COMPULSORY MODULE FOR THE ARTS & HUMANITIES PATHWAY 

Full-time students following Arts and Humanities optional modules must take this 15 credit module in the first semester. Part-time students following Arts and Humanities optional modules must take it in the first semester of their second year of study. Students pursuing this Research Methods and Skills module do NOT take EUT062 - Research Methods.

COMPULSORY MODULE FOR THE ARTS & HUMANITIES PATHWAY

Aim

This course aims to introduce students to a range of scholarly approaches to ‘text’ (in the widest possible sense), enabling them to critically engage with the materials studied for the MA European Studies (Humanities Pathway).

Module content

Approaches covered include Historiography & Narrative, Intertextuality, Orientalism, Feminism and Hermeneutics. Texts by the following critics and theorists will be studied or referred to (indicative list):

Learning outcomes

On completion of this module, students should be able to:

•       Distinguish between different scholarly approaches to text

•       Identify and evaluate each approach’s specific contribution to knowledge

•       Reflect on the discursiveness and constructedness of texts

Module Co-ordinator

This is a team-taught module. The overall co-ordinator is Prof. Gerrit-Jan Berendse. If you have any questions about the course in general or about its specific requirements, then you may contact him. If you have questions about specific matters of content / readings pertaining to particular sections of the course, then you should contact the member of staff teaching it directly. (Contact details below.)

Teaching methods and participation

There will be two consecutive, 50-minute classes each Attendance at these classes is compulsory. All students are expected to prepare for each class and to contribute to discussions. Learning is an active process, requiring not only the acquisition of knowledge but the exchange of ideas, opinions and arguments with others. It is therefore essential that you come to classes having completed the essential readings and prepared to contribute to the discussion about them.

2-hour written exam in January 2014

Teaching is on Monday 3-5 pm in EUROP 0.42

(Teaching days, times and venue may vary, subject to the tutor’s arrangements with the students)

Session 1 (14 October 2013): Introduction / Reading Texts / Fact v Fiction

•         Introduction to the module

•         Basic concepts of reading texts

•         History, historiography and narrative

Session 2 (21 October 2013): Intertextuality

•       Intertextuality: A dialogical, interdisciplinary and transcultural concept

•       Intertextuality: From Structuralism to Poststructuralism & Postmodernism

Session 3 (4 November 2013): Orientalism

•       Orientalist discourse – key principles

•       Critiques of Orientalism

•       (Counter-)Orientalist readings

Session 4 (11 November 2013): Feminism

This session will examine a range of feminist approaches to reading texts, from both European and Anglo-American critics. The focus will be on the ways in which feminist critics have understood and analysed women's relationship to text as both authors and readers.

Session 5 (18 November 2013): Post-Structuralism / The Death of the Author

This seminar addresses one of the best-known theses of French literary criticsm after 1960, which Roland Barthes called ‘the death of the author’. With his short text of the same name, he became the representative of a wider move away from humanist approaches to cultural production, and more specifically the idea that art can be interpreted in the light of the background of its author. In place of such interpretations, readings based on the formal qualities of language or discourse employed came to the fore.

We shall explore these ideas beginning from Barthes’s and Foucault’s texts listed below, before moving to see whether they have relevance for research projects today.

Session 6 (25 November 2013): Hermeneutics

(See Course Kit on EUT 319 Module on Learnng Central)