The online registration for 2nd-year BA students for Elective Courses will commence on Friday 16th February at 8.00 pm and will close on Sunday 18th February at 11.59 pm. In order to register students access the following website: usosweb.uni.lodz.pl.
Each student chooses one course in each of the following categories (three courses altogether):
Zajęcia elektywne A
Zajęcia elektywne B
Zajęcia elektywne C
There are limits to the number of students in the groups. Please note that Professor Hinton’s two courses are identical, so do not sign up for both. Dr S. Klapcsik's group is the only one without the teacher's name in USOS and that is how you can identify it.
In the case of denied access to the group, please make an alternative choice.
Course descriptions can be found below.
elektywne A:
dr A. Handley, Intertextual Encounters: Interrogating the Presence of Art in Literature, Film and Music Video.
Works of art have often been appropriated and repurposed by other artists, working in different art forms.
The course is designed to make you aware of the multiple relationships that exist between visual and literary/textual art forms, and to invite you to explore the turbulent and often subversive nature of those relationships. The main objectives of the course are to learn how to read works intertextually, i.e. to identify how artworks have been appropriated by other artists; to explore the interrelationship between different art forms; and to reflect on the nature of a creative process which is inspired by artworks ancient and modern.
We will focus primarily on the presence of visual arts (e.g. painting, sculpture, and photography) in the 20th and 21st century literature, film and music video, engaging in an analysis of representative literary and visual sources, and selections from critical and theoretical texts. You will study work by W.H. Auden, J. M. W. Turner, Beyoncé, and others. You will be invited to adopt individual, creative approaches to works of art and literature, and to explore such concepts as intermediality and ekphrasis.
dr K. Ojrzyńska, “Freaks”
The course introduces the students to cultural disability studies and selected cultural representations of people of unusual (non-normative) appearance in film (Tod Browning’s Freaks, American Horror Story: Freak Show, Steven Shainberg’s Fur), literature (Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, and P.H.*reaks: the Hidden History of Disabled Persons), as well as theatre and performance (e.g. Mat Frazer’s performances). During the course, the students will discuss excerpts from theoretical texts by leading scholars in disability studies. This will give them the necessary theoretical background to interpret different representations of human diversity, with particular focus on the freak show aesthetics. More specifically, the students will examine such issues as:
1. the cultural constructions of difference and the cultural representations of human diversity,
2. the subversive potential of freakery,
3. the ocular relationship between the actor and the audience in freak shows (the question of unequal power relations and empowerment),
4. contemporary freaks and their performative strategies of self-representation … and more!
prof. I. Witczak-Plisiecka,
mgr S. Klapcsik, Film & Modern Media
This course aims to familiarize students with the narratological analysis of cinema and provide a brief introduction to filmmaking. The course also shows how different types of media are used in visual and digital culture, as well as in everyday life. Special attention is paid to the narrative analysis of films. The course will contain presentations by the teacher as well as the students, who will have the opportunity to shoot short films on their phones during the classes. Ideally, the final outcome of the course is a short film by a small group of students, a documentary or realist piece about Lodz or their hometown, which mirrors the discussed topics in class.
prof. D. Chansky., A Century of African American Women Playwrights
African American women have been writing plays at least since the Harlem Renaissance and the American Little Theatre Movement (1910s-1920s). Over the course of a century, Black playwrights have addressed racism, African American history, urban blight, a changing workplace, and Black American womanhood in a variety of styles ranging from so-called kitchen sink realism to comedy, fantasy, and abstraction. The readings in the course do not exhaust the possibilities for study but they will get you attuned to a rich trove of varied, important writing.
elektywne B:
dr A. Majdzińska-Koczorowicz, Linguistic and bimodal forms of expression
In this course students will have the opportunity to investigate various verbal and verbo-visual forms of expression in such areas as advertisements, social campaigns, comics, or Internet memes in order to discuss their communicative effectiveness. It aims at offering an insight into chosen cognitive linguistics concepts such as mental construal and perspective, conceptual metaphor and metonymy, conceptual blending, framing. A focus will also be placed on basic notions from the field of visual communication. The course will also highlight the variant nature of language and the possibility of alternate ways of expression.
dr K. Małecka, “All but Death, can be Adjusted”: Loss, Grief, and Bibliotherapy
This course will look at various representations of loss and grief in literature and culture. It will explore how those representations and reflections upon death-related issues can help grieving people as well as those who support them. Some of the questions we will try to answer in this course are:
Do we all grieve the same?
What are the most common grief reactions?
What should we say when someone close to us grieves?
How do people try to tame their fear of death?
What are the main stages of the bibliotherapeutic process?
What mourning rituals are still in existence?
While the leading theme of this course may strike one as grave or even morbid, the works we will look at offer not only comforting ideas with which many people can easily identify, but also a lot of dark humor that can help brighten the thought about the one thing none of us can avoid in the end.
dr P. Ostalski, Linguistic puzzles in syntax and morphology (and different ways to solve them)
The objective of the course is to give students an overview of the syntactic and morphological variation across different languages of the world. The course analyzes linguistic puzzles/problems and provides a unique educational activity that combines analytic reasoning and linguistic/cultural awareness. Students learn about the richness, diversity and systematicity of language, while exercising natural logic and reasoning skills. Additionally students discover ways in which speakers of different languages approach reality.
