1st year - MODULES 2012-2013
Term I
HISTORY OF IDEAS CULTURAL IDENTITY (I)
Mihaela Irimia
Term II
HISTORY OF IDEAS –
CULTURAL IDENTITY (II)
Mihaela Irimia
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Radu Surdulescu
CARTOGbRAPHIES OF DIASPORA
Sabina Draga Alexandru
THE RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTION
OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
Bogdan Ştefănescu
SHAPING THE REPUBLIC OF
LETTERS: CRISIS AND
REFORMATION IN EARLY MODERN
EUROPE
Sorana Corneanu
BRITISHNESS IN THE ARTS:
VISUAL ARTS
Daniela Davidescu Brown
NATIONAL IDENTITIES
IN
THE BRITISH ISLES (II):
SCOTLAND
James Christian Brown
RE-MAPPING CULTURAL SPACE (I):
SUBJECTS OF DIS-LOCATION
IN THE TRANSATLANTIC DIALOGUE
Irina Pană
RE-MAPPING CULTURAL SPACE (II):
CULTURAL GLOBALIZATION
Mădălina Nicolaescu
NATIONAL IDENTITIES
IN
THE BRITISH ISLES (I):
IRELAND
Ioana Zirra
(POST)COLONIAL INSCRIBINGS:
MULTICULTURALISM
Monica Bottez
CELTIC CULTURAL MEMORY
Ioana Zirra, Jim Brown, Martin Potter
(POST)COLONIAL INSCRIBINGS:
INDIAN IDENTITIES
Sabina Draga Alexandru
3
1. History of Ideas
– Cultural Identity
Module Supervisor: Prof. Mihaela Irimia
Syllabus for Term 1
#
Title
Themes for Presentation & Discussion.
Bibliography *
1
HISTORY OF IDEAS
(I)
As a discipline that comes into being in the late
1930’s the History of Ideas puts roots in the soil of
Western culture(s) already in the early 19th century.
Prefigurations of its agenda occur in the 18th, and
even in the 17th century. Commonly regarded as a
history of –isms, of, that is, sets of concepts, ideas,
symbols able to encompass and explain reality, the
History of Ideas is a must of Cultural Identity
Studies. It sounds logical that it should feature on a
Cultural Studies agenda.
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Total amount: 37 pages
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2
HISTORY OF IDEAS
(II)
Lovejoy, Arthur O., ‘The Study of the
History of Ideas’, in King, Preston (ed.), The
History of Ideas: An Introduction to Method,
London & Canberra: Croom Helm;
Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983,
179-197 [MI].
Mandelbaum, Maurice, ‘On Lovejoy’s
Historiography’, in Preston, King (ed.), The
History of Ideas: An Introduction to Method,
198-207 [MI].
A definition of the History of Ideas as a history of –
isms brings in the question of the whole set of
disciplines and the interdisciplinary approaches
entailed by such a view of culture and cultural
identity.
4
The History of Ideas stands in a relevant relation
to Intellectual History, Cultural History, and the
history of Mentalités.
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Total amount: 32 pages
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3
HISTORY OF IDEAS
(III)
Preston, King, ‘Introduction’, in Preston,
King (ed.), The History of Ideas: An
Introduction to Method, London & Canberra:
Croom Helm; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble
Books, 1983, 3-19 [MI].
Mazzeo,
Joseph
Anthony,
‘Some
Interpretations of the History of Ideas’, in
Kelly, Donald R. (ed.), The History of Ideas:
Canon and Variations, 92-107 [MI].
The History of Ideas is a ‘canon with variations’
that goes back to the classic antiquity, in the last
instance. It is, as such, bound with the History of
Philosophy. Previously thought of in terms of
fixities and givens – as part of the traditional
universalist vision – the History of Ideas is
currently considered in terms of its own history.
The ‘History of Ideas itself has a history’ is an
established topos in the literature and requires
apposite evaluation.
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Total amount: 21 pages
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Kelly, Donald R., ‘Introduction: Reflections
on a Canon’, in Kelly, Donald R. (ed.), The
History of Ideas: Canon and Variations,
Rochester, N.Y.: U. of Rochester P., 1990,
viii-xii [MI].
Krieger, Leonard, ‘The Autonomy of
Intellectual History’, in Kelly, Donald R.
(ed.), The History of Ideas: Canon and
Variations, 108-125 [MI].
FURTHER READING

