Teaching starts on Monday September 3, 2007

Go to: Valgfag · Projektemner · Kandidatemner

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Valgfag , autumn 2007

• Exploring South Asian Literature in English
• Edna, Wilky and Jake – Twentieth Century American Fiction
• Rule Britannia – from Sunrise to Sunset. A survey course of major events and issues of the British Empire
• Media, Advertising, and Public Relations: An Introduction to American Mass Communication
• Literature and War
• Comparative Syntax

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Exploring South Asian Literature in English

Vera Alexander, Monday 14-16 in building 1453, room 223

Vera Alexander

This autumn we will be welcoming Vera Alexander to the Department of English from the Centre for Canadian and Anglo-American Cultures at Saarland University, Germany.

Dr. Alexander was educated at the universities of Cologne and Freiburg in Germany, and the universities of Norwich and Canterbury in Britain. Her research interests include Indian, South African, Pan-Pacific and diasporic literatures as well as theories of transculturality in relation to immigrant writing; intertextuality; autobiography and children’s writing. Vera’s doctoral thesis, Transcultural Representations of Migration and Education in South Asian Anglophone Novels appeared in 2006. She has co-edited a book on romanticism and published articles on postcolonial anglophone writers, diaspora, culture, education and border concepts. Her current research project focuses on Canadian Life Writing.

South Asia, comprising India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, constitutes one of the most heterogeneous and productive postcolonial regions, not least owing to its vibrant western diaspora. India in particular, being one of the foremost newly industrialising nations, has become one of the most visible and vociferous nations currently challenging the centrality of western culture.

This class aims to introduce students to major themes relating to contemporary South Asian anglophone fiction. We will study aspects of the history of colonialism and decolonisation on the Indian subcontinent (Independence and Partition) and their reflection in recent writings; the role of English medium education, and issues of migration to Great Britain and North America, and globalisation. The texts covered will focus on cultural difference and adaptation, gender and generational conflicts engendered by such factors as cultural change and education.

Primary texts to be studied will include the following:

• Desai, Anita. Clear Light of Day . 1980. London: Penguin, 1982. (extracts)
• Kureishi, Hanif. The Buddha of Suburbia . London: Faber and Faber, 1990. (extracts)
• Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies . Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1999.
• Mistry, Rohinton. Tales from Firozsha Baag . London: Faber and Faber, 1987. (US edition published as Swimming Lessons and Other Tales from Firozsha Baag , 1989).
• Mukherjee, Bharati. ‘The Tenant,’ in The Middleman and Other Stories . New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1988. 97-113.
• Rushdie, Salman. East, West. 1994. London: Vintage, 1995.
• Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses . Dover, Del.: The Consortium. 1988. (extracts)
• Syal, Meera. Anita and Me .London: Flamingo, 1997. (extracts)

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Edna, Wilky and Jake – Twentieth Century American Fiction

Jens Fredslund, Tuesday 10-12 in building 1453, room 229

From the humid bayou of deep south Louisiana to fine New York mornings in June, and from smoke-filled Parisian decadence to hyphenated immigrant memory, this course explores some of the multitudes of interesting shades and aspects of American fiction from the twentieth century by means of a range of texts from the American canon.

The course is organized around the five main texts as listed below – by Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Amy Tan and Michael Cunningham. Each of these writers articulate their own version of the American experience, but they all share an interest in the overall themes of identity, belonging, purpose and alienation. Chopin’s Edna Pontellier struggles with the tension between the constraints of marriage and convention on the one hand, and personal freedom and artistic creation on the other. Hemingway’s Jacob Barnes drifts from place to place, and from bar to bar, in his search for intensity and authenticity. In a similarly rootless fashion, though far more stuck and explicitly frustrated, Bellow’s Tommy Wilhelm roams the streets of New York, in the shadow of father and failure. Tan’s Chinese-American women join hands in attempting to retrace and rearticulate their hybrid histories and doubled identities. And finally, Michael Cunningham’s richly intertextual novel uses interchanging narratives and story-lines in its portrayal of the lives of Clarissa, Virginia and Laura, who – each from a different juncture of the century – reassess their lives, pasts, presents and futures.

You are responsible for getting hold of the five texts below (which will hopefully also be available from Stakbogladen in time), and I will then, in return, provide a course compendium of the remaining texts of the course. This compendium will be available from Stakbogladen by late August.

• Kate Chopin: The Awakening [see your Norton] (1899)
• Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises (1926)
• Saul Bellow: Seize the Day (1956)
• Amy Tan: The Joy Luck Club (1989)
• Michael Cunningham: The Hours (1998)

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Rule Britannia – from Sunrise to Sunset. A survey course of major events and issues of the British Empire

David Harding, Monday 10-12 in building 1453, room 229

During the first century of European exploration and colonization, the role of England was relatively insignificant, dwarfed by the achievements of Spain and Portugal. In the next two centuries, however, the British Empire emerged, and was able to challenge and surpass all others, so that by the turn of the 20 ^th Century it was so expansive that it could truly be said that the sun never set on it.

