Online registration for BA seminars
The online registration for 2nd year BA students for BA seminars will commence on 25 April at 7 p.m. and will close on 27 April at 11.59 pm. Students register via usosweb.
There are limits to the number of students in each group. If the group of your choice is already full, please make an alternative choice.
Descriptions of courses:
dr Tomasz Fisiak
(Not Only) Gothic Intertextuality
The BA seminar aims to analyse selected aspects of Gothicism as a (pop)cultural phenomenon (from the inception of a Gothic novel in the 1760s until today), focusing on Gothic intertexts in modern fiction, films, and music videos. The theoretical concepts of intertextuality, interpictoriality, intermediality, and transmediality will be applied throughout the course. BA projects discussing all things Gothic (texts, cinematic productions, music videos, and other cultural artefacts) are welcome.
dr Marta Goszczyńska
Planetary Consciousness in Twenty-First Century Anglophone Fiction and Film
Although fictional and cinematic narratives have traditionally excelled at capturing individual human experiences, a significant subset of twenty-first-century Anglophone novels and films invites us to see the world as a dynamic web of interconnected systems and relationships. These “planet-oriented” works frequently adopt expansive geographic and temporal frameworks, emphasizing forms of connectedness that transcend national boundaries, historical periods, social conditions, and cultural identities.
Zadie Smith’s 2012 novel NW portrays London as a microcosm of ethnic and racial diversity, where characters negotiate layered identities within complex urban environments. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and its 2012 film adaptation by Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski and Tom Tykwer interweave six narratives that span continents and centuries—from a nineteenth-century Pacific voyage to a distant post-apocalyptic future—highlighting recurring human patterns across time. Similarly, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006) stitches together the lives of a Moroccan family, American tourists, a Mexican caretaker, and a Japanese teenager, illustrating how distant events reverberate globally.
These narratives prompt critical reflection on contemporary concerns such as globalization, technological advancement, climate change, and our ethical responsibilities to other humans, non-human animals, and the planet as a whole. Over the course, we will engage with a selection of such works, guided by theoretical frameworks including planetarity, cosmopolitanism, and post-humanism, to understand how literature and film can shape planetary consciousness.
dr hab. Magdalena Cieślak, prof. UŁ
The End of the World … and After – (Pre/Post)Apocalyptic Landscapes in Literature and Media
Apocalypse has always been part of our storytelling and remains among the favourite motifs in literature and media. As we become more and more acutely aware that the world as we know it is ending, with the climate crisis and mass extinctions being increasingly harder to ignore, we may wish to revisit (post)apocalyptic scenarios to find ways of dealing with the anxieties of our time. The seminar proposes to look at works of fiction presenting various critical landscapes and examine how they explore, as well as manage, our cultural, social and political fears. Contesting the heroic narratives of survival and rebirth, the seminar texts will instead acknowledge the vulnerability and precarity of human existence at the moment of crisis. In our discussions, however, we will try to open up to hopeful readings of such scenarios, embrace the posthuman future, and cherish the transformative, and potentially liberating, power of apocalypse.
Our theoretical point of departure will be the approaches of Rosi Braidotti (The Posthuman, Posthuman Knowledge) and Donna Haraway (Staying with the Trouble), and will include the analysis of such texts as Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, Isaak Marion’s Warm Bodies (and the 2013 film adaptation), Alex Garland’s Annihilation (based on Jeff VanderMeer’s novel), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, HBO’s The Last of Us, and more, hopefully of your choice.
dr Krzysztof Majer
The Body in American Fiction
Since the Puritan times, the conflict between the sensual, on the one hand, and the spiritual or the intellectual on the other has troubled the American literary imagination. The goal of this course is to recover and foreground the neglected and repressed Flesh, with its rich aesthetic and ideological potential, in the works of selected American writers. We will look into various representations of the body and the sensual across centuries, including Romantic portrayals of physicality (Nathaniel Hawthorne), fear of the corporeal (Henry James), intersections between the body, race, and the grotesque (William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor), narratives of youthfulness (John Cheever), the transgressive or ailing female body (Sandra Cisneros, Lucia Berlin, Amy Hempel), and queer bodies (Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, Carmen Maria Machado). The course will center on the body as an ideological construct with transgressive potential.
prof. dr hab. Piotr Cap
Populist rhetoric of conflict and crisis in the contemporary Polish and European public discourses
This BA seminar explores linguistic patterns of conflict, crisis and threat generation in state-political discourse of the post-2015 Poland, comparing the main strategies with the populist rhetorical trends typifying right-wing radical and exclusionary discourses in the contemporary Europe (Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, Italy, the UK). 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, 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 seminar 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.
dr hab. Mikołaj Deckert, prof. UŁ
Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility
The BA seminar covers the basic theoretical and practical topics within Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility. Students will get to know different research methods and tools to choose from for their BA projects which can focus on films as well as video games. An important objective is to make participants aware of the characteristics of particular translation and accessibility modes (e.g. subtitling, audio description), and enable participants to identify factors that influence the translator’s decisions as well as those that could shape the experience of viewers and players.
The seminar will also focus on the very process of planning, structuring and writing the BA thesis – issues like data types, data selection and collection, hypothesis formulation, referencing, register, and text editing.
dr hab. Kamila Ciepiela, prof. UŁ
Interactional Narratives in Everyday Talk
This seminar offers an introduction to the analysis of small stories—brief, everyday narratives told in interactional contexts such as conversations, jokes, gossip, and casual exchanges. Grounded in the influential work of Michael Bamberg and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, the course explores how narrative practices shape personal identities, social relationships, and meaning-making in everyday life.
Students will engage with key concepts in narrative and discourse analysis, learning to identify and interpret storytelling strategies in real-life talk. Through close readings of scholarly texts and hands-on analysis of authentic data, participants will develop skills in linguistic analysis while gaining insight into the dynamic, co-constructed nature of narrative.
The seminar is ideal for students interested in linguistics, discourse studies, or sociolinguistics. No prior experience with narrative analysis is required—just curiosity about how stories work in interaction and a willingness to explore language beyond the written page.
dr Łukasz Salski
Foreign language teaching and learning
In this class we will explore diverse aspects of foreign (or second) language teaching and learning. Within this broad field, students will be encouraged explore any topic relevant to their experience or pursue their interests, both in readings and individual research projects. Classwork will offer support in using and documenting relevant sources as well as choosing and applying appropriate research methodology.
dr hab. Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka, prof. UŁ / dr Anna Gralińska-Brawata
Analysing how people do things with words in different varieties of English
The aim of the seminar is to acquaint students with a variety of factors influencing the use of English and ways of investigating the functions of language and variability in speech from a sociolinguistic point of view. The seminar aims at inspiring and preparing students for conducting a research project as part of their B.A. thesis.
The course will focus on important issues concerning various sources of variability in language use including sociolinguistic variables such as, e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, social status, identity, speaking styles. It also focuses on language and its phonetic features, e.g., dialect and accent differences, and the functional dimension of using particular language forms. Linguistic variability is approached in different contexts, including professional and/or private interaction, commercial or social advertising, the media, language of the classroom). Our aim is to link theoretical issues with real life by analysing live language.