ELECTIVE COURSES OFFERED IN THE SPRING SEMESTER 2017/18

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1 ELECTIVE COURSES OFFERED IN THE SPRING SEMESTER 2017/18 ENG 500 Introduction to Feminist Theory Instructor: Maria Margaroni The aim of this course is to offer students the basic theoretical background required for the comprehension and analysis of issues relating to Gender Studies. Given the multiplicity of methodologies and perspectives, the course is not designed to be comprehensive and will not cover systematically the history of women s movements. It will focus, instead, on key issues and debates in Feminist and Gender Theory. Through the study of selected texts (both classic and more recent contributions to feminist thought), the students will have the opportunity to discuss the major concerns and intellectual developments in Feminist Theory. They will also be encouraged to compare and evaluate different theoretical approaches by bringing them into dialogue and by considering each in light of specific literary texts or films. ENG 524 Science Fiction and Philosophy Instructor: Tziovanis Georgakis The aim of the course is to investigate the genre of science fiction as a kind of a literary representation that mediates the ontological distinction between human subjects and technological apparatuses. Specifically, the course will explore science fiction as a particular frame of reference, as a peculiar modality,which represents the evasive, dubious, and often contradictory boundaries whereby human beings and technological objects are not only separated but also interbred as organisms and mechanisms. Throughout the duration of the course, the following issues will be discussed: computing and intelligence; ontogenesis; technical mentality; technology and positionality (Gestell); cyborgs and hybridity; machines and machination; biological, sexual, and political identities and transgression. In-class discussions will focus on theoretical texts by seminal thinkers in particular, by Alan Turing, Martin Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, and Bruno Latour which will be juxtaposed with works of science fiction by Stanislaw Lem, H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, and William Gibson. The course is interdisciplinary, so students will develop critical thinking skills for navigating distinct but necessarily pertinent mediums. ENG 526 Posthumanism and Literature Instructor: Tziovanis Georgakis

2 This course aims to reconsider the literary and philosophical representations of the human as they were inherited by humanist discourses from the European Enlightenment and afterwards. The prefix post indicates that posthumanism comes both before and after humanism. It comes before humanism because it exposes the unconsidered and unquestioned grounds upon which the human is founded. At the same time, posthumanism comes after humanism because it indicates the necessity to otherwise rename the human after it has been decentered by its imbrication in advanced technical, neurobiological, cybernetic, informatic, and economic networks. In particular, during the course, the posthuman entity that simultaneously emplaces and displaces the human entity will take three forms: (a) god, (b) animal, and (c) machine. In-class discussions will focus on theoretical texts by seminal thinkers in particular, by Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Seres, and Donna Haraway which will be juxtaposed with works of fiction by Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marge Piercy. The course is interdisciplinary, so students will develop critical thinking skills for navigating distinct but necessarily pertinent mediums. ENG 527 Literature and Technologies of the Self Instructor: Anastasia Nikolopoulou In this course we will explore how narrative representations of resilience and endurance challenge forms of governmentality that control marginalized populations. From eighteenth century slave uprisings to present day refugees, representations of human resilience are prominent themes in theatre plays, short stories, and films. We will also consider how social and cultural theories interpret the capacity of the individual to overcome extreme hardship with agency and resourcefulness. Readings are taken from Michel Foucault, Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Henry Mayhew, C. L. R. James, W. Barrymore, John Walker, Ismail Khalidi, Samah Sabawi. Films include After Spring, Paradise Now, Horses of God, and Divine Intervention. ENG 542 Introduction to the Syntax-Lexicon interface Instructor: Marijke De Belder Do words use sentences or do sentences use words? When formulating a sentence, do humans start with selecting the words or do they start with building the syntactic structure? Which module is the dominant one, the syntax or the lexicon? In this course we will organize a scientific debate between defenders of the syntax and defenders of the lexicon. Each student is invited to choose a side and each party will work as a team to defend its views. We will read and discuss famous articles, reflect on their implications and you will learn how to use the information to strengthen the team s view. The aim of the course is to learn how to gather information, how to formulate an argument and how to challenge an opponent in a reasonable way. May the scientific battle begin!