The rise to preeminence of the British Empire has had immense consequences for global development. British colonialism has left its imprint throughout its former empire in the form of language, culture, administration. This legacy, although sometimes beneficial to colonized peoples, has also contributed to many of the tensions, conflicts and inequalities the world faces at the beginning of the 21 ^st Century

The course has three main objectives:

• To provide students with a broad chronological overview of the main events and issues of the British Empire from the Elizabethan Era to the present
• To introduce students to important theories and issues in the field of the study of imperialism such as mercantilism, hegemony, cultural identity, orientalism, resistance, and neo-imperialism
• To investigate in detail a number of specific individuals, events, periods, and organizations as cases to illuminate broader issues and theories (provisionally):
  • The Opium Wars
  • The East India Company
  • Decolonization
  • British Petroleum and Shell Oil

The texts for the course will be announced by June 15, 2007.

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Media, Advertising, and Public Relations: An Introduction to American Mass Communication

Jody Pennington, Wednesday 10-12 in building 1453, room 227

This course examines the mass media in the United States from a social and cultural perspective. After defining and framing important concepts and issues necessary for media literacy, the course looks at specific media: the press, magazines, film, radio and popular music, television, and the World Wide Web. We consider the history of each medium and examine its role in today’s media-saturated world. We will also look at advertising and public relations, two industries that utilize the mass media and mass communication. The course will provide humanities students with insight into the role of advertising in marketing as well as how private and public organizations use public relations in good and troubled times. It examines how the media, advertisers, and public relations workers define and target audiences.

During the semester, we will consider current industry trends and ask what they mean for both producers and consumers of media products. We will look at theories about mass communication and its impact on ideas about gender and race, its use of stereotypes, and so forth. We will also examine how media are regulated in the United States. Finally, we will look at the global media and their relation to the United States today.

As a valgfag , this course builds on the Nation, State, and Globalization course, and supplements the American History and Society course as well as the Media and Culture Studies course.

Course reading

• Baran, Stanley J. Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture . Enhanced 4th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006.

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Literature and War

Dominic Rainsford, Monday 10-12 in building 1453, room 215

War is sometimes said to be too massive and appalling for fiction to deal with. In fact, there are only two really well known novels about war in English (and they are both on this course). On the other hand, there’s a lot of very good war poetry, and it is possible that most of us owe our sense of what at least the ‘Great’ War of 1914–18 was like, more to the poets who fought (and in many cases died) in it than to anyone else. And then, the more one looks around, the more it becomes apparent that a great deal of literature is marked, in one way or another, by being written in a time of war (like now), even if the authors in question never fired a shot. In this course, we will try to discover how important war is, as a general presence in literature in English. We will also try to find out whether literature can help us to understand war, and whether it could even, in theory, help us to avoid war (supposing that that’s what we want). Or perhaps, on the other hand, literature is usually complicit in war? Perhaps literature can even be a kind of war?

The course will be roughly divided into four parts. In Part One we will look at the roots of English-language writing about war, going all the way back to the Bible and Homer’s Iliad ; we will then see Early Modern writing about war at its best in two very different plays by Shakespeare. In Part Two we will trace the development of a modern understanding of war through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, paying attention both to theoretical accounts in the tradition of Clausewitz and to popular, sentimental reactions such as Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’; this part will culminate in a reading of Stephen Crane’s classic novel of the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage . Part Three will concern the literature of the First and Second World Wars, ranging from poets who fought in the trenches, through memoirs by nurses and other non-combatants, to the best-known war novel of the second half of the twentieth century, Joseph Heller’s serio-comic Catch-22 . In Part Four, we will come close to our own war-ridden time, and will ask whether literature has anything to offer when we try to make sense of what is going on now in Iraq, and in so many other places. What has literature to say in the era of the TV war, and of the unending War upon Terror?

The following books should be bought (in the editions specified):

• William Shakespeare, Henry V , ed. T. W. Craik (Arden Shakespeare, 1995).
• William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida , ed. David Bevington (Arden Shakespeare, 1998).
• Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage , ed. Donald Pizer (Norton Critical Edition, 1994).
• Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (Vintage Classics, 2004).
• Tony Harrison, The Gaze of the Gorgon (Bloodaxe, 1992).

You will also be required to buy a course compendium which will include poems, extracts from prose memoirs, historical and theoretical essays, and other short texts.

The following books are particularly recommended as supplementary reading:

• Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (Penguin, 2007).
• Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Harper Perennial, 2006).
• Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory , new edn (Oxford UP, 2000).
• Martin Shaw, The New Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War and Its Crisis in Iraq  (Polity, 2005).