Auerbach, Erich, ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the
Drama of European Literature, Foreword by
Paolo Valesio, Theory and History of
Literature, Volume 9, Minneapolis: U. of
Minnesota Press, 1984 (© 1959), 11-76 [MI].
 Auerbach,
Erich,
Mimesis:
The
5
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Representation of Reality in Western
Literature, New York: Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1957 (© 1953).
Auerbach, Erich, ‘Historical Introduction:
The Idea of Man in Literature’, in
Auerbach, Erich, Dante, Poet of the Secular
World, Chicago & London: University of
Chicago Press, 1974 (© 1961), 1-23.
Berlin, Isaiah, Against the Current: Essays in
the History of Ideas, London: The Hogarth
Press, 1979.
Bouwsma, William J., ‘From History of
Ideas to History of Meaning’, Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 12, No. 2, The
New History: The 1980s and Beyond (II)
(Autumn, 1981), 279-291.
Bredsdorff, Thomas, ‘Lovejoy’s Idea of
“Idea”’, New Literary History, Vol. 8, No. 2,
Explorations in Literary History (Winter,
1977), 195-211.
Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization:
A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason,
New York: Vintage Books, 1988 (© 1967).
Foucault, Michel, A supraveghea şi a pedepsi
– Naşterea închisorii, Bucureşti: Humanitas,
1977 (© 1975).
Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of
Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith,
New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
Gombrich, Ernst Hans, Ideals and Idols:
Essays on Value in History and in Art,
London: Phaidon Press, 1994 (© 1979).
Gombrich, Ernst Hans, The Uses of Images:
Studies in the Social Function of Art and
Visual Communication, London: Phaidon
Press, 1999.
Hutton, Patrick H., ‘The History of
Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural
History’, History and Theory, Vol. 20, No. 3
(Oct., 1981), 237-259.
Kelley, Donald, The Descent of Ideas: The
History of Intellectual History, Aldershot:
6
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Ashgate, 2002.
Kelley, Donald, ‘Eclecticism and the
History of Ideas’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, Vol. 62, No. 4, (Oct. 2001), pp. 577592.
Kelley, Donald (ed.), The History of Ideas:
Canon and Variations, Rochester, N.Y.:
University of Rochester Press, 1990.
Kelley, Donald, ‘What Is Happening to the
History of Ideas?’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, Vol. 51, NO. 1. (Jan. – Mar., 1990), pp.
3-25.
Kelley, Donald, ‘Horizons of Intellectual
History:
Retrospect,
Circumspect,
Prospect’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.
48, No. 1 (Jan. – Mar., 1987), 143-169.
King, Preston (ed.), The History of Ideas: An
Introduction to Method, London & Canberra:
Croom Helm; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes &
Noble Books, 1983.
Koyré, Alexandre, From the Closed World to
the Infinite Universe, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1956.
LaCapra, Dominick, ‘European Intellectual
History and Post-Traumatic State’, in
iichiko intercultural, Number 6 June 1994.
Lenoble, Robert, Esquisse d’une histoire de
l’idée de Nature, Paris: Éditions Albin
Michel, 1969.
Lovejoy, Arthur O., ‘Reflections on the
History of Ideas’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, Vol. I, No. 1. (Jan., 1940), pp. 3-23.
Lovejoy, Arthur O., Marele lanţ al fiinţei –
Istoria ideii de plenitudine de la Platon la
Schelling, trans. Diana Dicu, Bucureşti:
Humanitas, 1997 (© 1936).
Mandelbaum, Maurice, ‘The History of
Ideas, Intellectual History, and the History
of Philosophy’, History and Theory, Vol. 5,
Beiheft 5: The Historiography of the
History of Philosophy. (1965), pp. 33-66.
7
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4
MODERNITY — a
Western Project: from
Classic
Foundationalism to
Classic Modernity
(covered by THE REPUBLIC
OF LETTERS Module)
Marrou, Henri-Irénée, Sfîntul Augustin şi
sfîrşitul culturii antice, trans. Draga
Stoianovici & Lucia Wald, Bucureşti:
Humanitas, 1997 (© 1983).
Merton, Robert, On the Shoulders of Giants:
A Shandean Postscript, with an Afterword
by Denis Donoghue and a Preface by the
Author, San Diego – New York – London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers,
1985 (© 1965).
White, Morton, Foundations of Historical
Knowledge, New York & London: Harper &
Row Publishers, 1965.
Whitehead, Alfred North, ‘Science and the
Modern World’, in Adler, Mortimer J.,
Great Books of the Western World, Chicago:
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1993 (© 1952).
Wiener, Philip P., ‘Some Problems and
Methods in the History of Ideas’, Journal of
the History of Ideas, Vol. 22, No. 4. (Oct. –
Dec., 1961), pp. 531-548.
Willey, Basil, The Seventeenth-Century
Background, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books Ltd, 1962 (© 1934).
Willey, Basil, The Eighteenth-Century
Background, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books Ltd, 1972 (© 1940).
A survey of Western Foundationalism: the SocraticPlatonic model – λόγος as ontological paragon;
Aristotle and the taxinomy of the world; the
Christian model - Λόγος as the Word of God;
medieval theology, nominalism vs. realism; NeoPlatonism, Renaissance humanism and burgeoning
modern hermeneutics (from Origen, via Valla, to
Schleiermacher); the discovery of the Other and the
17th-century ‘crisis’ of European conscience; the
Enlightenment paradigm and the foundation of
classic modernity – the rationalistic-scientific
model;
19th-century
positivism,
realism,
naturalism; ‘our’ modernity en route to
postmodernity.
8
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Francis Bacon, “The Advancement of
Learning” (1605), in Joyce Appleby et al.
(eds.), Knowledge and Postmodernism in
Historical Perspective, New York & London:
Routledge, 1996, pp. 31-40 [NEC] [MI]
René Descartes, Méditations (1641) [NEC] –
English trans. “Meditations on First
Philosophy”, in Lawrence Cahoone (ed.),
From Modernism to Postmodernism: An
Anthology, Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers
Ltd, 1996, pp. 29-40 [NEC] [MI]
John Locke, “Essay Concerning Human
Understanding” (1690), in Joyce Appleby et
al. (eds.), Knowledge and Postmodernism in
Historical Perspective, 1996, pp. 51-60 [NEC]
[MI]
Immanuel Kant, Was ist Aufklärung (1784)
[NEC] [NEC] – English trans. “An Answer
to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”,
in Lawrence Cahoone (ed.), From Modernism
to Postmodernism: An Anthology, 1996, pp.
51-57 [MI]
Karl Marx, Die Deutsche Ideologie (1847)
[NEC] – English trans. “The German
Ideology”, in Joyce Appleby et al. (eds.),
Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical
Perspective, 1996, pp. 180-188 [MI]
Tony Davies, Humanism, Routledge, New
York & London, 1997, Introduction:
“Towards a Definition of Humanism”; Ch.1:
“The Invention of Humanity”, pp. 1-71 [MI]
FURTHER READING
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Appleby, Joyce et al. (eds.), Knowledge and
Postmodernism in Historical Perspective, New
York & London: Routledge, 1996
Cahoone, Lawrence (ed.), From Modernism to
Postmodernism: An Anthology, Cambridge:
Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1996
Coates, Willson H., Hayden White &
Salwyn J. Schapiro¸ The Emergence of Liberal
Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western
9
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5
FORMALISM —
STRUCTURALISM:
the Scientific
Moment in the
Humanities
Europe, New York-St. Louis-San FranciscoToronto-London:
McGraw-Hill
Book
Company, 1966
Tony Davies, Humanism, Routledge, New
York & London, 1997
Hamilton, Paul, Historicism, London & New
York: Routledge, 1997
Hawkes, David, Ideology, London & New
York: Routledge, 1996
Jervis, John, Transgressing the Modern,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1999
Luhmann, Niklas, Observations on Modernity,
Stanford, California: Stanford U. P., 1998 (©
1992)
Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The
Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
1989
Van Doren, Mark, Liberal Education, New
York: Henry Holt & Co.,1943
The Formalist modern spirit as reaction to
Romanticism and the aporia of Formalism as
belated romanticism; Shklovsky, Tomashevsky,
Tynyanov, Jakobson and the ‘scientific’ method: the
‘art as technique’ topos, defamiliarization
(ostranenie)
as
literary
technique
and
Weltanschauung, literariness (literaturnost’) vs.
metaphoric estrangement, paradigm vs. syntagm,
fabula vs. sjuzhet, story vs. plot or myth, the
linguistics – poetics relationship; an autotelic school
of criticism in its own right; similarities with, and
differences from, other such stances; consequences
on narratology; the semiotic connection; the
linguistic turn.
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Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917),
in K.M. Newton (ed.), Twentieth-Century Literary
Theory: A Reader, London: Mcmillan, 1997
(©1988), pp. 3-5 [BCSC] [MI]
Roman Jakobson, “The Dominant” (1935), in
K.M. Newton (ed.), Twentieth-Century Literary
Theory, 1997, pp. 6-9 [BCSC] [MI]
10
Total amount: 5 pages
Structuralism and the call of immanence; the logic
of binary oppositions: Troubetzkoy, de Saussure
(the
paradigm
/
syntagm
opposition);
constructedness and convention; structuralist
splendeur and grand theory; structuralist décadence
and the culturalist turn; structuralism and ‘societal’
forms: food, fashion, the nation, religion, art,
science:
Simmel’s
culturalist
adumbrations
(adventure, the sexes, the crisis of the modern, the
philosophy of culture), Cassirer’s symbolic forms,
Barthes’s mythologies; spatial and constructivist
metaphors.
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Total amount: 46 pages
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Ernst Cassirer, Essay on Man: An Introduction to
a Philosophy of Human Culture, (©1944) [BN] –
Romanian trans. Eseu despre om – Introducere în
filosofia culturii umane, Bucureşti: Humanitas,
1994, Cap. VI.: “Definiţia omului în termeni ai
culturii umane”, pp. 93-103 [BN] [MI]
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (© 1957) [IF] –
English trans. Mythologies, Jonathan Cape,
London, 1972; and in Susan Sontag (ed.), A
Roland Barthes Reader, London: Vintage, 1993,
pp. 82-84 [BCSC]
Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social
Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology
of Knowledge, New York-London: Anchor Press,
1967 (© 1966), pp. 1-18
Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics,
Berkeley & Los Angeles: U. of California Press,
1992, pp. 11-18 [ED] [MI]
Jonathan
Culler,
Structuralist
Poetics:
Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of
Literature, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1975, [“The Development of a Method: Two
Examples (The language of fashion, Mythological
logic)”, pp. 32-54 [ED]
Mihaela Irimia, The Stimulating Difference:
Avatars of a Concept, Bucharest: Bucharest
University Press, 1995 [BCSC] [ED] [NEC] [BN]
[MI]
11
FURTHER READING
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Cassirer, Ernst, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,
trans. Ralph Manheim, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1953
Caws, Peter, Structuralism: The Art of the
Intelligible, New Jersey: Humanities Press
International, Inc., 1998
Dosse, François Histoire du structuralisme
(Vol.I: Le champ du signe, 1945-1966; Vol. II:
Le Chant du cygne, 1967 à nos jours, Paris:
Éditions La Découverte, 1992
Durand,
Gilbert,
Les
structures
anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, Paris: Bordas,
1969 – Romanian version Strucutrile
antropologice ale imaginarului, trans. Marcel
Aderca, Bucureşti: Univers Enciclopedic,
2000
Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four
Essays, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1957
Frye, Northrop, The Great Code: The Bible and
Literature, San Diego, New York & London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1983
Hawkes,
Terence,
Structuralism
and
Semiotics, Berkeley & Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1977
Macksey, Richard & Eugenio Donato (eds),
The Structuralist Controversy: The Language of
Criticism and the Sciences of Man, Baltimore &
London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1970
Newton, K.M. (ed.), Twentieth-Century
Literary Theory: A Reader, London:
MacMillan, 1997 (© 1988)
Pike, Keneth L., Language in Relation to a
Unified Theory of the Structure of Human
Behavior, Hague: Mouton & Co., 1967
Pop, Mihai Ce este literatura?, Bucureşti,
Editura Univers, 1983
Scholes, Robert, Structuralism in Literature:
An Introduction, New Haven & London: Yale
12
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6
Precursors of CS (1):
FRIEDRICH
NIETZSCHE and
Metaphysical Necrology
Total amount: 58 pages
University Press, 1974
Steiner, Peter, Russian Formalism: A
Metapoetics, Ithana & London: Cornell
University Press, 1984
‘Got ist tott’ and the beginning of ex-foundation (the
‘death of the author’ syndrome); the twilight of
(the) idols; truth as fable; the (dif)fusion of the
(European) centre: Zarathustra, not Christ; the ‘new
man’ and the will to power; the collapse of reason
and
morality
(the
beyond-good-and-evil
syndrome); the critique of language: metaphors as
dry leaves and worn out effigies, the ‘words,
words, words’ syndrome - anticipating postmodern
textualism and the linguistic turn.
 Friedrich Nietzsche, (1) La gaya scienza (1882)
[NEC] – English trans. The Gay Science, (Part III,
Sec. 125, “The Madman”), p. 103; (2) Jenseits vom
Gut und Böse zur Genealogie der Moral (1886)
[NEC] – English trans. Beyond Good and Evil - The
Genealogy of Morals, (ch. “The Natural History of
Morals”), in Walter Kaufmann, The Portable
Nietzsche, The Viking Press, New York, 1968, pp.
104-120; (3) Wille zur Macht (1887) [NEC] –
English trans. The Will to Power, in Lawrence
Cahoone (ed.), From Modernism to Postmodernism:
An Anthology (1996), p. 130 [MI]
 Friedrich Nietzsche, (1) Also spracht Zarathustra
(1884) [NEC] — English trans. Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (c 1961), Penguin Books, London,
1969, pp. 121-137 — Romanian trans. Aşa grăit-a
Zarathustra, Humanitas, Bucureşti, 1994 [BN]
[BCSC] [MI]; (2) Götterdämmerung (1889) [NEC]
– English trans. Twilight of the Idols [MI], pp. 467472 – Romanian trans. Amurgul idolilor,
Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1994 [BN] [BCSC] [MI]
 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil:
Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, in Joyce
Appleby et al. (eds.), Knowledge and
Postmodernism in Historical Perspective, 1996, pp.
201-212 [MI]
 Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der
13
Moderne (1985) [NEC] – English trans. The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, (ch. “The
Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a
turning point”), in Thomas Docherty (ed.),
Postmodernism: A Reader, New York, London,
Toronto,
Tokyo,
Singapore:
Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1993, pp. 51-59 [BCSC] [MI]
FURTHER READING
 de Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading: Figural
Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust,
New Haven & London: Yale University Press,
1979
 Kaufmann, Walter The Portable Nietzsche, The
Viking Press, New York, 1968
7
Precursors of CS (2):
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
and being-in-time
The ‘forgotten’ question of ‘being’ and the
revisionism of Western metaphysics: thinking the
familiar, Da-sein or being-in-the-world/being-intime vs. Being; history, historicity, the historicity of
being; Destruktion, or destructuring the history of
ontology; a critique of the Cartesian ego-cogitans – a
‘constructive’ operation; a critique of SocraticPlatonic ‘reductionism’, an assault on essentialism;
existentialist phenomenology, an attack on
traditional humanism, Heidegger’s new humanism:
man’s proximity to Being, the utensil quality of
things in the world, the question of ‘Sorge’ in
Dasein’s world; the ‘use of poets’.
