Od 4 października g. 19.00 do 6 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.
1. dr hab. prof. UŁ Michał Lachman, Contemporary British and Irish Drama: Politics of Social Unrest
The course focuses on contemporary British and Irish plays which specifically thematise the issues of social crisis and cultural unrest. British dramatists have traditionally dedicated themselves to reflecting on the condition of the society, by confronting topical issues resonating across the public. The course attempts to cover approximately twenty years of recent dramatic history (from the 2000s to the present) and showcase a number of plays which visualize social tensions and crises in resonant ways. The plays offered for analysis discuss the issues of history, identity, otherness, verbatim and documentary writing, as well as concepts of refugee ethics and migration in the attempt to diagnose the condition of modern societies facing inner divisions and visualizing outer borders. Recent history of politics, society and culture can be critically reconstructed from a careful analysis of the works to be discussed in the course. In their work, playwrights presented here reflect on most important issues raised in public debates and discussed by leading cultural critics.
The course is going to cover the following range of issues and names:
- Crisis and its functions. David Hare, Vertical Hour (2003); Zinnie Harris, How to Hold Your Breath (2015)
- History and identity – faces of nostalgia. Enda Walsh, New Electric Ballroom (2008); Mike Bartlett, Albion (2017)
- Voices off – images of the foreign. David Greig, Damascus (2007); Mark Ravenhill, Product (2015)
- Refugees / Migration Crisis. David Greig, Europe (1994); Anders Lustgarten, Lampedusa (2015)
- Anthropocene and its threats. Enda Walsh Ballyturk (2014); Caryl Churchill, Escaped Alone (2017); Stef Smith, Human Animals (2016)
- Verbatim and documentary drama: between fact and literature. Richard Norton-Taylor, Bloody Sunday (2005)
- Conflict, post-conflict, Northern Ireland. Owen McCaffery, Quietly; Stacey Gregg, Shibboleth
2. dr hab. prof. UŁ Katarzyna Ostalska, Immersive world-building: more-than-human literary narratives (animals, plants, AI) in textual and digital multiverses (speculative fiction, games and film)
The seminar aims to study narratives that were both traditionally printed and “digital born” (Hayles) 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 immersion and “possible worlds theory” in relation to the speculative genre, digital and cinematographic world. The research material involves speculative literature (SF) (for instance, Gibson’s Neuromancer), digital writing (for instance, Loss of Grasp by Bouchardon), videos and games (for instance Detroit: Become Human) and film (for instance Everything Everywhere All At Once). 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. Justyna Stępień, Sensory Futures: Activating Ecological Scenarios in Cultural Practices
In the face of the accelerating climate emergency, injustice, and inequality, this transdisciplinary seminar invites you to critically engage with how artists, scholars, and thinkers envision and speculate on ecological futures. Through the lens of critical posthumanism, ecocriticism, new materialism, and Indigenous knowledge models and practices, we will examine the critiques of anthropocentrism and humanism to address new ways of thinking about our relationship with the environment. Through a wide range of media practices – from films, visual and digital arts, TV series, and digital games to theoretical and literary essays – we will see how today’s cultural practices respond to the global challenges. By the end of the course, you will have developed a vocabulary of ecological concepts and a nuanced understanding of how cultural practices contribute to the debates about our environmental crisis. In effect, this seminar will inspire you to participate in critical discussions shaping our troubled times.
4. dr hab. prof. UŁ Kacper Bartczak, Nature: presence, disappearance, return – American literature in its material surroundings.
This is a proseminar (“proseminarium”) in American literature designed as an intro to the subsequent MA seminar. The central purpose of this class is to focus on the representations of nature in American literature (and other areas of culture: film, painting, art). Nature has been THE foundational topic of American literature, since the moment Americans started to see their difference from Europe.
In the first section of the class (the “proseminarium” phase, that is this academic year), we will examine how American literature has approached the related concepts of nature, wilderness, or, more generally the material world. Here, the purpose will be to think about the ambiguity of the material nature. American authors saw nature as a source of spiritual and physical resurrection – life itself. Alternatively, other American authors had distrusted nature, highlighting our alienation from it. In later phases, a number of contemporary American writers examined how late capitalist processes caused nature to disappear or merge with our technology, as technology became more pervasive. Finally, with more recent methodologies – varieties of the new materialism and ecological approaches – we can speak about a return of nature.
The “proseminarium” class will feature selected works by H. D. Thoreau (founder of American ecological thought, stemming from the Transcendentalist movement), Walt Whitman (key American poet of the 20th century), Herman Melville (author of Moby Dick), Ernest Hemingway, W. C. Williams (poet), Wallace Stevens (poet) Cormac McCarthy (contemporary novelist, author of Blood Meridian, The Road, The Passenger), Edward Abbey (an early 20th century ecological writer in the tradition of Thoreau), Jean Baudrillard (French philosopher and sociologist who wrote about America), and Don DeLillo (contemporary novelist, author of White Noise), Rae Armantrout (poet).
To facilitate the discussion, we will consult other cultural areas – selected movies, painting, landscape art, writings in theory or history of ideas.
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 Krzysztof Kosecki, Language, Culture, and Communication
Adopting a cross-linguistic and a cross-cultural perspective, the course focuses on the relations between language, culture, and communication. We will discuss elements of culture; concepts of space and time; varieties of language related to sex, age, and occupation; individualism vs. collectivism; slang; euphemisms; aspects of language of advertisements; ethnic and social prejudice / stereotypes; language of politics; language of emotions; key cultural terms in varieties of English across the world; borrowings as a reflection of culture; gestures and non-verbal communication; cultural aspects of signed languages.
7. Prof. dr hab. Piotr Cap, From the ‘oppressive leftists’ to ‘true patriots’: Populist rhetoric of conflict in the contemporary Polish political discourse
The proseminar will employ tools of rhetorical and argumentation research and critical cognitive discourse studies (discourse space research, metaphor analysis, proximization) to explore patterns of legitimization discourse used by top Polish political parties to claim state leadership in the years 2015–2024. In the first two months we will study the discourse of Law & Justice (PiS), a far-right conservative party ruling Poland from October 2015 to October 2023. We will look at L&J’s strategies of leadership legitimization involving socio-ideological polarization, strategic generation of internal as well as external conflict, threat construction and crisis management. In its second part, the proseminar will focus on the apparently more moderate and cooperation oriented discourse strategies implemented by three opposition parties in the lead-up to the 2023 parliamentary elections, in which L&J finally lost power. The aim of the proseminar is to compare and contrast the two discourses, L&J’s and the opposition’s, to speculate about the longevity of radical populist discourses such as L&J’s. We will try to verify the hypothesis that a conflict-charged, polarized populist discourse can be an extremely powerful tool, able to grant long-term political leadership. However, in a yet longer perspective, such a discourse runs a considerable risk of ‘wearing out’ and becoming vulnerable to more forward-looking and pragmatic leadership rhetoric, which presages political change. Altogether, the proseminar promises 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 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 (e.g., are Polish ministers who used “ministra” while taking their oath real ministers or not? And why?).
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 and multimodal contexts (e.g., memes), and professional settings and the ones whose BA projects involved speech action in a phonetic perspective.