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Comparative Syntax

Sten Vikner, Tuesday 10-12 in building 1463, room 416

The goal of this seminar is to compare the syntax of English to that of a closely related language, namely Danish. Other languages will also receive some attention, e.g. French and German.

Some syntactic theories and descriptions are concerned exclusively with one language (e.g. only with English or only with Danish). Such theories therefore have little to say about differences between languages.

Within generative linguistics, the comparative aspect is particularly relevant, as this theory is very far from language-specific. On the contrary, it claims to be able to account for language in general. This is the reason for the central roles in generative linguistics played by universal grammar, which accounts for common properties, and by parameters, which determine the scope of possible variation. I therefore hope to show how a number of different variations between English and Danish can be accounted for by means of relatively few and simple assumptions.

I intend to discuss English-Danish differences concerning some or all of the following:

• main and embedded clause structure
• declarative and interrogative clause structure
• finite and non-finite clause structure
• reflexive and reciprocal pronouns

We will also discuss the theoretical and practical differences between a generative analysis and an analysis along the lines of Diderichsen (1946), on which many current analyses of Danish syntax are based, e.g. Hansen (1980), Allan & al. (1995), Jørgensen (2000), and Togeby (2003).

Obligatory reading:

• Hand-outs which will be distributed.

Background reading (general):

• Davidsen-Nielsen, Niels & Peter Harder: 2000, "Constituent order in English and Danish", Copenhagen Studies in Language 25, 39-71.
• Haegeman, Liliane & Jacqueline Guéron: 1999, English Grammar - A Generative Perspective , Blackwell, Oxford.
• Roberts, Ian: 1997, Comparative Syntax , Edward Arnold, London.

Background reading (on Danish):

• Allan, Robin, Philip Holmes, & Tom Lundskær-Nielsen: 1995, Danish, a Comprehensive Grammar , Routledge, London.
• Diderichsen, Paul: 1946, Elementær Dansk Grammatik , (3rd edition, 1962), Gyldendal, Copenhagen.
• Hansen, Erik: 1980, Dæmonernes Port - Støttemateriale til undervisningen i nydansk grammatik , Hans Reitzel, Copenhagen.
• Jørgensen, Henrik: 2000, Indføring i Dansk Syntaks , University of Aarhus, Aarhus, www.hum.au.dk/engelsk/engsv/papers/joer00c.pdf.
• Togeby, Ole: 2003, Fungerer denne sætning? - Funktionel dansk sproglære , Gads Forlag, Copenhagen.
• Vikner, Sten: 1999, "Ledstillingen i dansk og government & binding" in Per Anker Jensen & Peter Skadhauge (eds.), Sætningsskemaet i generativ lingvistik , pp. 83-110. Institut for Erhvervssproglig Informatik og Kommunikation, University of Southern Denmark, Kolding, www.hum.au.dk/engelsk/engsv/papers/vikn99a.pdf.

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Projektemner , autumn 2007

• Postcolonialism and Jane Austen
• Civilizing Uncle Sam: Aspects of American Liberal Reform, 1890-1970
• Key Themes in English Language Teaching and Learning
• Elsewheres – A Hundred Years of Other Spaces in Fiction from Britain, Canada and America
• Worldwide Language Variation in English

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Postcolonialism and Jane Austen

Vera Alexander, Friday 8-11 in building 1453, room 223

Vera Alexander

This autumn we will be welcoming Vera Alexander to the Department of English from the Centre for Canadian and Anglo-American Cultures at Saarland University, Germany.

Dr. Alexander was educated at the universities of Cologne and Freiburg in Germany, and the universities of Norwich and Canterbury in Britain. Her research interests include Indian, South African, Pan-Pacific and diasporic literatures as well as theories of transculturality in relation to immigrant writing; intertextuality; autobiography and children’s writing. Vera’s doctoral thesis, Transcultural Representations of Migration and Education in South Asian Anglophone Novels appeared in 2006. She has co-edited a book on romanticism and published articles on postcolonial anglophone writers, diaspora, culture, education and border concepts. Her current research project focuses on Canadian Life Writing.

While set in England and belonging to the canon of British texts, Jane Austen's novels take place before the backdrop of imperial expansion and reflect on Britain's colonies in a number of subtle ways, ranging from allusions to remote sources of wealth to seafaring adventures.

This course will combine a critical re-examination of a selection of Jane Austen’s texts with an introduction to postcolonial studies in order to contextualise Austen’s implication in European colonialism.

Issues to be discussed include Edward Said’s juxtaposition of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, concepts of centre versus margin, considerations of economy and property as well as direct and indirect manifestations of power and cultural hegemony. Along with many other aspects of meaning hidden under the surface of conventions and humour, references to the colonial world add up to the complex texture of significations in Austen's work.

Primary texts will include Jane Austen's MansfieldPark , Sanditon and Persuasion .

