This semester’s variant offers an introduction to central features of American society, politics, and culture, drawing on methodologies and concepts from historical studies and political science.

In order to understand American society and dominant values, learning more about contemporary society, how it is structured, and how present structures came about is central. Students are thus expected to appreciate the conditioning factors which have historically influenced, and continue to influence, the patterns of thought and behavior in American society, and which have given rise to particular institutions, values, and ways of life.

With an emphasis on American values, we will explore a wide range of issues, including race and immigration; federalism, partisanship and polarization; civil liberties and civil rights; and social class and social mobility.

ENG1201 gives an introduction to the basic structures of the English language and to English usage. The course covers topics such as basic grammatical terms and structures, vocabulary and lexical connections, differences and similarities between English and Norwegian, discourse competence, text analysis / text types, and essay writing. Special attention is given to aspects of the English language and usage that may pose a challenge to Norwegian students.

The aim of this course is for students to gain a critical awareness of the basic structure of English and linguistic choices in various contexts, as well as providing opportunities for students to develop their English language skills.

This course is a genre-based introduction to poetry and drama in English. Presenting some of the best-known English-language poets and dramatists, the course explores a selection of poems and plays so as to illuminate the different forms and techniques found within these principal genre categories. The course also provides an introduction to specialist terminology used within literary criticism.

The course will give training in:

• How to read poetry and drama
• How to negotiate particular manipulations of language used in poetic and dramatic expression
• Prosody (the study of poetic metre)

Students will also gain knowledge of:

• Essential poetic forms and modes
• The traditional dramatic forms of tragedy and comedy

Teaching is divided between lectures (with posted lecture notes afterwards) and seminars. Written work will be required, and this will need to be approved in order for a student to take the final written exam. Information and updates about the course (and assignments) will be posted on Blackboard and students are therefore expected to check this site on a regular basis.  Please note that you are expected to read both of Shakespeare’s plays in their entirety: watching them in performance first will enable you to do so more easily.

The course provides an introduction to First and Second language (L1 & L2) acquisition with a special focus on how theoretical knowledge of these phenomena can be employed for practical purposes in education and more specifically in language teaching. We will follow the natural progression in how children acquire their native language (L1) and the factors that play a major role in this process. First language acquisition will then be compared to the acquisition of Second language(s) following recent research in the field. We will discuss the repercussions recent theoretical advances may have, among other things, on improving the methods for L2 instruction and the notion of bi-/multilingualism in a global world.

Instruction is provided through lectures, seminars, online activities, and individual supervision. This course will make use of flexible teaching forms, and a high degree of student activity is required.

This course is an in-depth introduction to the basic issues of English syntax and to ways of describing and explaining them using advanced theoretical approaches. Students will be introduced to syntactic analysis using the Principles-and-Parameters theory as outlined in the work of Chomsky and others.

Syntax is the study of sentence structure – how words are put together to form larger meaningful units. As well as introducing the theory per se, we will be concerned with linguistic argumentation: how hypotheses are formed and evaluated on the basis of language data and theoretical assumptions and objectives.

The course will largely deal with data from English, but will also consider some facts about Norwegian and related English-Norwegian contrasts. (Note to foreign students: no previous knowledge of Norwegian is necessary for this part.)

The course aims to provide a deeper insight into three areas: (i) the system of grammar of human languages, (ii) the sentence grammar of English, and (iii) some English/Norwegian contrasts, which can be applied to problems in translation and language teaching.

The topic of this lecture is the history of the Black and Asian British minorities, as well as transcultural conviviality and its discontents from 1945 until roughly 2010, while also having a look at social developments since then, including the backlash against the idea of Britain as “multicultural” since, first, the war-on-terror decade and second, the Brexit referendum. It will be worked out and discussed how the transit of Great Britian as the “motherland” of the British Empire into a society at times struggling with the development of an inclusive identity for a multi-ethnic and multi-faith population. It will be discussed how the multiplicity of histories (for example, of the Caribbeans, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or the Asian minority of Uganda) is both reflected and imagined in literary texts, as well as cultural theory.

The aim of the lecture is 1) to introduce students to a key aspect of British history of the 20th and 21st centuries, 2) to discuss Britain’s colonial history as the context of this development, and 3) to make students familiar with several key literary works and terms pertaining to Black and Asian British Literature and its context.

The lecture will be taught in various steps: In the first weeks, there will be guiding questions for structuring and reflecting on your reading of the focus text, Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island. For this, we will be working with the platform “TaskCards”. In September, we will have several online sessions in lecture / seminar forms with group tasks, and from the beginning of October there will be regular sessions in person at Dragvoll. The OA consists of a shorter piece of writing and a (collaborative) media project (ca. 2000 words in total).

What kind of literacy do we need to read landscapes, texts, and atmospheres of place; to understand the geosocial “where of literature” (Thacker) and the “metaphors” of landscape (Mitchell)? If landscapes are “haunted by past ways of life” and “by imagined futures” (Gan et al.), how can we register its human and nonhuman “ghosts”? This course aims to grapple with these questions, as we explore literary maps, narrative landscapes, and poetic “landslides” (Fatemi; Rivera), using diverse interpretative strategies and methods deriving from critical literary geography; human geography; urban studies; environmental humanities; postcolonial, feminist, disability and queer studies; anthropology; and more.

In many ways, spatial and contextual approaches in literary studies are not new. After all, literature is always “written, read, and published somewhere” (Thacker; emphasis mine). And yet, it is never simply or just about place. It is written and read by some bodies. Thus, fiction and poetry re-people geography, and can redress histories of sociopolitical erasure, and give us a way to map the subjective atmospheres of landscape: the feel of its woundedness, grief, or delight (Morrison; Gumbs; McKittrick).

This term therefore we will first follow different storytellers to reflect on how they use diverse genres and media—graphic novel, love poem, letter, atlas, graffiti, photo essay, autobiography, speculative fiction—as navigational, affective, architectural, political instruments, but also as tools of spatio-political reflection and repair. Moreover, as we zoom in on specific literary forms, we will pay close attention to the spatial, cartographic affordances of the prose paragraph, poetic stanza, scholarly footnote, or the gutter in a graphic novel. We will do so to ask how texts express, transform, and reimagine geosocial space—the city, a border zone, an ecological disaster site, a tourist hotspot, a home, or other “demonic grounds”—on the page and off of it (Barthes; Wynter; McKittrick, Kincaid). In addition, we will focus on the situatedness of literature: where and how texts are written, read, recited, and shared, and by whom. Finally, we will also engage in some place-writing of your own and together with others to ponder the role of communities of readers and writers in reading, writing, and making of sociopolitical place.

The British, and with them their culture and language, first got to the African continent in the 16th century. British rule in different parts of the continent took different shapes and forms in dominions, protectorates and colonies, and lasted until 1980, when Zimbabwe gained independence as the last African country. Several hundreds of years of occupation inadvertently left their mark on the continent’s societies, and decolonization is an ongoing process in many of them. In this course, we will focus on the African postcolony, both from a cultural and linguistic point of view. 

Among other topics, we will consider, with regard to select African societies: 

• Monuments, landscapes and the environment; 
• Tourism and (neo)colonial cultural and linguistic traces; 
• The status of higher education and how to make it sustainable for independent societies.