 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927) [NEC] –
English trans. Being and Time, New York: State
University of New York, 1996 (Int. II, 6 “The
Task of a Destructuring of the History of
Ontology”), pp. 17-23 [MI]
 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1996 (VI, 41,
“The Being of Da-Sein as Care”), pp. 178-183
[MI]
 Martin Heidegger, Brief über den Humanismus
(1946) [NEC] – English trans. Letter on
Humanism, in Lawerence Cahoone (ed), From
Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology [MI],
14
Total amount: 55 pages
pp. 274-308 – Romanian trans. Scrisoare despre
umanism, in Secolul 20, # 234-235-236, 1980 [MI]
 Michael Inwood, “Heidegger and his language”,
in A Heidegger Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 2000 (© 1999), pp. 1-11 [MI]
FURTHER READING
 Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. John
Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, New York:
State University of New York, 1996
 Inwood, Michael, A Heidegger Dictionary,
Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 2000 (© 1999)
8
Precursors of CS (3):
The FRANKFURT
SCHOOL and the Loss
of (Aesthetic) Unicity
Total amount: 46 pages
The Frankfurt school and the critical tradition in
Western thought; the sociological turn; a philosophy
of praxis; the moral question. The Adorno line: the
‘culture industry’ & ‘instrumental reason’; the
Gramscian infusion: praxis, hegemony, the
‘collective intellectual’; the Horkheimer - Adorno
view of the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’; the Weber
infusion;
the
Benjamin
line:
‘mechanical
reproducibility’ & the loss of the auratic force; art as
commodity; materiality & commodification.
 Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno, Dialektik
der Aufklärung (1944) [NEC] – English trans.
Dialectic of Enlightenment, in Lawrence Cahoone
(ed.), From Modernism to Postmodernism, 1996,
pp. 243-257 [MI]
 Max Weber, Die Protestantische Ethik and der Geist
des Kapitalismus (1920) – English trans. The
Protestant Ethic and the Logic of Capitalism, in
Joyce Appleby et al. (eds), Knowledge and
Postmodernism in Historical Perspective, 1996, pp.
215-240 – Romanian trans. Etica protestantă şi
spiritul capitalismului, Bucureşti: Humanitas,
1993
 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of
History”, in Kiernan Ryan (ed.), New Historicism
and Cultural Materialism, Arnold Publishers,
London, New York, Sydney, Auckland, 1996,
pp. 32-41 [BCSC]
15
FURTHER READING
 Arato, Andrew & Eike Gerhardt (eds.), The
Essential Frankfurt School Reader, New York:
Urizen Books, 1978
 McCarthy, Thomas, The Critical Theory of Jürgen
Habermas, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984 (©
1978)
 Weber, Max, Etica protestantă şi spiritul
capitalismului, Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1993
9
Precursors of CS (4):
The ÉCOLE DES
ANNALES and
MENTALITÉS
Total amount: 71 pages
From a structuralist to a culturalist agenda:
Mentalities
vs.
(Cultural)
Anthropology,
Mentalities vs. History of Ideas, Mentalities vs. ‘la
nouvelle histoire’, Mentalities vs. (the New)
Historicim. ‘Longue durée’ vs. facts; history as
‘mentalités’ vs. history as events; ‘outillage mental’;
the ‘France profonde’ topos; ‘histoire économique et
sociale’; collective conscience, the (collective)
imaginary, representation(s); material culture:
objects, tools, ambiance, rituals, protocols, festivals,
ceremonies – the ‘culturam serbare’ topos; social
sciences & ‘sciences de l’homme’; histories of dress,
housing, food, smell, taste, fear, laughter.
 Michel Vovelle, L’histoire et la longue durée, in
Jacques Le Goff (ed.), La Nouvelle Histoire, Paris:
Éditions Complexe, 1988, pp. 77-104 [IF] [MI]
 Philippe Ariès, L’histoire des mentalités, in
Jacques Le Goff (ed.), La Nouvelle Histoire, pp.
168-188 [IF] [MI]
 Jacques Le Goff, Marchands et banquiers du Moyen
Âge (1965) [IF] – Romanian trans. Negustorii şi
bancherii în Evul Mediu, Bucureşti: Meridiane,
1994, pp. 5-10 [ED] [MI]
 Jacques Le Goff, Les Intellectuels au Moyen Âge
(1957) [IF] – Romanian trans. Intelectualii în Evul
Mediu, Bucureşti: Meridiane, 1994, pp. 5-18 [BN]
[ED] [MI]
 Jacques Le Goff, “Mentalities: a history of
ambiguities”, in Jacques Le Goff & Pierre Nora
(eds.), Faire de l’histoire (1974) – English trans.
16
Constructing the Past: Essays in historical
methodology, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985, pp. 166-176 [IF] [MI]
FURTHER READING
 Ariès, Philippe & Georges Duby, Histoire de la vie
privée (1985) [IF] – Romanian trans. Istoria vieţii
private, Bucureşti: Meridiane, 1995, Vol. 5, pp.
26-32, 200-205; Vol. 6, pp. 107-114, 208-214 [BN]
[ED] [MI]
 Bloch, Marc, Les rois thaumaturges: etude sur le
caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale
particulièrement en France et en Angleterre, Paris:
Gallimard, 1983
 Braudel, Fernand, Écrits sur l’histoire, Paris:
Flammarion, 1969
 Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident (XIVe-XVIIIe
siècles): Une cité assiégée (1978) [IF] – Romanian
trans. Frica în Occident - O cetate asediată,
Bucureşti: Meridiane, 1986, pp. 18-39 [BN] [ED]
[MI]
 Braudel, Fernand, Le temps du monde, Paris:
Armand Colin, 1979
 Kantorowicz, Ernst, The King’s Two Bodies,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997 (©
1957)
 le Goff, Jacques & Pierre Nora (eds), Faire de
l’histoire, Paris: Gallimard, 1974 – English trans.
Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical
Methodology, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985
 le Goff, Jacques et al., Histoire et imaginaire,
Poiesis, Paris: Diffusion Payot, 1986
 le Goff, Jacques, La nouvelle histoire, Paris: Retz
CEPL, 1978
 Roche, Daniel, Histoire des choses banales:
Naissance de la consommation XVIIe-XIXe siècle,
Paris: Fayard, 1997
10
Precursors of CS (5):
Language/culture as lived experience: the dialectics
of communication, identity and truth; the play of
power in human communities; questioning
17
MIKHAIL BAKHTIN,
Polyglossia and
Carnivalization
Total amount: 61 pages
received values: discourse vs. language, popular
culture vs. high culture; oral vs. written literature;
subversion as cultural mode: carnival &
carnivalization, the relativization of power and
officialdom, the centrality of the margin in history;
the spectacle of the bodily lower strata; the way
downwards and the way of excess; polyglossia,
polyphony, dialogism; the voice of the ‘other’ – an
overall de-freeze of the stiff(ened) centre.
 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rable i evo mir (1965) — English
trans. Rabelais and His World, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 315-336 [MI]
– Romanian trans. Rabelais şi lumea sa, Bucureşti:
Univers, 1975 [ED] [BN]
 Mikhail
Bakhtin,
Problemi
poetiki
Dostoievskevo (1929) — English trans. Problems
of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984, Ch. Five: ‘Discourse
in Dostoevsky’, pp. 181-204 [MI] — Romanian
trans. Probleme ale poeticii lui Dostoievski,
Bucureşti: Univers, 1975, [BN] [ED]
 Peter Stallybrass & Allon White, The Politics and
Poetics of Transgression, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1986, pp. 171-191
 Mihaela Irimia, The Stimulating Difference (1995)
[BCSC] [ED] [BN] [MI]
FURTHER READING
 Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984
 Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984
 Clark, Katerina & Michael Holquist, Mikhail
Bakhtin, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London,
England: Harvard University Press, 1984
 Dentith, Simon, Bakhtinian Thought: An
Introductory Reader, London & New York:
Routledge, 1996
 Gardiner, Michael, The Dialogic of Critique: M.M.
Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology, London & New
18
York: Routledge, 1992
 Reid, Allan, Literature and Cognition in Bakhtin
and Lotman, New York & London: Garland
Publishers, 1990
 Stallybrass, Peter & Allon White, The Politics and
Poetics of Transgression, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1986
 White, Allon, Carnival, Hysteria and Writing,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993
11
Precursors of CS (6):
MICHEL FOUCAULT,
‘pouvoir c’est savoir’,
and the Dislocation of
the ‘grands récits de
l’histoire
Total amount: 76 pages
Challenging the Western liberal humanist model;
the poststructuralist move into anthropology,
cultural anthropology, cultural poetics
–
interdisciplinarity. The modern paradigm shift; the
modern episteme; knowledge as power into power as
knowledge (pouvoir c’est savoir) – the ‘power-iseverywhere’ topos and its consequences on the
‘recent invention’ called man; ‘archaeology’;
‘genealogy’; the modern subject; modern institutions
and practices: the prison, the madhouse, sexuality;
the dislocation of the ‘grands récits de l’histoire’; the
role of ‘fissures’, ‘ruptures’, discontinuities.
 Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?”
(1983), in Magazine littéraire, No.309 /1993 [MI] –
English trans. “What Is Enlightenment?”, in
Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, London:
Penguin Books, 1991, pp. 32-48 [BCSC] [MI]
 Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison. Histoire de la
folie à l’âge classique (1961) [IF] [NEC] – English
trans. Madness and Civilization: A History of
Insanity in the Age of Reason, Vintage Books Inc.,
New York (c 1967), 1988 [MI] – Romanian trans.
Istoria nebuniei în epoca clasică, Bucureşti:
Humanitas, 1996, pp. 38-64 [BN] [ED] [MI]
 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de
la prison, Paris: Gallimard, 1994 (© 1975) [IF]
[NEC] – English trans. Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison (1975) – Romanian trans. A
supraveghea şi a pedepsi – Naşterea închisorii,
Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1997, 279-315 [BN] [ED]
[MI]
19
FURTHER READING
 Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A
History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans.
Richard Howard, New York: Pantheon Books,
1965
 Foucault, Michel, Mental Illness and Psychology,
trans. Alan Sheridan, Berkeley, Los Angeles &
London: University of California Press, 1976
 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Généalogie,
Histoire”, in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite, Presses
Universitaires de France, Paris, 1971 [IF] –
English trans. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”,
in Lawrence Cahoone (ed.), From Modernism to
Postmodernism (1996) [MI]; and in Michael
Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:
Selected Essays and Interviews, Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 1977, 360-379 [MI]
 Foucault, Michel, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de
la prison, Paris: Gallimard, 1994 (© 1975)
 Rabinow, Paul (ed.), The Foucault Reader: AN
Introduction
to
Foucault’s
Thought,
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, New York:
Pantheon Books, 1991 (©1984)
Total amount: 508 pages
Average / Module: 46 pages
 Works mentioned under FURTHER READING are recommended for further academic
interests.i.e.dissertation work or research, as well as for further intellectual purposes, such
as Ph.D. studies. Please also note that the libraries in which titles included in the reading
and research requirements for the present module are available are marked as follows:
 The British Cultural Studies Centre Library [BCSC]
 The British Council Library [BC]
 The English Department Library [ED]
 Biblioteca Naţională [BN]
 The New Europe College Library [NEC]
 Institut Français de Bucarest Library [IF]
 Prof. Mihaela Irimia’s personal library [MI]
 Xerox copies covering the entire compulsory reading list in the Cultural Identity Module
are available at the BCSC.
20
Profile
Prof. MIHAELA IRIMIA is the Director of Studies of the British Cultural Studies MA,
Director of the Centre of Excellence for the Study of Cultural Identity, and Alumna of New
Europe College, whose Fellow she was in the interval 1997-2000, Fellow of St. John's
College, Oxford, and Research Fellow of Yale University. She currently teaches British
literature at the English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures,
University of Bucharest, with focus on British Enlightenment and Romantic Literature. Her
main research and teaching interests include literary and cultural history, critical theory,
history of ideas, intellectual history, cultural identity, cultural theory, the modernity project
and postmodern theory. She is a member of: the European Society for the Study of English
(ESSE), the Romanian Society for English and American Studies (RSEAS), the British
Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS), Societatea de Studii de Secol Optsprezece
din România (SSSOR), the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), the
International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS), the German Society for
Romantic Studies (Gesellschaft für Englische Romantik), the Romanian Society for
Philological Studies (SSFR), the Romanian Fulbright Association, and the Romanian
Comparative Literature Association.
Recent Publications
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
‘The Ineffectual Angel of Political Hijacking’, in Michael Rossington & Susanne
Schmid (eds), The Reception of Shelley in Europe, Continuum International Publishing
Group, 2008
‘A Walpolian Anecdote: The Garden of Alcinous’, in Tatiani G. Rapatzikou (ed.),
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008
‘The Merchant Tourist: Defoe and the Case of London’, in Mihaela Irimia (ed.), From
Conceptual Road Maps to an Identitary Cartography - An Identitary Cartography – Case
Studies, Bucureşti: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, 2008
Lures and Ruses of Modernity / Leurres et ruses de la modernité, International
Colloquium / Colloque international, New Europe College, 28-29 Nov., 2005 (ed.
Mihaela Irimia), Bucureşti: Institutul Cultural Român, 2007
‘Colonial London in the Eighteenth Century’, Urbs et Orbis: Métropoles et villes
provinciales dans le monde Anglophone (ed. Évelyne Hanquart-Turner), Paris &
Ivry/Seine: Éditions A3, 2007
‘Some Chronotopes of Modernity: Romanian Romanticism and the Invention of the
National Spirit’, British and European Romanticisms, Selected Papers from the Munich
Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism (eds Christoph Bode &
Sebastian Domsch), Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007
‘The Preposterous Head Dress: An Aesthetics of Prosthesis’, Du corps (ed. Gheorghe
Crăciun), Bucharest: Euresis, Cahiers roumains d’études littéraires et culturelles, 2007
21
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Travel (of) Writing, Conference ‘Ovidius’ University, Constanţa, 29-30 May, 2006 (eds
Adina Ciugureanu & Mihaela Irimia), Constanţa: ‘Ovidius’ University Press, 2007
‘Shakespeare from Stage to Page’, in Daniela Ţuchel (ed.), Shakespeareana 2006 ,
Galaţi: Editura Fundaţiei Universitare, 2006
Liens de mémoire – Genres, repères, imaginaries (ed. Laure Lévêque), Paris: l’Harmattan,
2006
‘Shakespeare and the ‘Long Modernity’’, in Daniela Ţuchel (ed.), Shakespeareana
2004, Galaţi: Editura Europlus, 2005
Modernism and Cultural Identity (ed.), Constanţa: Amphion, 2004
22
2. Cultural Anthropology
Module Supervisor: Prof. Radu Surdulescu
Syllabus for Term 1
#
1-2
Title
Anthropology as a
Comparative
Discipline
Themes for Presentation & Discussion. Bibliography
Versatility of definitions. Branches. CA, ethnography,
ethnology. The ethnographic method; the structure of
field inquiry; field specificity and participant
observation; the informant; the ethnographic text. The
ethnographer’s experience. CA vs. mythography,
cultural history, cultural studies. Temporality and A.
paradigms. Rupture vs. continuity. Allochrony and
coevalness. Comparative-evolutionary A., cultural
relativism, functionalism, structuralist A., semiotic A.,
postmodern A. Critique of essentialism, objectification,
codification in present-day approaches. Flux and
indeterminacy. Change and tradition. British and
American Anthropology – main directions.