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Civilizing Uncle Sam: Aspects of American Liberal Reform, 1890-1970

Dale Carter, Friday 11-14 in building 1453, room 223

About the Course . We tend to think of the United States as the home of free enterprise, private property and limited government: no welfare provision, no public transport, no unions, no constraints on big business. But the nation is not quite such a dog-eat-dog jungle in which only the richest, strongest or nastiest survive. Since the late 19 ^th century, in fact, Uncle Sam has in this regard been civilizing himself, and this course explores aspects of the process. Addressing the responses of reformers to the problems of industrial society, it seeks to identify the main features of liberal social, economic and political activism, to account for successive waves of reform, and to evaluate their strengths, shortcomings and contradictions.

The course is divided evenly between three great phases of liberal reform: the Progressive era (approximately 1890 to 1920), the New Deal years (from about 1933 to 1945), and the New Frontier/Great Society period (roughly 1957 to 1970). It addresses a variety of representative issues, including the status of the private corporation, the struggle against poverty, public health and safety, and the place of African Americans in the nation’s life. The course will also consider links between domestic and international affairs, such as the ways in which foreign examples have influenced liberal reform in the US, and the notion that liberalism is an imperial ideology.

About Course Reading : There will be no ‘set text’ for this course simply because no single published work adequately covers the field and multiple texts would be rather expensive. Instead, we will draw on a compendium (perhaps two) of primary and secondary readings. The list of ‘suggested preliminary reading’ given below is for those who would like to learn something more about the subject before the course begins. The books listed below are therefore not ‘set texts’ and you are not expected to buy any of them (millionaires amongst you are not banned from doing so).

Suggested Preliminary Reading ( see About Course Reading , above )

• Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur (eds.), The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism (2005)
• James Young, Reconsidering American Liberalism (1996)
• Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur (eds.), The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism (2002)
• John Morton Blum, The Progressive Presidents , new ed. (1982)
• Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur (eds.), Progressivism and the New Democracy (1999)
• Alonzo Hamby, Liberalism and its Challengers: FDR to Reagan (1985)
• Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (eds.) The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (1989)  

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Key Themes in English Language Teaching and Learning

Tim Caudery, Friday 8-11 in building 1453, room 229

This course presents a number of issues which currently concern teachers, course writers and language teaching planners. The themes we will explore will probably include:

• the teaching of language for communicative purposes
• the ways in which we believe people acquire language in the classroom
• the importance of vocabulary
• learner independence and learning strategies
• teaching and learning grammar
• ‘receptive’ and ‘productive’ language skills
• differences between learners

These are very big themes, and the course will provide a basic introduction to each. Students will each choose one theme to pursue for their Bachelor project, and will either review recent research articles on that theme or discuss published teaching materials in relation to their chosen topic (or a combination of the two).

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Elsewheres – A Hundred Years of Other Spaces in Fiction from Britain, Canada and America

Jens Fredslund, Friday 8-11 in building 1453, room 227

“There” is a marker of pointing, precision and definition – but also one of distance and difference. For “there” is somewhere other than “here”. This spatial and geographical Other is the main focus of interest in this course, which constitutes an exploration of a range of these other places – these elsewheres – in selected works of British, Canadian and American fiction from the last hundred years. In other words, this course aims to investigate important aspects of the past century by means of some of its different spaces in fiction.

The course revolves around the four main texts as listed below – by Hemingway, Golding, Ondaatje and Auster, which all have in common this investigation of a site of somewhere else. These texts describe a series of journeys and displacements and use their various elsewheres in order to address a range of different themes and issues. Hemingway’s exploration of the African wild seems to raise questions of authenticity and originality. It presents the savannah as a site of power and primitivity. Golding’s island narrative describes the marooning of a group of schoolboys on a desert island, and uses this displacement to investigate themes of civilization, savagery and brutality. Like an island surrounded by a roaring sea, humanity, in Golding’s book, seems disconcertingly inhuman. Ondaatje’s overtly geographical novel investigates issues of identity, nation and home. It is a text of belonging, borders and the borderless. And finally, Auster’s latest novel articulates a series of spaces and regions in text. It constitutes a gradually emergent map of intertextual topography – and a site for – by then, probably – sore eyes.

You are responsible for getting hold of the four novels below (which will hopefully also be available from Stakbogladen in time), and I will then, in return, provide a course compendium of the remaining texts of the course. This compendium will be available  from Stakbogladen by late August. Also, check the course conference or the department notice board for reading assignments for the first week.

