s invasion on the independent state of Ukraine. Drawing on research models from contemporary critical discourse studies and critical-cognitive pragmatics, students will learn that the crisis, conflict and threat elements in these discourses produce public coercion patterns which contribute significantly to the strong leadership and continuing popularity of the L&J party. Throughout the course, the analysis of the Polish political discourse is intertwined with samples of right-wing discourses in other European countries (Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, Italy, the UK), demonstrating analogies with regard to the major discursive themes (European integration, multiculturalism, immigration, welfare state), actors, and rhetorical strategies used (othering, enemy-construction, fear appeals). Altogether, the course offers a unique and authoritative panorama of the Polish state-political discourse, coupled with a thought-provoking picture of ties and mutual dependencies among radical and populist right-wing discourse trends colonizing the 21st century Europe.
8. 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.
9. dr hab. prof. UŁ 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 invite discussions issues including 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 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.