3
Culture and
Cultures
Harris, Olivia, “The temporalities of tradition:
Reflections on a changing anthropology”, in
Hubinger, Vaclav (ed.), Grasping the Changing
World: Anthropological Concepts in the Postmodern
Era.
Geertz, Clifford, ‘Thick Description: Toward an
Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The
Interpretation of Cultures.
Taylor’s definition of C. Webs of significance. Shaped
behaviour. C. as text. Thick description. C. and context.
C. and civilisation. Enculturation. UK and America - a
contrastive view.

Pasquinelli, Carla, ‘The concept of culture between
modernity and postmodernity’, in Hubinger, V., op.
cit.
23

4-5
Self, Race,
Ethnicity
Daniel, E. Valentine, ‘Crushed Glass, or, Is There a
Counterpoint to Culture?’, in Daniel, E. Valentine
and Peck, Jeffrey M. (eds.) Culture/Contexture:
Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies.
The tree and the network images about human evolution.
Race as a cultural construct. Its discursive nature. Its
relational structure. Dividuals. Multiple identities.
Dispersed identities. The foreigner within. Specific
problematics in the UK and the USA.


Sökefeld, Martin, ‘Debating Self, Identity and
Culture in Anthropology’, in Current Anthropology,
Vol. 40, No. 4, August-October 1999.
Lloyd, David, ‘Race under Representation’, in
Daniel, E. V. and Peck, J. M. ...
FURTHER READING
 Sarup, Madan, ‘‘Race’, Identity and Nation-ness’, in
Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World.
 Seyhan, Azade, ‘Ethnic Selves’, in Daniel, E. V. and
Peck, J. M. ...
 Michaels, Walter B., "The First American";
"Difference Not Inferiority", in Our America ...
6
Myth and Ritual
Rituals, rites. Rites of worship, purification, expiation,
sacrifice, passage, of gift giving. Taboos, totems. Myth
and ritual. Myth and truth value. The linguistic
approach. The structuralist definition. Freudian, Jungian
views. Eliade’s phenomenology of myths. Cassirer.
Historicist and ideologist views.
Social conflict as social drama. Ritualized forms of
authority. The text analogue and the context of
performance. Phases in social drama. Distance between
audience and performers. Liminal and liminoid.


Frazer, Sir James, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic
and Religion. Abridged edition. London: Papermac,
1987; first published: 1922. (Selected fragments)
Eliade, Mircea, Aspecte ale mitului, Bucuresti:
Humanitas, 1992. (Selected fragments)
24

7-8
Cosmopolitics
Modern imaginings. Mass migration. Dangerous
convergences. The long-distance nationalist. The
dynamics of socialism vs. those of transition. Pro- and
anti-Americanism: myths and realities.
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Culture and
Immortality
11
Anderson, Benedict, "The New World Disorder",
in Joan Vincent (ed.)...
Verdery, Katherine, "Theorizing Socialism: A
Prologue to the 'Transition' ", in Joan Vincent
(ed.)...
Frigioiu, Nic., "Ritualuri politice", in Antropologie
politica, Bucuresti, 2009
Revel, Jean-Francois, L'obsession anti-américaine
(pp.7-27)
Behr, Edward, Une Amérique qui fait peur (pp. 724)
Subjects of violence - a typology. Deconstructing
mortality and immortality in the modern era.
9
10-
Turner, Victor, ‘Acting in Everyday Life and
Everyday Life in Acting’, in From Ritual to
Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play
Postmodern
Horizons in
Ethnography. From
Representation to
Invention

Bauman, Zygmunt, Introduction
Immortality and Other Life Strategies.
to:
Mortality,
From interpretive-textualist A., to meta-textual A.
Fictions inventing truths.
The ethnographer as a
Hermes, a trickster. Rhetorical strategies. Ethnography
and power. Deconstructing ethnography. Feminist
contributions. The anthropology of postmodernity.


Clifford, James, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, in
Clifford, James and Marcus, George eds. Writing
Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.
Di Leonardo, Micaela, "Introduction: Gender,
Culture, and Political Economy", in Gender at the
25
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12
Anthropology and
Other Human
Sciences
Culture into text, versus text into culture. Genre mixing.
Refiguration of social thought. Portrayal, modelling,
diagnosing. Three basic analogies: game, drama, text.
Relationships between CA and literary studies at
various levels.


13
Supplementary
Debate Seminar
Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the
Postmodern Era.
Crapanzano, Vincent, ‘Hermes’ Dilemma: The
Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description’,
in Writing Culture.
Gavriluta, Nicu, "Antropologie sociala si culturala" (multiculturalism, sexuality, abortion, cloning).
Sevillia, Jean. Corectitudinea morală.
Geertz, Clifford, ‘Blurred Genres: The Refiguration
of Social Thought’, in Local Knowledge: Further Essays
in Interpretive Anthropology.
Geertz, Clifford, ‘Found in Translation: On the Social
History of Moral Imagination’, in Local Knowledge.
Controversial issues in contemporary cultural and social
anthropology (comparative views on small-size and
complex societies, such as UK and USA).
Abortion. Capital punishment. The "Christmas"
controversy. Civil liberties and anti-terrorism measures.
Education and terrorism. Euthanasia. Free speech.
Glocalization. Holocaust, Gulag, genocide. Marginal
groups (the perspectives of gender, race, ethnicity).
Medical ethics. Multiculturalism. Police interrogation.
Political correctness. Religion and identity.
Sex
education. Separation of church and state. Youth
violence.
FURTHER READING AND REFERENCE BOOKS (available at BCSC):

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
Augé, Marc, Le sens des autres: Actualité de l’anthropologie, Paris: Fayard, 1994.
Bauman, Zygmunt, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies, Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1992.
Behr, Edward, Une Amérique qui fait peur, Paris: Plon, 1995.
Bell, Catherine, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992.
26
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Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and
Art, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
Clifford, James and Marcus, George eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986.
Coupe, Laurence, Myth, London: Routledge, 1999.
Daniel, E. Valentine and Peck, Jeffrey M. eds. Culture/Contexture: Explorations in
Anthropology and Literary Studies, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996.
Das, Veena et al. eds, Violence & Subjectivity, U. of Calif. P., 2000 (c 1996).
Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo,
London: Routledge, 1996,  1966.
Frigioiu, Nic., Antropologie politica, Bucuresti: Tritonic, 2009
Gavriluta, Nic., Antropologie sociala si culturala, Iasi: Polirom, 2009
Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Geertz, Clifford, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, London:
Fontana Press, 1993 (c 1983).
Goody, Jack, The East in the West, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996.
Hendry, Joy, An Introduction to Social Anthropology: Other People’s Worlds, London:
MacMillan Press, 1999.
Hubinger, Vaclav (ed.), Grasping the Changing World: Anthropological Concepts in the
Postmodern Era. London: Routledge, 1996.
Ingold, Tim ed.. Key Debates in Anthropology, London: Routledge, 1996/2001.
Iser, Wolfgang, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, Johns
Hopkins U. P., 1993.
Kuper, Adam, Culture: The Anthropological Account (London: Routledge, 1996).
Lane, Christopher, ed.. The Psychoanalysis of Race, New York: Columbia UP, 1998.
Di Leonardo, Micaela, "Introduction: Gender, Culture, and Political Economy", in
Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era,
Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991.
Marcus, George and Fischer, Michael, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental
Moment in the Human Sciences, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986/1999.
Moore, Henrietta, Anthropological Theory Today, London: Malden: Polity Press,
1999/2000.
Rapport, Nigel & Overing, Joanna, Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts,
London: Routledge, 2000.
Revel, Jean-Francois, L'obsession anti-américaine, Paris: Plon, 2002
Sarup, Madan, ‘‘Race’, Identity and Nation-ness’, in Identity, Culture and the Postmodern
World, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996.
Surdulescu, Radu, The Raping of Identity: Studies on Physical and Symbolic Violence, Iasi:
Institutul European, 2006.
Turner, Victor, ‘Acting in Everyday Life and Everyday Life in Acting’, in From Ritual to
Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: PAJ Books, 1982.
Turner, Victor, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1996.
27


De Vries, Hent and Weber, Samuel eds, Violence, Identity and Self-Determination,
Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997.
Winthrop, Robert H., Dictionary of Concepts in Cultural Anthropology, New York:
Greenwood Press, 1991.
Profile
Prof. RADU SURDULESCU is Professor of American Literature at the University of
Bucharest. He currently teaches courses in American Literature, Literary Theory and
Cultural Anthropology. The scope of his scientific research also spans concerns as varied as
cultural politics, Globalisation Studies, Cold-War and Post-Communist History. R.
Surdulescu is editor-in-chief of University of Bucharest Review: A Journal of Literary and
Cultural Studies.
Recent Publications

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The Raping of Identity: Studies on Physical and Symbolic Violence, Iasi: Institutul
European, 2006
Form, Structure and Structurality in Critical Theory, Bucharest: E.U.B., 2000
Critica mitic-arhetipala: De la motivul antropologic la sentimentul numinosului (Myth
Criticism, Archetypal Criticism: From the Anthropological Motif to the Numinous),
Bucharest: ALLFA, 1997
Sam Shepard: The Mythomorphic Vision, Bucharest: E.U.B., 1996
Contemporary Critical Theories: A Reader (co-edited with Bogdan Stefanescu),
Department of English, Univ. of Bucharest, 1998, revised edition 2002
*
"A Few Notes on the Margin of George Rousseau's Views on Extreme Violence", in
Literary into Cultural History, Bucharest: ICR, 2009
"(Im)Mortality in Don DeLillo's 'World City'", in The Sense of America: Histories into
Text, Bucharest, 2009
"Stop-cadru în Washington Square" - a preface to the Romanian version of Henry
James's novel Washington Square, trad. Radu Surdulescu, ediţia a II-a, Bucureşti:
Minerva, 2007
“Zgomotul de fond postmodern sau comedia spaimei de moarte” (“The Postmodern
White Noise, or The Comedy of Death Fear”), a preface to the Romanian version of
Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (Zgomotul alb), trans. by Horia-Florian Popescu,
Bucureşti: Leda-Corint, 2006
"Conflicting Embodiments of Truth", in: Our America: People, Places, Times, Bucharest:
Univers Enciclopedic, 2005
"Adevar si fictiune: Razboiul spaniol al lui Hemingway si Dos Passos", in Observator
cultural, 8 (265), April 21-27, 2005
28
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"Michel Wieviorka si subiectivitatea violentei", in Observator Cultural, 237, September
7, 2004
"Dismantled and Dispersed Identities: Semicolonialism, Reeducation and Peer
Torture in Some Communist Countries" (in CEREC Colloquium Working Papers, Paris,
2004)
"The Violence of Posteriority: Postcommunism and Some Conceptual and Ethical
Embarrassments" (in -ISMs & -NESSes: the 2nd Anti-conference. The Annals of
"Ovidius" University of Constanta, 2004)
"<Being here has come to me>": Stanislaw Lem's and Do DeLillo's Fantasies of
Hypermnesia and Fracted Time" (in University of Bucharest Review, 2004)
“The Powerful Freight Train of Modernity and the Recent Ethics Gaps on the
American Cultural Scene” (in America in/from Romania, Bucharest: Univers
Enciclopedic, 2002)
“Fatete ale discursului est-europenist în proza lui Updike si Bellow”, in Observator
Cultural, 142, 12 noiembrie 2002
"'Progresisti' si 'dizidenti': Confruntari inter-culturale in publicistica americana de
dupa 11 septembrie", in Observator Cultural, 108, March 19, 2002
“Voyeurism as Ritual: Robert Coover’s and Curtis White’s Reflections of American
Image Culture”, in Transatlantic Connections (Bucuresti, Editura Integral, 2000)
“Power Cut in the Mad Forest” in Ana Cartianu: Festschrift (Editura Universitatii din
Bucuresti, 2000)
“Practising Formalist and Deconstructive Methods in the Age of Cultural
Interpretation” (University of Bucharest Review, 2000)
“Identitatea culturala romaneasca si ecumena globala”, in Studii culturale, 1, 2000.
29
3. The Rhetorical Construction of
National Identity
Module Supervisor: Dr. Bogdan Ştefănescu
http://stefanescu-nationalism.blogspot.com/
Syllabus for Term 1
#
1
Title
DEFINING NATIONALISM I:
THE TERMS
Themes for Presentation & Discussion
Bibliography
Natio and nation, nation vs. ethnic group,
nationalism vs. national sentiment, nationalism
vs. (national) ideology, nationalism, nation and
state, nationalism: good and bad, nationalism
vs. chauvinism/xenophobia, nationalism and
history. Nationalism as a fuzzy concept or a
cluster of properties.