• Ernest Hemingway: Green Hills of Africa (1935)
• William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
• Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient (1992)
• Paul Auster: Travels in the Scriptorium (2006)

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Worldwide Language Variation in English

Johanna Wood, Friday 11-14 in building 1453, room 229

“Since English began to spread around the world . . . all its varieties have taken on an independent history, some of them influenced by local circumstances, others responding to changes in the prestige dialects of Great Britain and the United States, and all of them affected by the inexorable trends in language change that affect every community from one generation to the next.” ( Richard Bailey and Manfred Görlach , English as a World Language)

“Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied.” (Noam Chomsky, Language and Freedom )

As speakers have exported English to different territories throughout the world, language change has resulted in many different varieties.  Change is an on-going and inevitable process which happens in any living language and which may be influenced by many different factors, both language external (e.g. contact with speakers of different varieties) and language internal (principles of the grammar).

The features that characterize a particular variety are due to many different factors.  Scots, for example, developed forms distinct from Standard English through its separate development as a northern variety of English, influenced by contact with Old Norse, Dutch, and Gaelic.  This variety of English was then “exported” to Ulster, North America, Australia, and New Zealand where it was one contributing influence in the formation of new dialects there. Other factors that affect the formation of new dialects are language internal. Similar processes of language change, for example loss of third person singular ‘s’ or the leveling of was/were ,happen in more than one variety and need not necessarily involve contact . In this class we will examine the linguistic features of not only Scots but other varieties of English around the world, and consider language change, “influenced by local circumstances”, and according to fixed “principles”.

The background for this class is the first year module in linguistics and material covered in the second year History and Development of the English Language.  Other second year emne (e.g. Comparative Syntax and Introduction to Sociolinguistics) will give you additional resources that you may want to draw on, but are not essential.

Materials will be provided in compendium form and will include journal articles on more specialized topics as well as readings from:

• Bauer, Laurie. (2002). An Introduction to International Varieties of English .  Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press.
• Chambers, J.K. and Peter Trudgill. (1998). Dialectology . Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

We will also draw on material in:

• Kortmann, Bernd and Edgar W. Schneider Kate Burridge, Rajend Mesthrie, and Clive Upton. (2004). A handbook of varieties of English: a multimedia reference tool.   Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.  Table of contents: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip052/2004025131.html

Table of contents · List of courses

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Kandidatemner , autumn 2007

• Comparing Modernisms
• Introduction to Speech Perception
• The Irish Revolution
• Psycholinguistic approaches to language processing and acquisition
• Missings and Captures – Searching in Twentieth Century Fiction
• Exploring Green America: Ecotourism in the United States
• Quests for the Holy Grail – From the Middle Ages to Dan Brown
• Out of the City, Back to the Land: The Anti-Urban Impulse in Late-19 ^th - and Early-20 ^th -Century British and American Culture, Literature, and Film
• Forked Animals: The Human and the Inhuman from Shakespeare to Now
• Research in foreign language vocabulary acquisition and pedagogy

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Comparing Modernisms

Vera Alexander, Wednesday 8-10 in building 1453, room 215

This autumn we will be welcoming Vera Alexander to the Department of English from the Centre for Canadian and Anglo-American Cultures at Saarland University, Germany.

Dr. Alexander was educated at the universities of Cologne and Freiburg in Germany, and the universities of Norwich and Canterbury in Britain. Her research interests include Indian, South African, Pan-Pacific and diasporic literatures as well as theories of transculturality in relation to immigrant writing; intertextuality; autobiography and children’s writing. Vera’s doctoral thesis, Transcultural Representations of Migration and Education in South Asian Anglophone Novels appeared in 2006. She has co-edited a book on romanticism and published articles on postcolonial anglophone writers, diaspora, culture, education and border concepts. Her current research project focuses on Canadian Life Writing.

Modernism is such an elusive and heterogeneous movement that it is perhaps best addressed in the plural. In dealing with modernism(s) we confront radical changes in the social and political sectors of Europe and North America and different art forms intersecting and influencing each other to produce a wide range of interrelated cultural, intellectual and aesthetic developments.

This course will examine some of the complex interrelations of issues subsumed under the heading of modernism on both sides of the Atlantic as well as literary and cultural exchanges between Britain and North America.

We will explore the connections between such diverse themes as, among others, feminism, the crisis of representation, the experimental search for new means of expression and stylistic innovation, the role of the Great War, the impact of Freud, revisions and reworkings of the past and questions of cultural mediation. Our tour will take in selected expressions of modernism in fiction, drama, poetry and film and chart some of the most salient ‘-isms’ needed to form an understanding of modernist ideas.

Authors and texts discussed will include (but not be limited to) the following:

• Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
• T.S. Eliot, The WasteLand
• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Ezra Pound, The Cantos (selections)
• Gertrude Stein,  Tender Buttons (selections)
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

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Introduction to Speech Perception

Ocke Bohn, Monday 14-16 in building 1463, room 416

Speech perception is the most basic linguistic ability which humans possess: All other linguistic competencies build upon it, and it is the very first one which we – as babies – excel at. In addition, speech perception is perhaps the linguistic ability that is best understood, both in terms of how mature native listeners perceive speech and in terms of how we acquire speech perception abilities in first and second language learning.

