2022-2023 FALL – ELECTIVE COURSE CATALOGUE
Department of English Language and Literature
2022-2023 Fall
ELECTIVE COURSE CATALOGUE
ENGL 1011 Popular Culture – Dr. Jason Ward
This course introduces the students to UK Popular Culture. How might popular culture be defined? What are some of the cultural phenomena that constitute the UK’s popular culture? Why is the popular worthy of study? Who are some of the key names in UK’s canon of culture? What are some of the key theories that can be deployed to better understand popular culture? Does popular culture have any value beyond entertainment? How does the study of the UK’s popular culture enhance our understanding of British literature? This course aims to familiarize students with the key theoretical concepts, the historical background and contemporary manifestations of popular culture. This will be achieved through the reading, critiquing and examination of key scholarly texts, the viewing and discussion of popular culture documentaries, and student-led research, presentations and a poster exhibition. We will cover a broad range of cultural phenomena including the Great Exhibition (1851), the swinging sixties, the raving nineties, Britpop, Brexit, national foods, computer games, and numerous diverse genres of distinctly British music, subcultures and art forms.
ENGL 1020 Fictions of Fear and Building Values in the European Union by way of Literature and Art – Dr. Ahmet Süner
This course, which is supported by the European Union as a Jean Monnet module, intends to show students how literary and artistic fictions of fear might be thought of as significant sources of shared value for EU. As students interpret some important literary and cinematic examples of fictions of fear during class discussions, they will be invited to engage with questions of value, especially with a view to some of the most important issues that EU has been facing and is likely to face in the future regarding democracy, equality, immigration and the environment. The students will obtain a “Jean Monnet certificate” upon successful completion of the course. These are some of the questions that we will investigate throughout the course:
How can we understand the role of literary and artistic fictions of fear in the project of building shared values in EU? How can we contribute to processes that concern ”the becoming of the Union” by way of engaging with literature and art? How can fictions of fear make us wonder about and reflect upon the future of EU, as well as motivate us to work towards finding solutions to its problems?
The fictions of fear selected for class discussion, especially in the first half of the course, are renowned examples from literary history which will include Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Voltaire’s Candide and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We will look at Frankenstein as the quintessential European fiction, where the main question consists in the necessity of, and failure in, building European values. The second half of the course will include three informative lectures by specialists on European issues (democracy-equality by Aylin Güney; immigration by Ayselin Yıldız and environment by Defne Günay) and more discussions on selected literary and cinematic fictions of fear, and especially on acclaimed dystopias such as 1984, Never Let me Go and V for Vendetta. Students will carry out and make presentations on group projects on two fictions of their choice, at least one of which will be literary.
ENGL 1040 English Language Teaching Methodology – Dr. Çağrı Özköse-Bıyık
This elective course is specifically designed for junior and senior level undergraduate students in the language-related departments who are planning to become language teachers after they graduate. In the first half of the course, we cover traditional designer methods such as Suggestopedia, Community Language Learning, Total Physical Response, etc., and then move towards more up-to-date, communicative, contemporary methods such as task-based language teaching, Dogme ELT, content and language integrated learning (CLIL). We complete the first half by talking about the post-method approach. In the second half, we begin to explore how teaching specific skills such as teaching speaking, teaching writing can be done more effectively by means of field-specific instructional practices. In that sense, ENGL 1040 ELT Methodology will help students acquire a more professional stance as prospective language teachers, i.e., being able to reflect on their teaching practices and on their learning as teachers by evaluating the current trends in light of their own experiences, knowledge of ELT in Turkey, and their personal teaching styles. Students who are planning to obtain pedagogical formation can get course reduction by transferring credits earned in this course.
ENGL 1055 American Culture and Literature I – Dr. Tuba Geyikler
(Contemporary Western Novel)
This class, along with ENGL 1056, gives students an opportunity to focus on the cultural and intellectual history of a particular period in greater focus than is permitted by the regular curriculum. The approach taken may be to focus on the connection between literary texts and the social and historical context. Alternatively, a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to the cultural practices of a particular historical period may be explored. This semester, students will read three contemporary Western novels, The Plague of the Doves by Louise Erdrich (311 pages), In the Distance by Hernan Diaz (219 pages), The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt (230 pages), and they will watch neo-western films of their choice focusing on the American Frontier and a web of dynamics that make the genre timeless.
ENGL 1069 Special Topics in Cultural History I – Dr. Jeffrey Hibbert
(Desire in Contemporary American Film)
Freud utterly repositioned desire in its relationship to personality and personhood. After all, how we imagine ourselves to be and what we desire are often radically different from one another. For some post-Freudians, this takes on an even greater dimension when trying to ascertain something as grand and grandly elusive as “the real person.” Who are we when we are most ourselves, most true to ourselves, and to what degree is that beneficial or harmful to ourselves and others? Taken a step further, Fredric Jameson uses Freud and post-Freudian methodology to read texts (any given text including fiction and film) as the unconscious of a culture, the desire of a society, a nation, or a people.
In this class, we will explore the desires within a dozen contemporary American films as well as explore the desire that each film embodies as a kind of dream of American culture. We will learn to see a film as a kind of dream work and the subject doing the dreaming is America and its culture. We will look closely as the kinds of desires (the things that characters want, whether they are aware of it or not) that characters in the film experience, and we will read closely the ways in which they either come in contact with that desire or do not, before we explore the consequences of that contact.