Bogdan Ştefănescu, Romanticism
Between Forma Mentis And Historical
Profile, Ex Ponto, Constanţa, 2000, pp.
84-90; and either
J. Hutchinson & A.D.Smith,
Nationalism, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1994, pp. 34-70,76-82, 89-102,
113-131 or
A. Mungiu-Pippidi, Transilvania
subiectivă, Humanitas, Bucureşti, 1999,
pp. 25-65
FURTHER READING
 Easthope, A., Englishness and National
Culture, Routledge, London, 1999
 Snyder, L.L., The Dynamics of
Nationalism. Readings in Its Meaning
and Development, D.van Nostrand
30
Co.Inc., Princeton etc., 1964

2
DEFINING NATIONALISM II:
THE THEORIES
Ştefănescu, B., “On the Discrimination of
Nationalisms”, in Krytyka no. 11/nov.
1999, Kiew, Ukraine.
Romantic-idealist, instrumentalist,
contextualist, social-constructivist (“invented”
nations) and the typologies.




Anderson, B., Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, London & New York, Verso,
1990, Introduction and Chapter 3
Bogdan Ştefănescu, Romanticism
Between Forma Mentis And Historical
Profile, Ex Ponto, Constanţa, 2000, pp.
84-90; and either
J. Hutchinson & A.D.Smith,
Nationalism, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1994, pp. 34-70,76-82, 89-102,
113-131 or
A. Mungiu-Pippidi, Transilvania
subiectivă, Humanitas, Bucureşti, 1999,
pp. 25-65
FURTHER READING



3
NATIONALISM AS DISCOURSE
I: TROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS
Easthope, A., Englishness and National
Culture, Routledge, London, 1999
Snyder, L.L., The Dynamics of
Nationalism. Readings in Its Meaning
and Development, D.van Nostrand
Co.Inc., Princeton etc., 1964
Ştefănescu, B., “On the Discrimination of
Nationalisms”, in Krytyka no. 11/nov.
1999, Kiew, Ukraine.
The Performativity of Cultural Discourse. The
tropological types in historical discourse (H.
White). Rhetorical archetypes.

Hayden White, Metahistory. The
31

Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe, The Johns Hopkins
U.P., Baltimore & London, 1973, pp. 138
White, H., The Tropics of Discourse, The
Johns Hopkins U.P., 1978 (first two
chapters).
FURTHER READING

4
NATIONALISM AS DISCOURSE
II: RHETORICAL
REPRESENTATIONS OF
NATIONAL IDENTITY
Boia, L., Mit şi istorie în consştiinţa
românească, Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2000
The Performativity of Nationalist Discourse.
The tropology of nationalist discourse.


Bogdan Ştefănescu, Romanticism
Between Forma Mentis And Historical
Profile, Ex Ponto, Constanţa, 2000, pp.
84-90
Bogdan Ştefănescu, “On the
Discrimination of Nationalisms”, in
Krytyka no. 11/nov. 1999, Kiew,
Ukraine
FURTHER READING

Girardet, Raoul, Mituri şi mitologii
politice, Ed.Institutului european,
Bucureşti, 1997
Rhetoric and politics: organizing discourse and
5
NATIONALISM AS A
collectivities. Political archetypes: Radicalism –
subjective-materialist versions of social life.
(DIS)COURSE OF ACTION:
POLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS
 Andrew Heywood, Political ideologies.
OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
An Introduction, Macmillian Education
(Radicalism 1)
LTD, 1992, pp. 3-53; and either


R. Ingrams, England. An Anthology,
Fontana, London, 1990, pp. 71-87; or
L. Snyder, The Dynamics of
Nationalism, Nostrand, Princeton, 1964,
pp. 2-9, 56-58, 76-103
FURTHER READING
32




6
NATIONALISM AS A
(DIS)COURSE OF ACTION:
POLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS
OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
(Radicalism 2)
Ball, T. & R. Dagger, Ideologii politice şi
idealul democratic, Polirom, Iaşi, 2000
Miller, D., Enciclopedia Blackwell a
gîndirii politice, Humanitas, Bucureşti,
2000
Mungiu-Pippidi, A., Doctrine politice.
Concepte universale şi realităţi
româneşti, Polirom, Iaşi, 1998
Ştefănescu, B., “On the Discrimination of
Nationalisms”, in Krytyka no. 11/nov.
1999, Kiew, Ukraine.
Radical versions of national identity in England
and abroad.



Andrew Heywood, Political ideologies.
An Introduction, Macmillian Education
LTD, 1992, pp. 3-53; and either
R. Ingrams, England. An Anthology,
Fontana, London, 1990, pp. 71-87; or
L. Snyder, The Dynamics of
Nationalism, Nostrand, Princeton, 1964,
pp. 2-9, 56-58, 76-103
FURTHER READING
 Ball, T. & R. Dagger, Ideologii politice şi
idealul democratic, Polirom, Iaşi, 2000
 Miller, D., Enciclopedia Blackwell a
gîndirii politice, Humanitas, Bucureşti,
2000
 Mungiu-Pippidi, A., Doctrine politice.
Concepte universale şi realităţi
româneşti, Polirom, Iaşi, 1998
 Ştefănescu, B., “On the Discrimination of
Nationalisms”, in Krytyka no. 11/nov.
1999, Kiew, Ukraine.
7
NATIONALISM AS A
(DIS)COURSE OF ACTION:
POLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS
OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
Political archetypes: Liberalism – the objectivematerialist versions of social life.

Andrew Heywood, Political ideologies.
An Introduction, Macmillian Education
LTD, 1992, pp. 3-53; and either
33
(LIBERALISM 1)

R. Ingrams, England. An Anthology,
Fontana, London, 1990, pp. 71-87; or
 L. Snyder, The Dynamics of
Nationalism, Nostrand, Princeton, 1964,
pp. 2-9, 56-58, 76-103
FURTHER READING
 Ball, T. & R. Dagger, Ideologii politice şi
idealul democratic, Polirom, Iaşi, 2000
 Miller, D., Enciclopedia Blackwell a
gîndirii politice, Humanitas, Bucureşti,
2000
 Mungiu-Pippidi, A., Doctrine politice.
Concepte universale şi realităţi
româneşti, Polirom, Iaşi, 1998
 Ştefănescu, B., “On the Discrimination of
Nationalisms”, in Krytyka no. 11/nov.
1999, Kiew, Ukraine.
Liberal versions of national identity in England
8
NATIONALISM AS A
and abroad.
(DIS)COURSE OF ACTION:
 Andrew Heywood, Political ideologies.
POLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS
An Introduction, Macmillian Education
OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
(LIBERALISM 2)


LTD, 1992, pp. 3-53; and either
R. Ingrams, England. An Anthology,
Fontana, London, 1990, pp. 71-87; or
L. Snyder, The Dynamics of
Nationalism, Nostrand, Princeton, 1964,
pp. 2-9, 56-58, 76-103
FURTHER READING




Ball, T. & R. Dagger, Ideologii politice şi
idealul democratic, Polirom, Iaşi, 2000;
Miller, D., Enciclopedia Blackwell a
gîndirii politice, Humanitas, Bucureşti,
2000;
Mungiu-Pippidi, A., Doctrine politice.
Concepte universale şi realităţi
româneşti, Polirom, Iaşi, 1998;
Ştefănescu, B., “On the Discrimination of
Nationalisms”, in Krytyka no. 11/nov.
1999, Kiew, Ukraine.
34
9
NATIONALISM AS
(DIS)COURSE OF ACTION:
POLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS
OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
Political archetypes: anarchism– the subjectiveidealist versions of social life. The place of
anarchism in the 20th century.

(ANARCHISM 1)


Andrew Heywood, Political ideologies.
An Introduction, Macmillian Education
LTD, 1992, pp. 3-53; and either
R. Ingrams, England. An Anthology,
Fontana, London, 1990, pp. 71-87; or
L. Snyder, The Dynamics of
Nationalism, Nostrand, Princeton, 1964,
pp. 2-9, 56-58, 76-103
FURTHER READING




Ball, T. & R. Dagger, Ideologii politice şi
idealul democratic, Polirom, Iaşi, 2000
Miller, D., Enciclopedia Blackwell a
gîndirii politice, Humanitas, Bucureşti,
2000
Mungiu-Pippidi, A., Doctrine politice.
Concepte universale şi realităţi
româneşti, Polirom, Iaşi, 1998
Ştefănescu, B., “On the Discrimination of
Nationalisms”, in Krytyka no. 11/nov.
1999, Kiew, Ukraine.
Anarchist versions of national identity in
England and abroad.
10
NATIONALISM AS
(DIS)COURSE OF ACTION:
POLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS
OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
(ANARCHISM 2)



Andrew Heywood, Political ideologies.
An Introduction, Macmillian Education
LTD, 1992, pp. 3-53; and either
R. Ingrams, England. An Anthology,
Fontana, London, 1990, pp. 71-87; or
L. Snyder, The Dynamics of
Nationalism, Nostrand, Princeton, 1964,
pp. 2-9, 56-58, 76-103
FURTHER READING
 Ball, T. & R. Dagger, Ideologii politice şi
idealul democratic, Polirom, Iaşi, 2000
 Miller, D., Enciclopedia Blackwell a
35


11
NATIONALISM AS
(DIS)COURSE OF ACTION:
POLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS
OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
(CONSERVATISM 1)
gîndirii politice, Humanitas, Bucureşti,
2000
Mungiu-Pippidi, A., Doctrine politice.
Concepte universale şi realităţi
româneşti, Polirom, Iaşi, 1998
Ştefănescu, B., “On the Discrimination of
Nationalisms”, in Krytyka no. 11/nov.
1999, Kiew, Ukraine.
Political archetypes: conservatism – the
objective-idealist versions of social life. The
place of conservatism in the 20th century.



Andrew Heywood, Political ideologies.
An Introduction, Macmillian Education
LTD, 1992, pp. 3-53; and either
R. Ingrams, England. An Anthology,
Fontana, London, 1990, pp. 71-87; or
L. Snyder, The Dynamics of
Nationalism, Nostrand, Princeton, 1964,
pp. 2-9, 56-58, 76-103
FURTHER READING
 Ball, T. & R. Dagger, Ideologii politice şi
idealul democratic, Polirom, Iaşi, 2000
 Miller, D., Enciclopedia Blackwell a
gîndirii politice, Humanitas, Bucureşti,
2000
 Mungiu-Pippidi, A., Doctrine politice.
Concepte universale şi realităţi
româneşti, Polirom, Iaşi, 1998
 Ştefănescu, B., “On the Discrimination of
Nationalisms”, in Krytyka no. 11/nov.
1999, Kiew, Ukraine.
12
NATIONALISM AS
(DIS)COURSE OF ACTION:
POLITICAL REPRESENTATIONS
OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
Conservative versions of national identity in
England and abroad.


Andrew Heywood, Political ideologies.
An Introduction, Macmillian Education
LTD, 1992, pp. 3-53; and either
R. Ingrams, England. An Anthology,
36
(CONSERVATISM 2)

Fontana, London, 1990, pp. 71-87; or
L. Snyder, The Dynamics of
Nationalism, Nostrand, Princeton, 1964,
pp. 2-9, 56-58, 76-103
FURTHER READING
 Ball, T. & R. Dagger, Ideologii politice şi
idealul democratic, Polirom, Iaşi, 2000
 Miller, D., Enciclopedia Blackwell a
gîndirii politice, Humanitas, Bucureşti,
2000
 Mungiu-Pippidi, A., Doctrine politice.
Concepte universale şi realităţi
româneşti, Polirom, Iaşi, 1998
 Ştefănescu, B., “On the Discrimination of
Nationalisms”, in Krytyka no. 11/nov.
1999, Kiew, Ukraine.
13
Liberal modernity. Anarchic modernism.
Conservative postmodernity. Radical
NATIONALISM AND THE
POLITICS OF POSTMODERNITY. postmodernism. (Post)modern nations and
globalism.