3 ENG 553 Issues in First Language Acquisition Instructor: Kleanthes Grohmann This course introduces current developments in the linguistic study of language acquisition. It offers a general overview of Universal Grammar and the biolinguistic principles of language, and then proceeds to specific interests in the morphosyntax of first language acquisition, but also introduce bi- and multilingualism, issues in second language acquisition and learning, heritage language use, and language attrition. Students will be able to assess language variation from the vantage point of the Principles & Parameters framework and its contemporary version with special reference to language development. They will also become familiar with basic notions of first language acquisition and advanced topics on language interfaces and processing along the way. The theoretical framework will help students appreciate the linguistic basis for much of the research over the past three decades. ΑΓΓ 556 Grammatical features in syntax and morphology Instructor: Phoevos Panagiotidis In syntactic theory and description the notion of feature plays a central role in driving both structure-building and interpretation. Features are usually perceived as something like elementary particles, as the basic stock of language. However, we don t really know how many of them exist; meanwhile, important details about their nature are usually left undiscussed. In other words, a full theoretical description of what features are is still not available, although theoretical linguistics of the last 50 years has made significant discoveries about how they work. This course will explore issues in the theory of features and offer links with the workings of features in morphology. ENG 575 Theatre Translation Instructor: Vasso Giannakopoulou This course constitutes an introduction to the translation of dramatic texts. Although translation has been an indispensable part for the staging of plays across languages and cultures as early as classical Rome, the theoretical study of Theatre Translation has had a belated appearance in the 1980s. Recently, though, it has been attracting strong attention and vigorous debates. The aim of this course is to present a historic overview of drama and its translation, introduce basic theoretical approaches to the translation of dramatic texts for the page or the stage, as well as translation strategies to deal with particular facets of drama translation, both through theoretical texts and case-studies from various genres, periods and traditions. The course will have a strong

4 applied component in which students will translate from works by Anglophone playwrights from various times and styles, such as Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and David Mamet, among others. ENG 584 Intercultural communication and translation Instructor: Maria Constantinou-Papanicolaou This course introduces students to the fundamental principles and issues of intercultural communication from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students will gain initial insight into what intercultural communication entails both in itself and in relation to translation. In this sense, it will describe and critically discuss both old and new thinking of the concept of culture, intercultural and cross-cultural communication. Considering first culture as a mental programming, it will examine how time, space, context are culturally determined (Hall, 1983), and affect intercultural communication while discussing communication styles, culturedetermined intellectual styles and features of monochronic vs polychronic cultures. It will also present Hofstede s (1980, 2001) five dimensions of culture (collectivism vs individualism, power distance, masculinity vs femininity, tolerance of uncertainty, long vs short term orientation) while investigating how such cultural factors can impede intercultural communication by using concrete examples from cross-cultural communication. On the other hand, viewing translation as a particular form of intercultural communication, and culture as a discursive construct, the course will examine common ground, functional pragmatic equivalence in translation, etc. Emphasis will also be given to concepts and issues such as intercultural understanding, cultural filtering, politeness and cultural norms (addressing, greeting, expressing condolences, etc.), the impact of globalisation on translation or the role and importance of localisation in the translation of certain genres (e.g. advertisements) or in translating for different sociolinguistic contexts (e.g. translating for the Greek Cypriot community). ENG 586 Image and Text: Semiotics and Translation Instructor: Maria Constantinou-Papanicolaou This course is an introduction to semiotics, the study of signs and to semiotic (sociosemiotic and multimodal) approaches to translation. It aims to offer students the basic theoretical background required for the comprehension and analysis of multimodal texts and the transformations they may go through in the translation process. Particular attention will be paid to the intersemiotic and interlingual translation of theatre and film posters, advertisements, cartoons, comics, etc. by examining verbal (written or oral messages), iconic (iconic representation) and plastic (such as colour, size, emboldening ) signs which compose such multimodal texts. In this sense, the course will investigate how such features interact in multimodal texts both in the original and translated texts. Isotopy, semic components (with the use of

5 componential analysis), transmutation, semiosis, intersemiosis or intertextuality are some of the key concepts and tools that will help students understand how meaning is reproduced/transposed in other verbal and non-verbal systems. The course will also consider and discuss cultural factors, which may affect choices in intersemiotic and interlinguistic translation. ENG 595 An/other Europe in Film and Translation Instructor: Evi Haggipavlu In thinking of Film as mediation/interpretation/translation of culture and of the cinematic image as a palimpsest filled with time, our aim will be to trace an alternative--to the official one told-- cultural history of Europe through Cinema. To that end, we shall delve deep into Europe s internal foreignness revealed in the films of Tarkovsky, Bergman, Fellini, Petzold, Olmi, Kusturica, the Dardenne brothers, Antonioni, Varda, Godard, Truffaut, Marker, Bunuel, Lanthimos, Resnais, Akerman, Denis, Herzog, Angelopoulos, Kluge and Fassbinder, among others. Theirs is a cinema of time that tells a strange story about Europe s history, politics, thought and culture out of its encounters with its internal and external others; a story of an/other Europe that posits difference as such at the center of the cinematic frame. In becoming attuned to their temporal musings, we shall attempt to map out a non-linear, cinematic history of Europe; one that offers glimpses of a Europe in time and thinks the critical role that translation as interpretation plays in this filmic journey. Our focus will be on the Existential, Cultural as well as Political implications of the complex relationship between the Home Heimlich and the Foreign Unheimlich in the various ways this manifests itself---as origin-original/copy, self/other, source/target, visible/invisible, identity/difference, familiar/strange---in our thoughtful engagement with the works of Axelos, Mills, Fanon, some representatives of the German Tradition in Translation Studies, Woolf, Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin, Steiner, Ortega y Gasset, and Berman among others. Our approach is interdisciplinary as it draws from the areas of Philosophy, Translation Theory, Cultural Studies, Literature, European Cinema and Film Studies.