At present, the films for this class will include comedies, drama, horror, and the weird. They include The One I Love, Blackcoat’s Daughter, Lost Highway, Up, The Bling Ring, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Devil all the Time, Spontaneous, The Humans, Horse Girl, The Invitation, and The Grand Hotel Budapest.
All the films we will study in this class will have mature subject matter. (sex, drugs, violence, and scenes that are troubling to watch). Yes, there are scary films on this list too. Students who feel that they will have difficulty with adult themes should consider taking a different elective. Students with no difficulty are welcome!
ENGL 1077 Comparative Literature I – Dr. Evren Akaltun
This course will focus on certain common features in literature across national frontiers of languages and cultures. The theme of this specific class is “borders”. We will be reading novels and short stories by leading authors from Germany, Iran, Turkey, Japan, Italy, and Colombia to see how the authors in their selected works tackled the issue of borders; borders that are not only related to the idea of nation, but also to sexuality, reality, etc. We will also watch films and analyse them in relation to the texts that we will be reading and develop a global and interdisciplinary perspective on a variety of national literatures.
ENGL 1081 Turcophone Literature in a Comparative Perspective I – Dr. Esen Kara
This course offers a study of Turkish Literature through a comparative perspective. We will read canonical works of modern Turkish literature in comparison with the selected examples of World literature. We will analyze the representations of recurring themes and ideas in these works and mainly discuss the place of early Republican and contemporary Turkish literature in literary modernism. Modernity and its crises, the city as spectacle, the tension between past and present, old and new, the East and the West will be the main themes we will deal with through a comparative approach. Among the writers we will read are Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Oğuz Atay, Leyla Erbil, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Virginia Woolf. The language of the course will be Turkish/English.
ENGL 1085 Drama in Music and Literature – Lect. İclal Kardıçalı
Fairy Tales and their Retellings in Music and Literature I is an elective multidisciplinary course that brings together music and literature. In this class, students learn about the Great, Wonderful and International Fairy Tale Tradition. They read and analyze some of the most popular fairy tales, read and compare their different versions seen in different centuries and cultures. They also watch and listen to their different adaptations in the musical and animated platforms which get their inspiration from these tales, namely in classical music, in opera, in ballet, in Disney Animations, in dance and in jazz. In this particular class the students will re-discover tales like Puss in Boots, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Vasilisa the Beautiful. They will also see their adaptations in the musical world in Tchaikovsky’s, Humperdinck’s, Rossini’s creativity. We will be talking about the Romantic Period in Music and doing some music rehearsals! The highlight of the course is Shakespeare’s most loved fairy tale: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With this piece of literary masterpiece, we will voyage with Shakespeare, Britten, Mendelssohn, Béjart, Balanchine and Duke Ellington. It will be an opportunity for all of us to discover music and literature as life and society enhancing arts, while remembering fondly how fairy tales contributed to our childhood imagination and beyond.
ENGL 1090 Drama Practicum – Dr. Katherine Göktepe
This Drama Practicum course focuses on the editing and the performance of a complete play (an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline) that will be given in front of a live audience at the end of the course.
The class will involve those students who wish to consider the art and craft of playwriting using an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline set in 1939 Soviet Russia, allowing students to go deeper into the play; spend time on script and character analysis; structure (beginnings, middles, and ends); protagonists, antagonists, goals, and obstacles; and acting methods. Students will read and discuss relevant background information on the historical periods (Roman Britain and Soviet Russia, respectively), and will challenge themselves as actors but also as storytellers. Class activities will involve:
- Close readings of the play
- Consideration of what makes a good play (character, conflict, action, and ideas)
- Engagement and editing of character development, making a clear plotline, and crafting dynamic dialogue
- Workshops, auditions, read-throughs, and rehearsals
- Learning the Sanford Meisner approach to acting
ENGY 5553 Postcolonial Literature and Multiculturalism I – Dr. Esen Kara
(MA Programme)
This course will explore the representations of postcolonial and multicultural identities in contemporary literature. First we will read and discuss theoretical texts to look at the common terms and ideas that postcolonial thinking is built upon. Then we will critically examine the universalizing discourse of multiculturalism and its Euro-centric undertones in relation to globalization, and discuss the position of postcolonial thinking in this context. We will also look at the changing paradigms in the study of subalternity, specifically the concepts of neo-colonialism and neo-orientalism, and the emerging interactions between postcolonialism and posthumanism. In our critical and close reading of the selected literary texts, the metaphors of hybridity, diversity, and border crossing, and their relationship to materiality will be our point of departure. The tension between metaphor and materiality opens up different narrative spaces and aesthetics in each of these texts. From this perspective, we will look at the ways postcolonial literature challenges power dynamics and deconstructs binary oppositions in dealing with the issues of race, gender, and sexuality.
ENGY 5561 Studies in the English Novel I – Dr. Ahmet Süner
(MA Programme)
In this course, we will be looking at the beginnings of the Gothic genre by reading several novels from a variety of perspectives. While I will encourage a more formal approach to the literary works in general, we will also try to acquire a historical sense of the development of the Gothic genre through the reading of the “classics,” those famed Gothic novels of the turn of the 19th century. We will address questions of desire, repression, intimacy and secrecy, so the psychological aspects of the genre will be an ongoing theme in our analyses of individual texts. The course will also explore that 18th-19th century theoretical locus of aesthetic speculation relevant to the study of the Gothic: the Sublime.