(a)     Compulsory courses

1^st semester

2^nd semester

ENG 103 Academic Essay Writing 

3^rd semester

ENG 239 Introduction to Cultural Criticism

4^th semester

ENG 249 Frontiers of/in Europe

5^th semester

ENG 401 Discursive Construction of Identity in Europe

6^th semester

7^th semester

8^th semester

ENG 406 Translation and Interpreting: Theory and Practice

Below you can find descriptions for course group II. For all other courses, please consult any of the three tracks of the BA in English.

ENG 141 Introduction to Critical Thinking

This course aims at helping students acquire the analytic, critical and reflective skills necessary for their development as discriminating readers and effective writers. Through the careful analysis of a wide range of texts (journalistic, scientific, philosophical, literary) and cultural artefacts (photographs, videos, films, artworks) the students will learn the basics of inductive and deductive reasoning and will develop the ability to select and evaluate information, analyse genre, style, and tone, interpret and engage with ideas, draw informed conclusions, and formulate persuasive arguments.

ENG 239 Introduction to Cultural Criticism

The course will familiarize students with the methodological and theoretical concerns involved in the comparative study and analysis of culture(s). Particular emphasis will be given to the main debates surrounding the concept of culture and its historical development, the distinction between “high culture” and “popular culture”, the class, race, and gender politics of canonicity, the epistemological and ethical stakes entailed in any attempt to understand other cultures and unfamiliar forms of cultural production. A broad range of activities and objects (from films, music, television and literature to buildings, clothing, sports, piercing and other practices of body modification) will be analysed in relation to historical or geographical mappings, political and economic contexts, official and marginal discourses.

ENG 249 Frontiers of/in Europe

The concept of the border is crucial in understanding Europe. Since its inception, concept(s) of the European have been defined with respect to both its internal borders and its external limits. The course surveys mainly two areas: i) the expansion into space and the redefinition of the concept of Europe and European identities over time and in different contexts, and ii) the different criteria (climatic, anthropological, cultural, religious, linguistic, political, geopolitical) by which Europe-internal borders and frontiers have been drawn and redrawn. At the same time, it will reveal the blurriness and shifting character of such frontiers, rethinking them as transition zones within continua rather than faultiness. Towards this, a multidisciplinary approach is adopted, drawing on geography, history, political science, sociology, linguistics, dialectology, culture theory, and the history of ideas. A special emphasis will be given to case studies on the various frontiers of (incomplete) European expansion: the Polish plains and the Baltic area, Scandinavia, the Iberian peninsula, Cyprus, Southern Italy, North Africa, the Balkans, and Turkey.

ENG 401 Discursive Construction of Identity in Europe

The concept of some sort of unitary European identity and/or ideal is anything but a novel concept, probably as such predating modernity and emerging from within the trauma of the Reformation. At the same time, Europe — a geographical area the scale of China and India — emerges as an intensely fragmented space, politically, linguistically, religiously, ideologically, and culturally. The course examines the fundamental texts and the basic concepts behind the construction of both a European identity and the negotiation of local identities as they take shape and eventually incorporate into that of Europe. Necessarily multidisciplinary, it will employ tools from philosophy, history, political science, and culture theory and discourse analysis. The course will aim to expose and foreground the multiplicity and non-unary character of European identities and the European identity and ideal itself. It will also examine the dynamics and the contribution of Europe's 'others' and its minorities in the dialectics of constructing Europe and its many versions.

ENG 402 Europe and Its Former Colonies

This course will explore the literary and cultural aspects of European colonialism, post-colonialism, and the impact this has had on the global exchange of peoples, languages, and cultures. A diversity of texts will be studied from the early modern to the contemporary periods providing a diversity of perspectives of how Europe sees and is seen by the rest of the world. There will be a critical inquiry of the effects of Europe’s cross-cultural interaction with Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and how this has shaped, challenged and transformed notions of self, citizenry, spirituality, aesthetics. Topics to be studied may include early European travel literature and ethnography, contemporary European migrant literature, the discursive formation of Orientalism, the interface of modernity and colonialism, and of postmodernity and postcoloniality, processes of creolization in language and culture.

ENG 403 Seminar in Western Aesthetics

The aim of the seminar is to offer students the opportunity to engage with some of the key questions that have historically defined the field of Western Aesthetics. More particularly, discussion will focus on texts (from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Heidegger, Benjamin, Derrida, and Lyotard) that seek to determine the aesthetic function, the relationship between art and reality, art and truth, art and morality, art and politics as well as the stakes and limits of representation. The seminar will take the form of debates between “the ancients and the moderns”, the moderns and their posterity, the philosophers (as the subjects par excellence of theorein) and the artists/practitioners.

ENG 405 Imaginaries of Europe in Contemporary Film and Fiction (20th Century)

This course will focus on contemporary fictional and filmic representations of Europe in its multiple historical actualizations and its past or emergent idealities. Discussions will centre around selected works by (among others) Milan Kundera, Julia Kristeva, Ohran Pamuk, Wim Wenders, Lars Von Trier, Theo Angelopoulos, Emir Kusturica, and Gianni Amelio, who will be brought in dialogue with some of the seminal contemporary thinkers of the challenges and impasses that Europe presents us with today (e.g., Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, Jean Baudrillard, Edward Said, and Etienne Balibar).

ENG 406 Translating and Interpreting: Theory and Practice

The aims of this course are to expose students to the main topics of translation and interpreting and to clarify the similarities and differences of the two subfields of Translation Studies. The theoretical aspects to be covered include among others: types and modes of Translation and Interpreting, culture and Translation/Interpreting (cultural specifics), approaches to translation strategies and techniques (methodology), the problem of equivalence vs. correspondence (context and situation), terminology and LSP-texts, the role of the language mediator (ethics, agency and communication theory), knowledge management and resources, text linguistics. The course could also include basic exercises in the translation of general or EU-texts and a basic practical introduction to consecutive Interpreting.

(b)     Elective courses