This course will first introduce students to basic concepts and methods in speech perception research, and then cover the following main topics:

• The origin of speech perception in language development (with special emphasis on very young children, who possess impressive perceptual abilities);
• Cross-language speech perception (which shows the extent to which our native language determines the perception of speech sounds of a foreign language), and, especially
• Learning of speech perception patterns of a foreign language (in which we will look at the limits and possibilities of modifying perceptual patterns of the native language).

Texts and other materials:

You will receive a compendium at the beginning of the course, as well as supplementary materials later in the semester. It would be a very good idea if you downloaded the speech perception software ALVIN to your own PC and studied its features before we start the course. Here are the instructions for installing ALVIN:

Access, using the internet, Jim Hillenbrand’s homepage at http://homepages.wmich.edu/~hillenbr/. Go to the fifth entry under  "Research, Publications, Software" which is "Alvin experiment-control software:" Click on Full install (v 1.19, 2/24/2006).

Your operating system will ask you whether you wish to run Alvin119full.exe (“kør”) or to save it (“gem”). I recommend “save”. If you click on “save” (or “gem”), remember the directory where Alvin119full.exe is saved.

Enjoy!

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The Irish Revolution

Michael Böss, Monday 10-12 in building 1453, room 223

The Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 is usually seen as the beginning of the long “Irish Revolution” which ended in 1922 with the founding of the Irish Free State. Official celebrations of the Easter Rising have sometimes been controversial, however, since such state commemoration may be seen as an official endorsement of the use of violence as a political means. When, in 2005, the Irish government decided to celebrate the centenary of the rising in 2006 with a big military parade down Dublin’s O’Connell Street and past the major symbol of the rising, the General Post Office, the decision gave rise to new debates, both public and academic, on how to understand the historical and immediate causes of the Irish Revolution, in addition to its short and long term effects. The debate showed that, if one wants to understand contemporary Irish society, including Northern Irish politics, there is no better starting point than an analysis of the political, social and cultural contexts of Easter Week. This seminar will do just that. However, it will go on to look at contemporary interpretations in fiction and film: Roddy Doyle’s revisionist novel A Star Called Henry , Neil Jordan’s Hollywood film Michael Collins and Ken Loach’s recent Golden Palm winning film The Wind That Shakes the Barley .      

Compulsory reading:

• Doherty, Gabriel and Dermot Keogh (eds.)(2007). 1916: The Long Revolution . Dublin: Mercier Press.
• Garvin, Tom (2005). Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland 1958 . New Edition. Dublin: Gill and  Macmillan.
• Doyle, Roddy (2000). A Star Called Henry : London: Penguin.

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Psycholinguistic approaches to language processing and acquisition

Ken Drozd, Thursday 10-12 in building 1453, room 223

Psycholinguistics is the study of the psychological processes underlying language comprehension, production, and acquisition. Psycholinguists explore how the forms and meanings of words are stored and accessed, how speakers process syntactic structure to yield semantic meaning, how intonation and world knowledge conspire to constrain reference and linguistic communication, and the mechanisms and processes which underlie the recognition of humor and metaphor. In this seminar, we review the central psychological processes which give rise to linguistic behavior and the contemporary models psycholinguists have come up with to explain how they operate. The readings for the course consist primarily of journal articles and book chapters, all of which are available on-line through the State Library.

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Missings and Captures – Searching in Twentieth Century Fiction

Jens Fredslund, Wednesday 10-12 in building 1453, room 229

Many characters inhabiting twentieth century literature are marred by a sense of dislocation and perdition. Characters are missing, looking, baffled and confused. This course considers a series of responses to this dislocation and sense of disorientation, and it reads a series of texts which describe different attempts to track, trace, capture and contain something or someone missing, lost or out of reach.

The four main texts of the course as listed below mark the beginning and the end of the twentieth century, and we will explore the years in between by means of a series of other, shorter stories. Conrad’s text sets the stage for the twentieth century search – for meaning, purpose and direction, allegorically embodied by the mysterious and elusive Kurtz. The story epitomizes the frustrated gesture of mapping as characteristic of the early part of the century. Chevalier’s much more recent novel explores a different type of capture, namely the artistic one, as it tells the story of the coming into being of Vermeer’s famous painting of the mysterious girl with a pearl earring. In other words, Chevalier’s story describes translation as capture, as Vermeer tries to pinpoint an object of desire by re-presenting it. Foer’s novel rearticulates the motif of the actual journey of discovery, as it tells its intermingled stories of history, origin, family and identity. Conrad’s text goes away. Foer’s back, retracing its steps and past. And finally, Auster’s most recent novel translates the motifs of the search and the quest for capture into the realm of text and textuality. His novel emerges as a gradually growing literary portrait of the pursuit of both narrators and characters, who are lost, displaced and arrested. 

