PhD

Literature and Culture

Literature and Meaning (NEW)

Cult, lect, PhD
Rozsnyai Bálint

The course is intended to survey the career of meaning in literary scholarship

from the late 19th c. to the late 20th c. It covers the various fields and agents of
meaning production, explores the significant theoretical traditions including
relevant linguistic “contributions.” In each major (thematic) section, essentialist
vs non-/anti-essentialist positions will be discussed, relying on representative
arguments on both sides. We will also read representative applications, i.e. texts
(re)producing/discovering meaning of well known (canonical) texts.
The sections, with the antagonists in brackets:
1. The textual orientation—authority of the text: Richards, I.A. and
generations of New Criticism: Brooks, C., Warren, R.P., Wellek, R., Warren,
A. (Leavis, F.R.);
2. The hermaneuts: Frye, N., Abrams, M.H., Hirsch, E.D. Jr.
3. Readers and meanigs: Iser, W., Fish, S., Schweickart, P.
4. Deconstructors: Derrida, J., Man, P. de, Miller, J.H., Culler, J. (Austin, Searle)
5. Neopragmatists: Fish, S., Rorty, R., Michaels, W.B. (Abrams, Hirsch)
Texts include: (selections from)
Richards. Principles of Criticism
Brooks, Warren. eds., Understanding Poetry
Brooks, C.The well wrought urn: studies in the structure of poetry
Wellek, Warren. Theory of Literature
Hirsch. Validity in interpretation
Iser. The Act of Reading
Fish. Is There A Text; Doing What Comes Naturally
Abrams. Natural Supernaturalism
Rorty. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
Michaels, Knapp. Against Theory
Derrida. Limited, Inc.
Miller. The Ethics of Reading
Grading:
you will write a short mid-term quiz (identification of texts, 10%) and a final
(identification of texts, 30%, and an essay, 60% of the final grade.)

Madwomen in the Attic: Women, Writing and Madness

Lit, sem, PhD, MAEN Gend, Cult, 4-5 ENG, US
Kérchy Anna
MAEN C6 Gender Track Seminar, MAEN D3 Cultural Studies, PhD

Freud’s 1905 case-study on Dora, the young hysteric woman peaked in the birth of
psychoanalysis, while The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar’s vast 1979 study
on 19th and 20th century women writers became an ultimate reference point in gender
studies. Tracing the connections between madness (hysteria, schizophrenia, psychosis,
neurosis, etc.), femininity, subjectivity, authorship and writing has been a challenging
project ever since. The course proposes to analyse literary, filmic and theoretical
representations of women and madness examining the discursive construction, the
engendering social surveillance, as well as the transgressive potentials of the ‘female
malady,’ focusing on the question: Is the madwoman a victim of patriarchal oppression,
a silenced ‘leaking vessel’ of the ‘wandering womb’ or an empowering figure of female
rebellion and creativity, speaking up in an embodied, subversive voice? The material to
be discussed includes theoretical texts by S. Freud, Toril Moi, E. Bronfen, Gilbert and
Gubar, Cixous and Clément, Elaine Showalter, Shoshana Felman, Barbara Johnson,
Alice Jardine, poems by Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath,
short stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Joyce Carol Oates, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and its rewritings (Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Jean
Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl,
Interrupted, Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat,
Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, a medieval treatise on witchcraft the Malleus
Maleficarum, as well as Roman Polanski’s film Repulsion, and John Cassavetes’ A
Woman Under the Influence.
Grading policy: participation, presentation (30%), homework booklogs (30%),
final essay/test (40%)

Literature and the Semiotics of the Subject

Lit, sem, MAEN Gend, Cult, PhD
Kiss Attila
MAEN D3 Gender Studies, C7 Cultural Studies, PhD