14
NATIONALISM AND THE
POLITICS OF POSTMODERNITY
2: POSTCOLONIALISM AND
POSTCOMMUNISM.
Th. Docherty, Postmodernism. A Reader,
Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, 1993,
pp. 120-140, 323-363
R. Boyne, & A. Rattousi, Postmodernism
and Society, pp. 1-70, 97-117
The terms and the theories of postcolonialism
and postcommunism. Nations and
multiculturalism.



Eagleton, Terry, Fredric Jameson,
Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism
& Literature, University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 1992
Hutchinson, J. & A.D.Smith,
Nationalism, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1994;
Mestrovic, S., The Balkanization of the
37

West: The Confluence of Postmodernism
and Postcommunism; London & NY,
Routledge, 1994
Snyder, L.L., The Dynamics of
Nationalism. Readings in Its Meaning
and Development, D.van Nostrand
Co.Inc., Princeton etc., 1964
Profile
Dr. BOGDAN ŞTEFĂNESCU, Reader in English at the University of Bucharest, currently
teaches courses in British Literature and Critical Theory. A journalist, editor and
professional translator, he taught as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Pennsylvania State
University and has been a visiting professor with many Romanian Universities. His
interests also include: Nationalism and Post-Communist Studies, Translation Studies,
Comparative Literature. He has published books and articles on literature, education,
nationalism, translation theory etc., as well as many translations from and into English.
Recent Publications








Irlanda (co-îngrijitor ediţie Claudiu Baciu), Secolul 20 nr. 4-6/1996;
‘Ulysses In Romanian: The Secret Odyssey’, in The James Joyce Literary Supplement
vol. 11, no. 1/1997;
Contemporary Critical Theories (co-edited with Radu Surdulescu), Department of
English, University of Bucharest, 1998;
‘On the Discrimination of Nationalisms’, in Krytyka no. 11/nov. 1999, Kiew,
Ukraine;
Romanticism In And Beyond History, Fundaţia “România de mîine” – Universitatea
Spiru Haret, Bucharest, 2001.
‘Turning Tables and Tapestries’ (designed and edited), supliment al Revistei 22, nr.
886, 2-8 martie 2007.
‘Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town’ by Rogers
Brubaker et alia’, review in The Bloomsbury Review, vol. 28, Issue 1, Jan/Feb 2008.
’11 May 1998’ by O. Nimigean, co-translated with A. Sorkin in Wayne Miller &
Kevin Prufer (eds.) New European Poets, St. Paul: Graywolf, 2008.
38
4. Re-Mapping Cultural Space: Subjects
Of Dis-Location In The Transatlantic
Dialogue
Module Supervisor: Prof. Irina Grigorescu Pană
Syllabus for Term1
Course Description and Objectives
The course discusses aspects of the old world/new world cultural dialogue through the
complex and controversial relationship between situations of displacement (dislocation, exile,
migration, resettlement, colonial conquest, translocation) and identity (re)construction generative of
new, hybrid, richly ambiguous perceptions of both original and ‘marginal’ space as translative
objects of desire. The focus is on versions of dislocation reflective of the ways in which the exilic
subject is supplemented by temporal and spatial memory objects and by the cultural components of
an ‘elsewhere’ in dialogic rapport with the shifting position of a home ‘under erasure’ inevitably remarked by the dynamics of projection, translation, rewriting, return. Implications of the new world
utopian constructions and the significances of exilic dislocation, discovery, self-renewal and
individuation through the explorations of otherness are considered from various critical and
methodological perspectives effectively employed in contemporary interpretative discussions of
dislocation issues (psychoanalytical, hermeneutical deconstructive, post-colonial). Concepts,
narrative patterns, against the grain rereadings of old/new world conjunctions, sample and
seminal texts attempting innovative representations of (post)colonial tensions are structured to
illustrate competing or conflicting perspectives on the theme of displacement. The subjects of
(dis)location – people, places, times, landscapes (‘mindscapes’), symbolic objects – are discussed
through some of the dominant features of the transatlantic dialogue between a European
‘Englishness’ spoken through configurative narration and otherly spaces such as America, Asia,
Australia, (mis)represented through modes of difference and repetition: new world mythical
geographies, the eschatology of foundation myths, the ‘American dream’ variations, utopian
developmental scenarios, trauma and separation and return anxiety, exilic and new world
adventuring, center-margin rapports, the cult of the body, utopian erotic couples, archetypal figures
at work in the displacement experience, power subversion, landscape and ornament-monument
forms, patterns of cultural dis/repossession.
The objectives of the course are to help students gain an understanding of the center-margin
dynamics, original (European) space structures and ‘new world’ utopian narrative subjects, to
introduce them to concepts and contemporary critical approaches interpretative of (dis)location
related topics generated by the transatlantic dialogue, to respond critically and coherently to
sample works with implicit or explicit displacement subjects components in British, American,
Canadian, Australian, oriental ‘otherly’ cultures; to evaluate competing or conflicting critical
39
approaches; to develop skills of written analysis which incorporates research, argument
development and close reading.
#
1
Title
Old worlds New worlds.
Themes for Presentation & Discussion. Bibliography
Implications of the new world utopian constructions and the
significances of exilic dislocation, discovery, self-renewal and
individuation through the explorations of otherness.
Conflicting interpretations of new world concepts and issues



Mircea Eliade. ‘Paradise and Utopia: Mythical
Geography and Eschatology’. The Quest. History
and Meaning in Religion, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1969, 1984. 88-112
Tzvetan Todorov. The Conquest of America: The
Question of the Other. New York: Harper, 1987. 5672 (40 pages)
Jacques Derrida. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: U
of Chicago Press, 1982. 18-30
FURTHER READING





Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1969
Carl G. Jung. The Archetypes of the Collective
Unconscious. Vol 9 Part 1 of Collected Works 2nd ed
trans R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968
Jacques Lacan. Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis. New York: Norton, 1978
Richard P. Sugg, ed. Jungian Literary Criticism.
Evanston, Ill: Northwestern UP, 1992
Hayden White. Tropics of Discourse. Essays in
Culture Criticism. Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins UP,
1978. ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’ 121135.’The Forms of Wilderness: Archaeology of an
Idea’136-182. ‘The Noble Savage Theme as Savage’
183-206
40
2
The Subject of
Otherness, Return
and Resistance
Versions of “America” and viewing the American Other.
Narratives of supplementarity and the issue of
representation. Utopian developmental scenarios, trauma
and separation and return anxiety, exilic and new world
adventuring, center-margin rapports, the cult of the body,
utopian erotic couples, archetypal figures at work in the
displacement experience, power subversion, landscape
and ornament-monument forms, patterns of cultural
dis/repossession. Perspectives of displacement.


Jean Baudrillard. America. London: Verso, 1988, 2150
Jane Gallop, ‘The American Other’. Reading Lacan.
New York: Cornell University Press, 1987, 55-73.
(50 pages)
FURTHER READING
 Michael Seidel. Exile and the Narrative Imagination.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986
 Gianni Vattimo. The End of Modernity. Nihilism and
Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1990
 Christine Brooke-Rose. ‘Exsul.’ Exile and Creativity.
Signposts, Travelers, Ousiders, Backward Glances. Ed
Susan Rubin Suleiman. Durham: Duke U.P., 1998.
9-25
 Kumar. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1991
 Ruth Levitas. The Concept of Utopia. Hertfortshire:
Syracuse UP, 1990
 Thomas Peyser. Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization
in the Era of American Literary Realism. Durham:
Duke UP, 1998
 Ralph Pordzik. The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A
Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in New
English Literatures. New York: Peter Lang, 2001
 Paul Ricoeur. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ed.
George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia UP, 1986
3
Subjects of
migration, return
and resistance.
The subjects of (dis)location – people, places, times,
symbolic objects – are discussed through some of the
dominant features of the transatlantic dialogue between a
European “Englishness” spoken through configurative
41
narration and otherly spaces such as America, Asia,
Australia.


Peter Brooks. ‘Repetition, Repression and Return:
The Plotting of Great Expectations’.
Reading for the Plot. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1998. 113-142
Edward Said. ‘Themes of Resistance Culture’.
‘Freedom from Domination in Future’,
‘Movements and Migrations’. Culture and
Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1993. 133- 252; (40
pages)
FURTHER READING
 Rodolphe Gasche. The Stain of the Mirror. Derrida
and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1986
 Paul Giles. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions
and the Transatlantic Imaginary. Durham: Duke UP,
2002
 Rene Girard. Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1965
 Girard. The Scapegoat. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1965
 Frederic Jameson. The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1981
 Gerald J. Kennedy. Exile, Writing and American
Identity. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993
4
The Exilic Subject.
Empire and “otherly” spaces: the “orient”, Canada,
Australia. The borderline subject: the uncanny elsewhere
(alibi), modes of abjection. The (mis)representation of the
new world through modes of difference and repetition:
new world mythical geographies, the eschatology of
foundation myths, the “American dream” variations.



Rene Girard. The Scapegoat. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1965. 24-52
Julia Kristeva. From Filth to Defilement’. Powers of
Horror. New York: Columbia University Press,
1982. 56-77
Homi K. Bhabha. ‘DissemiNation: time, narrative
42
and the margins of the modern nation’. Homi K.
Bhabha (ed). Nation and Narration. London:
Routledge, 1990. 291-321.
(80 pages)
FURTHER READING


5
The Subject of the
Margin
Matei Calinescu. Rereading, New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1993
Jacques Derrida. ‘Living on Bordelines’.
Deconstruction and Criticism London Ed. Harold
Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H,
Hartman and Hillis J, Miller. Routledge, 1979. 75176.
Interpretative models of empire and colonial projections;
psychoanalytical, postmodern, (post)colonial. Utopia :
coordinates between difference and repetition. Great
Britain and America. Subjects of (dis)location, discovery,
renewal. Utopia and identity. New world archetypal
imagery. Projections of otherly spaces: psychoanalytical
and deconstructive views.


Benita Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories of
Colonial Discourse’. The Post-colonial Studies Reader.
Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin.
London: Routledge, 1995. 36-45
Peter Mason. Deconstructing America.
Representations of the Other. London: Routledge,
1990. 24-45.
FURTHER READING



6
The Subject
Edward Said. Orientalism. London: Routledge, 1978
William W. Stowe. Going Abroad. European Travel in
Nineteenth Century American Culture. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1994
Tony Tanner. The American Mystery. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2000
Tanner. Venice Desired. Cambridge: Harvard UP,

1992
Representations of “hysteria” in objects of memory
constructed as new world markers: simulacrum,
43
Dynamics
erasure, the (missed) encounter with the real.

Malcolm Bradbury. Dangerous Pilgrimages.
Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel. London:
Penguin, 1995. 69-90

Evelyn Ender. ‘Engendering the Mind’. Sexing the
Mind. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1995. 138-162. (45 pages)
FURTHER READING







7.
The Subject
Subversion.
Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life.
Berkeley: U of California Press, 1984
Walter Benjamin “ The Arcades Project” 393-401
Paul Virilio “The Overexposed City” 440-449. Gary
Bridge and Sophie Watson. The City Reader.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2002
Paul Carter. The Road to Botany Bay. London: Faber
and Faber, 1987
Vladimir Jankelevitch. Ireversibilul si nostalgia.
Bucuresti: Univers Enciclopedic, 1998.
“Nostalgia” 249-283
Paul Ricoeur. Despre interpretare. Eseu asupra lui
Freud. Bucuresti: Editura Trei, 1998, 1965)
of Identity and (dis)location issues: rereading selfhood,
reflection, construction, projection. The function of
mimetic models in the construction of the new world
subject. Subversion games in the perception of
(post)colonial space.

Rene Girard. Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. 58-89
 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffis and Helen Tiffin. ‘PostColonial Reconstructions: Literature, Meaning,
Value’. Literature in the Modern World. Ed. Dennis
Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
234-245.
(40 pages)
FURTHER READING

Eric Cheyfitz. The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation
44




8
The Voyaging
Subject
and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991
Jacques Derrida. Dissemination. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1981
Gianni Vattimo. The Transparent Society. Baltimore.
The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992
Arthur Versluis. The Esoteric Origins of the American
Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001
Alex Zwerdling. Improvised Europeans: American
Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London. New
York: Basic Books, 1998
The subject of dialogic voyages marked by simulacra, the
“great game” and the narration of otherness in travel
writing that acknowledges the difficulties of the “signed”
monument.


