Graduate Courses
SLA 1304H
Staging God, Man, and History.
Polish Drama and Theater in Context.
Study of Polish drama, theatre, and performance (from the 19th to the 21st centuries) and its links to the main problems of European modernity is combined with the investigations of the role of theatre as cultural institution in different periods of Polish history with particular emphasis on the impact of Polish theatre and drama on its own culture and its contribution to the world theatre. The plays, playwrights, and creators of the theatre who defined the genre in Poland and gave it international status, such as Mickiewicz, Przybyszewska, Witkiewicz, Gombrowicz, Różewicz, Grotowski, and Kantor, selected films (features and documentaries), and theoretical readings form the corpus to be studied. We also look at some interesting new developments in drama and performance that reflect the cultural transformations of Poland in the last twenty years within a changing Europe. Readings in English.
SLA 1305H
Polish Fiction or a Disrupted Funeral of the Novel
This course offers theoretically informed readings of Polish fiction from 18th to 20th centuries, including narrative strategies, the function of language and literary conventions, various styles and poetics, and the issue of representation. Our study of Polish fiction engages the issues of aesthetics, politics, and epistemology.
SLA 1306H
Polish Poetry: Shaping the National Canon
A journey from the Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassicism, through Romanticism, young Poland, Inter-war period to the present, with a particular emphasis on the canonical, the challenging, the ambiguous, and the rebellious in Polish poetry. Contextualizing Polish poetry within European traditions.
SLA 1308Y
Main Paradigms of Polish Literature and Culture:
A Graduate Survey Course
Study of major literary and cultural paradigms, starting with the revaluations of the often misunderstood Sarmatian culture and the memory of it in the 19th century, moving on to the Romantic paradigm and its (dis)continuations, and ending with the strongest counter-proposals for Polish mentality, identity, and self-identifications (such as the Enlightenment, Positivism, and the Inter-war struggles for modernization).
SLA 1310H
Twentieth Century Theater and Performance:
Modernism, Avant-garde, Postmodernism
The course has two aims. The first is to familiarise students with some of the major theoretical and practical developments in European and North-American theatre in the twentieth century (e.g. Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Grotowski, Brook, Kantor, Wilson, Bausch, Lepage, Abdoh). The second aim is to investigate the usefulness of the wide range of theories that are central to critical debates in the humanities, such as psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, feminist, gay and lesbian/queer theories, and many more, to theatre studies. The course provides the opportunity to discuss, evaluate, and to test these theories against the plays and performances under discussion. While plays, performances, and theoretical texts form the material of the course, the interaction of theory and praxis is its central focus.
SLA 1312Y
Modernism and Postmodernism in Polish Literature
This course offers the in-depth study of the "five faces of modernity" and of the philosophical and theoretical concepts most useful to understand their importance to literary production. Discussions focus on the cross-roads of Polish literature of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, literary theory, and those concepts developed by sociology and political science that are helpful in contextualizing Polish discourse of modernity.
SLA 1037H
Theater and Cinema in Extremis:
Staging the 20th Century Aesthetics and Politics (co-taught with Prof. V. Ambros)
Artistic output coming from the long gone Eastern Bloc has often been reduced to the notion of political art created in extremis, i.e. either at the point of death or in grave or extreme circumstances. For many years the label of totalitarian regime has fostered an oversimplified parallel between the Nazi, Stalinist or even more broadly Communist art production and aesthetics with little differentiation between these two regimes and their particular contexts. It is the aim of this course to revisit the complex relationships between politics and aesthetics using the dramatic and cinematic art of the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia as examples. A broad range of topics and aesthetic choices will help to examine the often-claimed uniformity of arts created in extremis.