1. Objectives:
Recent developments in (literary) theory and the semiotics of the speaking subject
reveal that the study of literature presupposes an understanding of how meaning
emerges in the human subject through a socio-historically specific situatedness.
The theory of this positioning of the subject involves psychoanalytical, sociological
and semiological approaches to both the macrodynamics of social discursive
practices and the microdynamics of individual meaning-production.
This course aims at introducing students into the above theoretical issues through
the study of a representative selection of works on the theory of the subject. We
will concentrate on the problem of interaction between text and reader, and
investigate how they mutually produce each other in a semiotic model.
2. Scheduled topics:
1.The theory of the subject and the critique of the sign.
Preliminary problems in the theory of communication.
2.Ideology, power-technologies and the constitution of the subject.
3.Psychoanalysis, symbolization and the constitution of the subject.
4.The problem of the extra-linguistic and the borderlines of meaning in literat ure:
abjection and the subject-in-process.
5.Problematizing the "brute materiality of the Letter": surplus, containment and ex-
penditure.
6.Notes towards a theory of practice.
3. Readings:
COWARD, R. & ELLIS, J. 1977. "The Critique of the Sign." In: Language and
Materialism. Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject. New York
and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
SILVERMAN, Kaja, 1983. "The Subject of Lacan." In: The Subject of Semiotics.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ALTHUSSER, Luis, 1986. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In: ADAMS,
Hazard & SEARLE, Leroy (eds.), 1986. Critical Theory Since 1965. Tallahassee:
Florida State U.P.
DAYAN, Daniel “The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema.” www.apertura.hu
FOUCAULT, Michel, 1984. "The Subject and Power." In: DREYFUS, H.L. & RABINOW,
P. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
GROSZ, Elizabeth, 1989. “Glossary.” Sexual Subversions. Sidney: Allen and Unwin.
LACAN, Jacques, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function..." In: ADAMS,
Hazard & SEARLE, Leroy (eds.), 1986. Critical Theory Since 1965. Tallahassee:
Florida State U.P.
KRISTEVA, Julia, 1984. "Prolegomena." "Genotext and Phenotext." "Poetry that is
not a Form of Murder." In: Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia
University Press.
KRISTEVA, Julia 1980. “From One identity into (An) Other.” In: Desire in Language. A
Semiotic Approach to Literature and the Arts. New York: Columbia University Press.
KRISTEVA, Julia, 1984. “The Speaking Subject.” In: Marchall Blonsky (ed.) On Signs.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
KRISTEVA, Julia, 1973. “The System and the Speaking Subject.” Times Literary
Supplement, October 12, 1973.
ZIZEK, Slavoj, 1989."How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?" In: The Sublime Object of
Ideology. London and New York: Verso.
4. Grading policy:
a/attendance, participation in discussions, reading journals, presentations: 40%
b/Home paper (8 pages, on one of three topics to be specified later, Style Sheet
should be observed, 40% content, 10% language, 10% apparatus, to be submitted
on last Friday of classes): 60%

PhD Research Seminar

Lit/cult, sem, PhD
Szőnyi-György Endre
PhD kutató szeminárium

This course is one of the two research seminars mandatory for PhD students in
the "English and American Literatures and Culture" doctoral program. The
seminar has a flexible thematics: presentations by professors and students as
well as gueast speakers will comprise the curriculum. The language of the classes
is Hungarian but the students who take it for credit will have to compile a week-
to-week journal in English which will be evaluated by their supervisors.

Linguistics

Linguistic Analysis
Ling, sem, PhD (English Applied Linguistics)
Fenyvesi Anna

The aim of the course is to teach students do Structuralist-style traditional

linguistic analysis through completing linguistic problems in phonetics,
phonology, morphology, and historical linguistics. After a brief theoretical
introduction and a survey of methodological tools, class sessions consist of
discussions of linguistic problems and their solutions. Course requirements
include solving problems assigned as homework. Problems contain data from
Indo-European, Native American and other languages.

Phonetics
Ling, sem, PhD (English Applied Linguistics)
Gósy Mária

The course surveys phonetics in its entirety, that is, both traditional and modern
phonetic sciences. The definition of the field as extending from speech planning
to speech processing comprises all its subfields from phonetic theory through
experimental phonetics to applied phonetics – all of which are discussed in the
course with a general view of phonetics as a starting point and utilizing
references to and examples from language specific characteristics of, primarily,
Hungarian and English.

Phonology/Syntax
Ling, sem, PhD (English Applied Linguistics)
Zsigri Gyula

The course provides an overview of theoretical and empirical issues of phonology

and syntax relevant to applied linguists, focusing on variation and its practical
and theoretical treatment within empirically based linguistics.