Edward Said, ‘The Pleasures of Imperialism’.
Culture and Imperialism. 175-196
J. Culler ‘The Semiotics of Tourism’, ‘Rubbish
Theory’ Jonathan Culler. Framing the Sign. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1988. 153-168. (35 pages)
FURTHER READING




9
The Hybrid Subject
Sharon Zukin.’Landscapes of Power: From Detroit
to Disney World.’ 197-208
Elisabeth Grosz. ‘Bodies-Cities.’ 297-304
Jane M. Jacobs. ‘The Death and Life of Great
American Cities.’ 351-357
Michel de Certeau. ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’
383-393
The hybrid vision employed in representations of
otherness generative of invented and remembered
centers, supplemented by “colonial” marginality.


Vesna Goldsworthy. Inventing Ruritania. The
Imperialism of Imagination. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1998. 28-51
Roxana Oltean. ‘The utopian Play of Spaces in ‘The
Great Good Place’. Spaces of Utopia in the Writings of
Henry James. Bucuresti: Editura Universitatii
45
Bucuresti, 2005. 92-101.
(40 pages)
FURTHER READING


1979





(1986)
10
(M)otherland
Issues
Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities.
Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism.
London: Verso, 1983
Y.-F. Tuan. Landscapes of Fear. Oxford: Blackwell,
Y.-F. Tuan. Space and Place: The Perspective of
Experience. London: Edward Arnold, 1977
Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift. Eds. Mapping the
Subject. Geographies of Cultural Transformation.
London: Routledge, 1995
‘Mapping the Subject’ 13-57
Homi Bhabha. The Location of Culture. London:
Routledge, 1994
Michel Foucault. ‘Of Other Spaces’. Diacritics 16
Double figures/spaces.
(M)otherlands considered as landscapes of memory and
prophetic projection marked by double figures and
modes of exilic distancing, difference and repetition.

Gilles Deleuze, ‘Repetition for Itself’. Difference and
Repetition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992.
26-42
 Irina Grigorescu Pana,’The Sphinx Demolished: the
Alibi of Australia’. Fictions of Exile in Australian
Literature Melbourne: Equator, 200. 11-24
 Maria Todorova. Imagining the Balkans. New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 105135.
(50 pages)
FURTHER READING


Elmar Holenstein. ‘The Zero-Point of Orientation:
The Placement of the I in Perceived Space’
Charles W. Bonner ‘The Status and Significance of
the Body in Lacan’s Imaginary and Symbolic
Orders’ 232-252
46

11
Uncanny Subjects
Judith Bulter ‘Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily
Inscriptions’ 307-315
The “uncanny” subject of displacement generative of
remappings of
transatlantic cultural space is both
reflective and generative of problematic cultural spaces
with a “trickster” object and various “carnivalesque”
body in need of rewriting.
 Linda Ruth Williams, ‘The Circulating Letter’;
‘Home Is where the Uncanny Is’. Psychoanalysis and
the Literary Subject. London: Arnold, 2004. 5865.177-182
 Peter Brooks, Body Work. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1993. 199-220.
(35 pages)
FURTHER READING




12
Boundaries of
Dislocation
Emily Fourmy Cutrer. ‘ A Pragmatic Mode of
Seeing’. James, Howells and the Polotics of Vision.’
American Iconology. New Approaches to Nineteenth
Century Art and Literature. Ed. David. C. Miller.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1993. 259-275
Stephen Daniels. Fields of Vision. Landscape Imagery
and National Identity in England and the United
States. Princeton, N.J: Princeton U P, 1993
Nicholas Mirzoeff. An Introduction to Visual Culture.
London: Routledge, 1999 ‘Transculture. From
Kongo to the Congo’ 129-159
Nicholas Mizroeff. Bodyscape. Art, Modernity and the
Ideal Figure. London: Routledge, 1995
Modes of (dis)location considered from various critical
and methodological perspectives effectively employed in
contemporary interpretative discussions of texts.
(psychoanalytical, hermeneutical deconstructive, postcolonial).

Rodica Mihaila, ‘Crossing Borders/Exploring
Boundaries: American Studies and the Question of
the Post-Communist Other’. ‘A Curious Affinity’
Bellow’s Invention of Romania in The Dean’s
47


December’
Rodica Mihaila and Irina Grigorescu Pana. Eds.
America in/from Romania, Essays in Cultural Dialogue.
Bucuresti, Univers Enciclopedic, 2003. 15-31; 298313
Peter Brooks. ‘Endgames.’ Reading for the Plot. 313323. (40 pages)
FURTHER READING
 Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1993
 Stjepan Mestrovic. The Balkanization of the West.
London: Routledge, 1994
 Clifford Geertz. The Interpretation of Culture. New
York: Basic Books, 1973
 Y.-F. Tuan. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental
Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1974
 W.J.T. Mitchell. Ed. Landscape and Power. Chicago:
Chicago UP. 2002. Charles Harrison: ‘The Effects of
Landscape’ 203-241.
 Edward W. Said. ‘ Invention, Memory and Place’
241 –261
Profile
PROF. IRINA GRIGORESCU PANA teaches British and American literature at the
University of Bucharest, the Faculty of Foreign Languages in both undergraduate and
postgraduate programmes. Between 1986 and 1996 she was a lecturer at Monash
University (Australia), where she coordinated courses in critical theory and literary studies.
She is a member of the Writers’ Union of Romania, secretary to the Romanian Association of
American Studies and an editor of the Bucharest University Review. Her teaching and research
interests are in the field of British and European Renaissance poetry, American and
Australian literature, contemporary interpretative approaches, psychoanalysis and culture,
the literature of exile, translation and creative writing.
Recent publications


New/Old Worlds. Spaces of Transition. Bucuresti: 2007 (forthcoming)
Our America. Co-edited, with an introductory study. Bucharest, 2005
48