You are responsible for getting hold of the four texts below (which will hopefully also be available from Stakbogladen in time), and I will then, in return, provide a course compendium of the remaining texts of the course. This compendium will be available from Stakbogladen by late August.

• Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (1899)
• Tracy Chevalier: Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999)
• Jonathan Safran Foer: Everything is Illuminated (2002)
• Paul Auster: Travels in the Scriptorium (2006)

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Exploring Green America: Ecotourism in the United States

David Harding, Tuesday 12-14 in building 1453, room 227

During the second half of the 20 ^th century, tourism has emerged a major global industry. According to many analysts, it is now the world’s largest and fastest growing industry, surpassing petrochemicals and automobile manufacturing. Development of tourism has become a major economic goal of most countries. The United States has the world’s largest tourism industry, and ranks third in attracting foreign visitors.

In recent decades, the largest segment of tourist activity has been mass tourism, with a focus on sending large numbers of visitors to well-known destinations. This form of activity has many drawbacks, however: overcrowded destinations, uniform and bland facilities and experiences, negative environmental impacts, and disruption and distortion of local communities and economies.

Both tourist destinations and travelers are increasingly looking for alternatives to mass tourism. Local communities are seeking development that does not have the negative impacts of traditional tourism, and results in more economic benefits accruing locally. Both destination communities and tourists have an increased awareness of environmental issues, and many are committed to reducing environmental degradation due to tourist activities. Travelers are also increasingly attracted to experiences that are more inspiring and exotic than those found at homogenous mass tourism destinations.

Because of this, within the tourism industry today the fastest growing segment is ecotourism. But defining what ecotourism is presents difficulties. It is based on broad and potentially ambiguous principles such as responsible travel, visiting natural environments, sustaining natural resources, and improving the well-being of local people. The term is also subject to misuse, with businesses and communities hoping to capitalize on creating an image of environmental responsibility, while simply “greenwashing” their activities.

This course has three main objectives:

• To introduce students to methods and issues involved with the creation of tourism destination images
• To explore the various meanings of the term ecotourism
• To examine specific cases of ecotourism in the United States

he United States, the natural environment is often being stressed by overuse, even in protected areas such as national parks,. Local communities are frequently left with ugly strips of tourist facilities such as hotels and fast food restaurants, and low-wage employment, while the bulk of profits go to outside developers and operators. Among the cases to be examined are (provisionally):

• Appalachia, a chronically poor and environmentally exploited region
• The Florida Keys
• Pacific whale watching
• Native American peoples and reservations, also poor and environmentally exploited

The texts for the course will be announced by June 15, 2007.

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Quests for the Holy Grail – From the Middle Ages to Dan Brown

Ib Johansen, Monday 12-14 in building 1453, room 227

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Out of the City, Back to the Land: The Anti-Urban Impulse in Late-19 ^th - and Early-20 ^th -Century British and American Culture, Literature, and Film

Peter Mortensen, Thursday 8-10 in building 1453, room 229

In the years before and after the turn of the nineteenth century, cities in Europe and North America grew at an unprecedented rate. In this period, the giant city (or metropolis) became the symbol of industrialized western modernity in its most advanced and problematic state, and the consequences of urban growth became highly charged topics for discussion and controversy. City life represented a radical shift in human society, and by extension, a radical shift in human consciousness as well. Perceived in radically contradictory terms, at once utopian and dystopian, the world city both promised the beginning of a new liberated civilization and threatened a regression to social, moral and cultural barbarism. Many modern artists, including Poe, Whitman, Joyce, Woolf and the Italian futurists, embraced the metropolis and sought to write their enthusiastic versions of it. Others, however, were prone to emphasize the perceived deficiencies of urbanity compared to life in more placid rural surroundings. World War I created a political climate that reinforced distrust of the great city and fostered the exploration of alternatives. Rampant urbanization rekindled older anxieties about urban living, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, as cities drew fire from a diverse and vocal group of writers, critics, planners and intellectuals.

This seminar will track the unfolding of Anglo-American critique of the city in various discursive domains around 1900, seeking to understand anti-urbanism’s intellectual, historical and political roots. Who, we will ask, were the most vocal and prominent urban critics of the day, and why did they feel so threatened? Did British and American anti-urban intellectuals form a homogenous group, or can we identify different styles of anti-urban discourse? To what extent did anti-urbanists simply reject the city, perhaps resorting to outmoded romantic escapism, and to what extent did they seek to develop more viable reformist alternatives to urbanization as it was taking shape? The seminar is transnational and interdisciplinary in scope, engendering a conversation across the following forms, disciplines and genres:

