This course explores a selection of British dramatic works from the eighteenth-century, the period when the theatres, following their closure during the Commonwealth period, evolved to become centres of mass public entertainment. The pensum includes six plays – all popular hits in their time – which represent some of the different dramatic genres with which playwrights experimented throughout the century.

In addition, the course explores a phenomenon closely connected with the theatres: the growth of celebrity culture and the emergence of theatrical ‘stars’. The celebrity culture which we experience today was, in many ways, born in the eighteenth-century. The course invites students to research the evolving mechanisms and media which facilitated fame and the emergence of star performers. Coursework will present opportunities to investigate particular theatrical stars – such as David Garrick, Susannah Cibber, Sarah Siddons, and others – and such issues as the threshold between private and public life, and the difference between fame and notoriety. There will also be opportunities to consider differences and similarities between celebrity culture today and that of the eighteenth century.

This is a course, then, concerned with literature in connection with developing media and as a part of the entertainment industry.

Reading for the course will also provide an overview of the era’s changing theatre culture, and such matters as: theatrical spaces/architecture, scenography, acting styles, the political status of the theatres, the Stage Licensing Act, the rise of female playwrights, the emergence of Shakespeare as ‘national poet’, and plays as printed texts as well as works for performance.

This course offers students the opportunity to study the cultural, social, and political history of Britain in the 1980s. The decade was dominated politically by Margaret Thatcher and her governments, and the course will pay serious attention to the economic, social, and political reforms of the Conservatives (1979-90), but its primary focus is on the impact of Thatcherite ideas on those who lived through and experienced Britain in the 1980s.

As a result, students will explore a wide variety of themes including the ideology of Thatcherism; the impact of unemployment on working-class communities; ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland; inner city riots and policing; the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and feminism; the Miner’s Strike and the role of trade unions in the economy; sexualities, ethnicities, and identities; the challenge of the AIDS public health crisis; leftist intellectual and political responses to the New Right; and the role of social movements in the fall of Thatcher. In doing so, the course challenges students to think about what was distinctive about the decade and whether it still works as a meaningful historical periodization in British history. But it also draws attention to the continuing relevance of these issues in twenty-first century British society and politics.  

The teaching on this course mostly consists of weekly Discussion Seminars. These will include short introductions to weekly themes by the course teacher, but students will mostly discuss selected the weekly readings and questions in class as set out in the detailed Course Handbook. Time spent in the classroom represents just 90 minutes of the 10 hours students are expected to work on a 7.5 credit 3000-level course each week. The rest of the time is devoted to preparing for class in terms of doing the weekly readings and watching films from the period, which are listed in the Course Handbook.

The course is designed to be a debating course so students should participate in open discussions of weekly topics with each other in groups and with the course teacher.

This course will be coordinated by the Nordisk section.  For more information about the course description, see emnebeskrivelse

This course will be coordinated by the section Allmenn litteraturvitenskap. For more information about the course description, see emnebeskrivelse

This course provides an introduction to central methodological issues within linguistic research. A primary goal is to give the students an understanding of the diversity of methods employed in linguistics. The course will discuss methodological approaches from a range of subdisciplines. The course aims to train students in developing research questions and to assess the applicability and relevance of different research methods, thus providing them with the foundation for developing individual master’s projects.

The course covers topics such as qualitative vs. quantitative data, research ethics, and criticism of sources. Furthermore, the students will be introduced to a wide range of methodological approaches, including questionnaires, research interviews, corpus linguistics, eye-tracking, and various other experimental techniques.

Classes will be taught in English, with a possibility of some teaching happening in Norwegian. Readings will be mainly in English with some texts in Norwegian.  Students admitted to an English program shall do the obligatory assignment in English and write the exam in English.

This course will be coordinated by the Nordisk section.  For more information about the course description, see emnebeskrivelse

This course deals with sociolinguistic theory and methods, as well as their development over time. Taking basic questions such as “what is language for sociolinguists?” as a starting point, we will discuss different approaches to the field, for instance variationism or ethnography. More general theoretical debates will be illustrated by sociolinguistic case studies from different parts of the world. Issues relating to language and power will be a central focus of the course and will be discussed within a critical (sociolinguistic) framework. 

In this vein, the course will raise awareness of epistemological biases and engage students in reflection on the decolonization of knowledge production.  Besides engaging in theoretical debates, we will try out several more recent sociolinguistic methodologies ourselves.  Insight into theoretical and methodological aspects within sociolinguistics will enable students to pursue an academically well-grounded and up-to-date master's thesis project in this field.

The topic of the course is meaning – how it is expressed by language and how it is communicated using language. Meaning is a notoriously tricky concept, and views diverge as to how it is best analysed. At the same time, the study of meaning is essential for understanding language structure and language use, in everything from everyday conversation and political discourse to the most sophisticated literary and scientific texts. We will approach the topic from the perspective of linguistic semantics and pragmatics. The main part of the course introduces some leading ideas about meaning and communication, and concepts and methods of semantics and pragmatics. We will examine notions such as:

• denotation, sense, reference
• meaning and truth
• semantic relations (synonymy, entailment, etc.)
• logical aspects of meaning
• literal vs. non-literal meaning
• the role of inference in communication