Courses

AEP Literature Courses

Here you'll find the full list of AEP courses related to Literature. Please note that course offerings are subject to change or cancelation based on faculty availability and student enrollment. All course subjects must be approved by your home institution for departmental credit.

Each course includes a detailed description, any cross-listed subjects, and a downloadable syllabus.

Czech Culture and Society: Literary Perspective
[CULTURAL HISTORY, CULTURAL STUDIES, POLITICAL SCIENCE, SOCIOLOGY, LITERATURE, 3 credits]

Syllabus

The objective of this course is to help students understand Czech culture and society from 1918 to the present. Students will learn about history and culture of this era from the perspective of life and work od Václav Havel (1936-2011), Czechoslavak and Czech president (1989-2003), the most important and influential personality of modern Czech history and culture. Using my extensive experience as an editor of Václav Havel´s Collected Writings and also my personal contacts with him and with many important Czech writers and artists of modern era, I have prepared a series of thirteen lectures on twentieth-century Czech culture and society, based on Václav Havel’s life and cultural and political activities, friends, family, and associates, and wide range of interests. Together these themes present modern Czech culture in its complexity, with its many links to world literature, culture, and politics. They provide a deeper and broader understanding of modern Czech culture and society in the historical and cultural perspective. In this course, lectures are combined with interactive discussions and tutored readings from essential texts. Further contact with the subject matter will be provided through excursions to places of direct relevance for our topic and through historical documents (musical recordings, photos, films). A further aim of the course is to bring students into personal contact with important figures of Czech public life (writers, critics, politicians, artists, translators) whom I have known and worked with for decades.

European Fairy Tales: Meaning and Interpretation
[LITERATURE, CULTURAL STUDIES, 3 credits]

Syllabus

Traditional fairytales are a significant part of cultural heritage, drawing the attention of scholars from various disciplines. Through their variety, diversity, and vivid imagery, fairytales reflect the richness of the world, while their unique features and peculiarities highlight the distinctiveness of individual countries, peoples, and cultures. This course introduces the genre of European fairytales within a broader historical, geographical, and cultural framework. It situates fairytales in relation to other European folk genres, such as myths and legends, with a particular focus on Czech fairytales and their specific characteristics. The primary aim of the course is to explore fairytales as symbolic narratives that offer insights not only into the world around us but also into human nature. Numerous theories examine the hidden symbolic meanings of European fairytales and the significance they convey. While folklorists have worked to organize and classify these tales, psychologists, literary critics, and scholars from other fields have sought to interpret them—uncovering the values, beliefs, social rules, and customs embedded within, as well as the human desires, dreams, and fears they reflect. 

Kafka in Prague
[LITERATURE, 3 credits]

Syllabus  

This seminar will engage some major prose compositions by the modernist Prague-born writer, Frank Kafka (1883–1924). We shall also engage some key works of criticism on Kafka by authors who are themselves thinker-writers of stature and interest; these will include Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Stanley Corngold, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michael Löwy, J. Hillis Miller, Paul North, David Foster Wallace, Benno Wagner, and Slavoj Žižek. Furthermore, we shall also watch a 1962– film based on Kafka’s novel work, The Trial, by the American-born director Orson Welles (1915–85). We shall also visit the Franz Kafka Museum in Prague.

Literature and Society: Central European Writers
[LITERATURE/SOCIOLOGY, 3 credits]

Syllabus 

This course of selected works in English translation will sample significant contributions of 20th Century writers from Austria, the former Czechoslovakia (and its successor states), Germany, Hungary and Poland. It will introduce students to the major ideas and themes that have made Central European literature a distinct and vital genre in the pantheon of world literature, one that in particular has left a lasting mark on modern consciousness vis-à-vis the moral answerability of individuals and societies.