• Urban sociology and cultural critique (by Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Robert E. Park, Louis Wirth, Lewis Mumford):
• Homesteading narratives (by H. D. Thoreau, Ralph Brosodi, Scott and Helen Nearing)
• Utopia and Anti-Utopia (by Edward Bellamy, W. D. Howells, H. G. Wells, William Morris)
• Urban planning (by Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, Peter Kropotkin, Frank Lloyd Wright)
• Fiction (by E. M. Forster, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos)
• Film (by F. W. Murnau, Paul Strand/Charles Sheeler, Fritz Lang, Charlie Chaplin, King Vidor)

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Forked Animals: The Human and the Inhuman from Shakespeare to Now

Dominic Rainsford, Thursday 12-14 in building 1453, room 229

Human beings are, in the words of King Lear, ‘forked animals’: we are divided in two, because, on the one hand, we know that we are a kind of animal, while, on the other, we define ourselves as, exactly, not animals. Some would say that this ambiguity, or confusion, underlies many of the world’s biggest problems.

In this course, we will look at some of the ways in which people have negotiated the human/animal and human/inhuman dualities from Shakespeare onwards (not forgetting some of the earlier sources that influenced Shakespeare – and all of us – such as the Book of Genesis, Ovid and Montaigne). On the way, we will read or re-read some of English literature’s most eccentric and enjoyable texts (which you will now see in a new light, even if you thought that you knew them), culminating in two works – a novel and an odd, fictionalized plea or pseudo-plea for animal rights – by perhaps the most intellectually provocative writer now living, the South African Nobel prize-winner, J. M. Coetzee.

Our discussions will be informed by scientific and philosophical accounts of the human/animal from Descartes, through Darwin, to Derrida.

By the end of the course, you can expect to have a new perspective on issues as diverse as talking parrots, the legal status and rights of gorillas and robots, and the use of dogs to terrorize suspected terrorists.

The following books should be bought (in the editions specified):

• William Shakespeare, King Lear , ed. R. A. Foakes (Arden Shakespeare, 1997).
• William Shakespeare, The Tempest , ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (Norton Critical Edition, 2003).
• Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels , ed. Albert J. Rivero (Norton Critical Edition, 2001).
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein , 1881 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998).
• Darwin , ed. Philip Appleman (Norton Critical Edition, 2001).
• H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau , ed. Patrick Parrinder (Penguin Classics, 2005).
• J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (Vintage, 2005).
• J. M. Coetzee et al., The Lives of Animals , ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton UP, 1999).

This may seem like rather a lot of books, but they are mostly quite short. You will also be required to buy a course compendium which will include poems, essays, and other short texts.

The following books are particularly recommended as supplementary reading:

• Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman, eds., At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (Palgrave, 1999).
• Gary Steiner, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy (U of Pittsburgh P, 2005).
• Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Oxford UP, 2004).
• Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (1983; Penguin, 1984).

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Research in foreign language vocabulary acquisition and pedagogy

Robert Lee Revier, Tuesday 14-16 in building 1453, room 215

“Without grammar, very little can be conveyed,

without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed.”

  (D.A. Wilkins 1972: 111, emphasis in the original)

In the last decade or so, vocabulary has (re)emerged as an important element in language use and language learning, and it now competes alongside grammar for the attention of foreign language teachers and acquisition scholars. Although much of the research that has brought vocabulary to the forefront deals exclusively with single words , a fast-growing body of research has subsequently expanded the range of investigation to include multi-word lexical items (MWIs). According to some estimates,  the number of MWIs in a native English speaker’s lexicon is of the same order of magnitude as the number of single words. The purpose of this seminar is to aid students in obtaining an overview of the central areas of research in foreign language vocabulary, including acquisition, competence, and assessment. Students will explore a number of vocabulary issues, including what it means to know a word, how words are acquired incidentally, and how words are learned systematically. Students will gain familiarity with various instruments used to assess learners’ breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge. Students will be encouraged to direct their investigation of these vocabulary issues and assessment instruments beyond single words to include lexical items consisting of two or more words, such as collocations, lexical phrases, and idioms.

Students in this course will have the opportunity to engage in small-scale hands-on empirical research, either individually or in groups. Research topic and scope will be addressed early on in the course to ensure that student projects are both feasible and manageable within the time constraint of a single semester. Students will obtain knowledge of basic research concepts and methods. Students will also be introduced to useful linguistic tools and internet resources such as the British National Corpus (BNC), Phrases in English (PIE), and lexical profilers.

The reading for this course will be a compendium consisting of book chapters and research articles. An important objective of the readings will be to identify the role that is assigned to multi-word lexical items in various accounts of foreign language learning, knowledge, and use. Part of each seminar will be devoted to issues concerning the design and development of the participants’ own research.

No previous knowledge of either foreign vocabulary acquisition or foreign language acquisition is necessary for this course.

The compendium will be made available for purchase at the University bookstore. In addition to the compendium, students will be expected to purchase one book. You will receive more information regarding the book purchase early in July.

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