J. Crust M.A., Yiddish Language and Culture, in English
Yiddish was the traditional language of the Jewish people in Poland and Eastern Europe for centuries. Gradually, this unique culture and language would spread far and wide, to the United States, Canada, Argentina, and beyond, impacting local cultures and pop culture in one form or another. The children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Poland and Eastern Europe pretty well invented Hollywood, the comic book superhero (Superman and Batman are Jewish; Spider-Man is half Jewish, half Czech), and Las Vegas as we know it today. Literature, cinema, and theater also grew from the Yiddish language and culture. Of course, Łódź played a central role in the story, being the second largest Yiddish center in Europe (after Warsaw) before the Second World War. Yiddish, no doubt, impacted Polish culture, and vice versa. Curiously, there is also an interesting feminist element in the history, Yiddish being the so-called “mama-loshen,” the mother tongue, the mother language. This course will look at the incredible world of Yiddish language and culture, in English, with a multi-media approach, looking at literature, film, theater, music, radio, and more.
prof. M. Hinton, Fundamental Questions of Language
On this course, you will be asked to consider the most fundamental questions concerning language and its use. The class will be discussion based, and each week we'll try to answer such questions as: Where does language come from? Can we think without language? How does language refer to reality? How is language linked to thought? Does language have rules and how would we know? Although these questions are philosophical in nature, we'll be addressing them as linguists and particularly interested in the way that they impact on the practice of linguistics.
mgr S. Klapcsik, Multiculturalism, Colonization and Migration in English-Speaking Countries
The aim of the course is to give an introduction to multiculturalism, that is, ethnic and cultural diversity, especially how these phenomena appear in various English-Speaking cultures. The texts and feature films of the class focus on ethnic identity, post-colonialism, diasporas, migration, and exile, as well as the unfortunate effects of racism in society and culture. Many of the films and stories are by hyphenated authors, migrants themselves, which occasionally raises the questions of auto-biography and documentary style realism in their works.
elektywne C:
prof. M. Myk, Stuff: Everyday Objects in North American Women’s Writing.
The course borrows its title from the American art critic Lucy R. Lippard’s 2023 book Stuff: Instead of a Memoir—a tribute to the objects that have turned out to be particularly significant in her life. We will focus on the literary texts similarly focused on the significance of material culture, paying special attention to the writers’ attention to our everyday environment and the objects one encounters, acquires, or accumulates during one’s lifetime. Fascinated with the status of objects in writing as well as the ways in which we tend to form attachments with different possessions, some of the most interesting North American authors writing today have celebrated, or critiqued, the appeal of various items in their work. We will examine a selection of notable 20th- and 21st-century texts that showcase interesting, often unconventional literary treatments of objects, including works of such authors as Gertrude Stein, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Boyer, Lisa Robertson, Divya Victor, Stacy Szymaszek, Lyn Hejinian, and Lydia Davis.
dr T. Fisiak, Gothic Intertexts
The class aims is to analyse selected aspects of Gothicism as a (pop)cultural phenomenon, with a particular focus on Gothic intertexts in the widely understood visual and aural spheres (cinema, music/video). Students will be acquainted not only with the concepts of intertextuality but also interpictoriality, intermediality and transmediality to discuss a range of Gothic-inspired films and music videos. Assessment will be based upon two major tasks, i.e. a movie review and a presentation on a music video of one’s choice, as well as active participation in the discussions throughout the semester.
dr P. Ostalski, Linguistic puzzles in semantics and phonology (and different ways to solve them)
The objective of the course is to give students an overview of the semantic and phonological variation across different languages of the world. The course analyzes linguistic puzzles/problems and provides a unique educational activity that combines analytic reasoning and linguistic/cultural awareness. Students learn about the richness, diversity and systematicity of language, while exercising natural logic and reasoning skills. Additionally students discover ways in which speakers of different languages approach reality.
dr W. Pskit, Word-formation across languages
The aim of the course is to explore topics in word-formation in English, Polish and (selected) other languages and to equip students with research tools facilitating contrastive word-formation studies. The issues to be discussed include basic concepts in morphology and word-formation, simple and complex words, inflection and derivation, productivity in word-formation. Our major concern is a contrastive approach to word-formation processes in English, Polish and (selected) other languages so that we can identify both similarities and differences regarding the ways in which the relevant languages employ the mechanisms of word-formation.
prof. A. Wicher,
prof. M. Hinton, Fundamental Questions of Language
On this course, you will be asked to consider the most fundamental questions concerning language and its use. The class will be discussion based, and each week we'll try to answer such questions as: Where does language come from? Can we think without language? How does language refer to reality? How is language linked to thought? Does language have rules and how would we know? Although these questions are philosophical in nature, we'll be addressing them as linguists and particularly interested in the way that they impact on the practice of linguistics.