America in/from Romania. Essays in Cultural Dialogue. Coedited with Rodica Mihaila.
study.Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, 2003
Transatlantic Connections. Essays in Cultural Relocation. Coedited, with Rodica
Mihaila. Bucharest: Integral, 2000
The Sphinx Demolished. Fictions of Exile in Australian Literature. Melbourne: Equator
Publishers, 2000
-The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature. Berna: Peter Lang Verlag,
1996
49
5. Irish Hyphenated Identity Recordings
Module supervisor: Dr. Ioana Zirra
Syllabus for Term I
# Title
1
Irish hyphenated identity;
geographical perspectivism
history; colonial neighboring.
Themes for Presentation/Discussion
Bibliography
Emily Apter (2006) The Translation Zone.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
from Chapter 16 A New Comparative
Literature, pp. 243-251
M.W. Heslinga, The Irish Border as a
Cultural Divide, Van Gorcum Assen, The
Netherlands 1979, part 1, chapt.3 ‘Ireland’
and Other Geographical Names,pp 30-37
* Seamus Heaney “Ocean’s Love to Ireland”
from North (1975). London: Faber and
Faber
2
The historic land patches and
the two Irish states
The four traditional provinces (fields) &
the distribution of the great families on the
historic land. The political segmentation
and its consequences (the Pale and the Old
English; the Jamesian Plantation after the
Tudor plantations and the Ulster Custom;
the Cromwellian land settlement and other
transfers of land ownership - landlordism
and absenteism; the Union and Partition)
Dudley Edwards, Ruth (1989). An Atlas of
Irish History. London & New York:
Routledge. (or e-book) part IV: Politics –
The Great Families of Ireland; The Pale
1300-1596; Part VII: Cromwelian land
confiscations; The transfer of land
ownership I and II : 1603-1778; 1870-1916
50
*Paul Muldoon: “The Boundary
Commission”
3
Colonial history avant la lettre:
Absorbed, Enforced,
Undermined Conquests
4
.
The Irish “sister” kingdom of
Britain: the Union
Maire and Conor Cruise O’Brien (1973). A
Concise History of Ireland. London: Thames
and Hudson. Ch. 3 “A Conquest
Absorbed” 4. “Protestant Conquest” 5.
“Protestant Conquest Undermined”
* The Story of Tuan MacCairill
Irish legislation during the Union; the
tragedy of the Famine and Britain’s
accusation of genocyde; the failure of the
Union parliament to decolonize Ireland
Ruth Dudley Edwards 1989 Chapters 30,
31 “O’Connell and Young Ireland”; “Irish
Representation at Westminster” 1800-1918
5
6
Resistance to the British rule in
the 19th c; Protestant versus
Catholic lines in the
decolonization of Ireland:
constitutional campaigns versus
terrorism. Independence
TO BE OR NOT TO BE A
DOMINION The Two Political
Establishments after the
Partition to the present
* W.B Yeats „Easter 1916”
Catholic agrarian problems and
movements; Protestant urban leadership
before and during the Union;
constitutional campaigns and terrorist
action; the Anglo-Irish and the Civil War
Maire and Conor Cruise O’Brien (1973)
Chapters 6 and 7: “Catholic resurgences
and Protestant Reaction”; “The Struggle
for Independence” (97-153)
Ruth Dudley Edwards The Irish
Militia/The 1798 Rising/The 1916
Rising/The Anglo-Irish war; The Civil
War
* Popular ballads and other historical
recordings: The Croppy Boy; Modern Irish
folklore from O. Sullivan: Irish Folklore
* George Bernard Shaw John Bull’s Other
Island
Maire and Connor Cruise O’Brien 1973
Chapt. 8 “Self-Government” (153-175)
51
7
8
9
x
x
x
Literary recordings of the
Anglo-Irish hyphenated identity
in the course of time
Twentieth century cultural
institutions, names, discourses
and names: from Anglo-Irish to
Irish along the lines of Cultural
Nationalism
Methodological observations
about the Irish identity
landmarks
James Joyce’s Ulysses as a
hyphenated identity
masterpiece – via excerpts from
the annotated edition by Don
Gifford and Robert Seidman (to
be provided in electronic book
form)
Dean Swift: A Modest Proposal; Edmund
Burke’s Letter to his son Richard Burke, Esq.
IASAIL – IASIL, The Field Day Theatrical
Company archives and Hubert Butler’s
“Grandmother and Wolfe Tone”
Anglo-Irish, Protestant and HibernoEnglish, Catholic vocabularies before and
after Partition (comparison of the written
sources). The connection of Irish
perspectivism with the power and cultural
centres.
“Telemachus” (the Anglo-Irish Buck
Mulligan toying with the nationalist
subaltern Stephen; the ironic icon of
Mother Ireland in 1904 ); “Nestor”
(Stephen, the cosmopolitan young man
versus the West Briton Mr. Deasy, the
outdated establishment man). The Dublin
statues in “Hades”. The savage parable of
Irish history in “The Oxen of the Sun”
52
6. Celtic Cultural Memory in the British
Isles
Dr. Ioana Zirra, Dr. James Brown, Dr. Martin Pottter
# Title
1
Sites of Memory: The
archaeological memory
sources from tourism to
scholarship
Themes for Presentation/Discussion
Bibliography
Power-point presentation of
archaeological sites and oral
commentary
Arnold, Bruce Irish Art, London: Thames
and Hudson, 1969, 1977, 1991
The scholarly classification and
interpretation of museum exhibits
The International Celtic Exhibition
Album I CELTI, Bompiani, 1991:
2
3
4
Gaelic Place-Name Lore
(3 sessions)
– oral tradition of dinnseanchas in Gaelic
culture– legends and later literary
reference points for proving the
connection between the knowledge of
place-name lore and identity,
– the mythological, historical, or religious
associations of the Celtic, Gaelic, Brythonic
place-names as a sociolinguistic
differentiation factor
Bibliography:
Ireland: Adrian Room. A Dictionary of
Place Names. Belfast:Appletree Press. 1986,
1988
Seamus Heaney’s essay The Sense of Place
in Preoccupations. London: Faber and
Faber. 1980 and Brian Friel’s play
Translations
Scotland: 1) “Òran na Comhachaig / The
Song of the Owl”, Trans. Meg Bateman, in
53
Wilson McLeod and Meg Bateman, eds.
Duanaire na Sracaire / Songbook of the
Pillagers. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2007. 392-405
(7 pages in English)2) Sorley Maclean,
“Hallaig”, in Reothairt is Contraigh: Taghadh
de Dhàin 1932-72 / Spring Tide and Neap
Tide: Choice of Poems 1932-1972. Edinburgh:
Canongate, 1977. 142-145 (2 pages in
English)3) John MacInnes. “Gleanings
from Raasay Tradition.” Dùthchas nan
Gàidheal: Selected Essays of John
MacInnes. Ed. Michael Newton.
Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2006. 64-80 (26 pages)
Wales: David Jones ‘Welshness in Wales’,
in David Jones Epoch and Artist 51-3.
David Jones ‘A London Artist Looks at
Contemporary Wales’, in David Jones The
Dying Gaul 35-40.
5
6
7
Celtic territorial, demographic
and linguistic archives and
historical mutations
– the map as palimpsest in the
decentralized Celtic/Gaelic territories: the
Irish túath and baile:; the origins of the
Highland / Lowlands division late
medieval; ancient Celtic, Pictish, Gaelic,
Norse, Scots and English elements in
Highland and Hebridean toponymy;
- Celtic law of persons and property;
offences, punishments; contracts, pledges
and sureties; punishment ; the brehons
– the language archive: the medieval rise
and decline of Gaelic; the decline of the
Irish Gaeltacht until the 19th century; the
North-South division in nowadays’
spoken Welsh
Bibliography:
Ireland: Fergus, Kelly: AGuide to Early
Irish Law. Dublin: Dubling Institute of
Advanced Study. 1988, 1991 (selections);
Deane, Seamus (ed) The Field Day
54
Anthology of Irish Writing, Derry: Field Day
Publications. 1991. vol I IRELAND AND
HER PAST: TOPOGRAPHICAL AND
HISTORICAL WRITING TO 1690 (Richard
Stannihurst the Dubliner) (235-247)
Scotland:Michael Newton. Warriors of the
Word: The World of the Scottish Highlanders.
Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2009. 7-43 (Chapter:
“Themes in Scottish History”) (36 pages);
Wales:Janet Davies The Welsh Language.
Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993
(Selections)
8 . Orality and literacy
.
9
10
– inapropriacy of assimilating oral
tradition to folklore in the Gaelic context
(oral tradition- circulated in writing or
print ; “folklore” as a more informal
popular tradition)
– dynamics of oral tradition and the
interaction with the written culture: the
persistence of manuscript culture in
Scotland and Ireland: the late adoption of
printing in Scotland and the anti-colonial
resistance through production of late
manuscripts in families with Gaelic names
- nowadays’ oral/ literary varieties of
Welsh;
– the axiology of memory in oral culture in
general and in the Gaelic tradition;
- memory transmission institutions: the
ceilidh house; the courts of poetry; the
families of brehons
– the role of the village bards and folklore
festivals in perpetuating traditional
cultural forms and negotiating the
encounter with new experiences (urban
life, world war, etc)
Bibliography:
Ireland 1. Robert Welch (ed) The Oxford
Companion to Irish Literature: “Manuscripts
before 1700” “Manuscripts after 1700”;
55
families of scribes; “festivals”. 2. Daniel
Corkery: The Hidden Ireland – Courts of
Poetry (circ. 15 pages)
Scotland: Michael Newton. Warriors of the
Word: The World of the Scottish
Highlanders. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2009.
80-121 (Chapter: “Literature and Oral
Tradition.”) (42 pages)
The Welsh Eisteddfod
11
12
13
14
Antiquarianism and Revivalism:
Ancient versus Modern Uses of
Myth– The Comparative
Overview of Irish, Scottish,
Welsh Pantheon and
Corresponding Institutions
The Celtic memory thesaurus of the Royal
Irish Academy in Dublin; the Celtic
twilight pantheon; the modern use of
myth to construct the Irish militarist ethos
(The Shan Van Vocht versus the
mythological cycle and their Celtic/Gaelic
reiteration in romantic revivalism;
Cuchulain in urban Protestant folklore)
Bibliography:
Ireland Robert Welch. The Oxford
Companion to Irish
Literature.” the mythological cycle”;” the
Royal Irish Academy”; The Wordsworth
Book of Irish Folktales, illustrated by Arthur
Rackham; Lady Gregory: Of Gods and
Fighting Men; Deane, Seamus (ed.) The
Field Day of Irish Literature, Derry: Field
Day Publications. 1991. vol 1, MacCana,
Proinsias (ed.) EARLY AND MIDDLE
IRISH LITERATURE (600-1600) (p1-59)
Scotland
Reactions to post-Culloden trauma – the
violent end of the old order
– Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, Ais
Eirigh na Sean Chanoin Albannaich
(Resurrection of the old Scottish tongue),
1751– affirmation of Gaelic identity
addressed to Gaelic readers
– James Macpherson, Ossian, 1760 –
repackaging native tradition for outside
56
consumption – J.F. Campbell, Popular
Tales of the West Highlands, 1860 - accurate
transcription, literal translation
– Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica,
1900 – traditional texts polished – evidence
of special spiritual character of the Gaels
(inspiration for twentieth-century
idealization of “Celtic Christianity”
1) Illustrative extracts from the texts
mentioned above and others similar (15
pages)
2) Thomas A. McKean. “The Fieldwork
Legacy of James Macpherson.” Journal
of American Folklore, 114.454
(2001):447–463 (17 pages)
Wales - antiquarian activity, such as Lady
Charlotte Guest's assembling of The
Mabinogion in the nineteenth century
- poetry; the impact of Welsh culture on
English-language culture and poetry in
English. The influence on English poets;
Welsh English-language poets. David
Jones, Dylan Thomas and G M Hopkins.
- the Arthur Legends
The contribution of Welsh folklore to
English, and indeed European, culture and
cultural awareness: the Arthur legends;
the Breton-French tradition (Thomas
Malory); the Welsh tradition in The
Mabinogion and in Geoffrey of
Monmouth's The History of the Kings of
Britain. Welsh sources in Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight.
Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the
Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis
Thorpe. London: Penguin, 1966.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Major Works.
Ed. Catherine Phillips. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1986.
Jones, David. In Parenthesis. New York:
New York Review of Books, 2003.
−−−. The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments.
57
London: Faber, 1995.
−−−. The Dying Gaul and Other Writings.
Ed. Harman Grisewood. London:
Faber, 1978.
−−−. The Anathemata: Fragments of an
Attempted Writing. London: Faber, 1972.
−−−. Epoch and Artist. Ed. Harman
Grisewood. London: Faber, 1959.
The Mabinogion. Trans. Gwyn Jones and
Thomas Jones. London: Dent, 1993.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Pearl,
Cleanness, Patience. Ed. J. J.
Anderson. London: Dent, 1996.
58
7.Aspects of Scottish Culture
Module Supervisor: Mr. James Brown
#
Title
1
Scotland: A Short
Presentation
Themes for Presentation & Discussion. Bibliography
This first unit is intended to provide background
information for subsequent units, by offering students a
basic introduction to the geography of Scotland—
physical and cultural regions, important places,
toponymy etc.—, and to some of the principal stages
and events in the history of Scotland.
Before the class, students should be thoroughly familiar
with the content of:

2-3
Configurations of
Scottish National
Identity
Brassey, Richard and Stewart Ross, The Story of
Scotland, London: Orion, 1999, pp. 3-32
Evidence for a Scottish national identity. Relation to
British identity. What are people identifying with when
they identify themselves as Scottish? Political and
institutional bases for Scottish identity. Stereotypical
representations of Scottishness (cinema, tourism etc).
Cultural bases for Scottish identity.




Bond, Ross & Michael Rosie. “National Identities
in Post-Devolution Scotland.” University of
Edinburgh, Institute of Governance, 2002
<http://www.institute-ofgovernance.org/onlinepub /bondrosie.html>
Calder, Angus. “Describing Scottish Culture.”
Scotlands of the Mind. Edinburgh: Luath, 2002,
pp. 91-108
McCrone, David. “What is Scotland.”
Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Nation.
2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2001. pp. 31-53
McCrone, David. “Scottish Culture: Images and
Icons.” op. cit.. pp. 127-148
59
4-5
History and Myth
The quest for Scottish origins. Gaels v. Picts. Medieval
and modern origin myths and their uses. The changing
in Scottish Culture
fortunes of Scottish historical studies. Popular
representations of history: heroes, romantic victims etc.
Alternative interpretations. Historicism in Scottish
architecture.




6-7
Religion and
Scottish Culture
Foster, Sally. Picts, Gaels and Scots. 2nd ed.
London: Batsford, 2004, pp. 7-12, 69-97
Kidd, Colin. Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish
Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo
British Identity, 1689-1830. Cambridge: CUP,
1993, pp. 219-239
McCrone, David. “Tomorrow’s Ancestors:
Nationalism, Identity and History.” Scottish
History: The Power of the Past. Ed. Edward J.
Cowan & Richard Finlay. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
U.P., 2002, pp. 253-271
McKean, Charles. “Real or False Fortifications”.
The Scottish Chateau: The Country House of
Renaissance Scotland. Rev. ed. Stroud: Sutton,
2004, pp. 39-58
Early Christianity in Scotland. The myth of Celtic
Christianity. Church and nation in the Middle Ages.
The Reformation and its cultural consequences.
Calvinism and Scottish identity. Religion in
contemporary Scotland
 Clancy, Thomas Owen and Gilbert Márkus OP,
eds. Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery.
Edinburgh: EUP, 1995, pp. 129-163
OR
 Storrar, William. “The Reformed Vision:A Godly
Nation.” Scottish Identity: A Christian Vision.
Edinburgh: Handsel, 1990, pp. 26-54
8-9
Languages of
Scotland: Gaelic
and Scots
Characteristics of Scots as a spoken and written
language (or “semi-language”). Socio-linguistic aspects.
Scots and English in modern Scottish literature.
The changing status of Gaelic in Scotland. Gaelic as a
60
medium of literature and oral tradition. Contemporary
language politics



10-
Land and Scottish
11
Culture
Scotland as “country”. Traditional attitudes to
landscape. How Scotland came to be represented as
highland. Living in the highlands and islands today.
Political issues around land ownership




1213
Approaching
Scottish Folklore
Corbett, John. “Varieties of Scots.” Language and
Scottish Literature, Edinburgh: EUP, 1997, pp. 121
Macdonald, Sharon. “‘Saving the Gaelic’:
Language Revival and Identity.” Reimagining
Culture: Histories, Identities and the Gaelic
Renaissance. Oxford: Berg, 1997, pp. 217-243
Newton, Michael. “The Organization of Society.”
A Handbook of the Scottish Gaelic World. Dublin:
Four Courts Press, 2000, pp. 108-138
Devine, T.M. “Highlandism and Scottish
Identity.” The Scottish Nation 1700-2000.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000, pp. 231-245
McCrone, David. “Land, Democracy & Culture
In
Scotland.”
10th
October
1997.
http://www.caledonia.org.uk/land/mccrone.ht
m#Contents [c. 9,000 words]
Macdonald, Sharon. “’A Way of Life’: Crofting,
Tradition and People.” Reimagining Culture:
Histories, Identities and the Gaelic Renaissance.
Oxford: Berg, 1997, pp. 101-127
Newton, Michael. “Landscape and Culture.” A
Handbook of the Scottish Gaelic World. Dublin:
Four Courts Press, 2000, pp. 199-225
The Romantic “discovery” of popular culture.
Interaction of oral and literary culture. Scottish folklore
study since the 1950s. Marginalization and revival of
interest in folklore. Examples from Scottish tradition.
Lowland songs and ballads. Gaelic women’s songs.
Tales of the supernatural otherworld. Contemporary
trends in interpretation
 Bruford, Alan, “Introduction.” Scottish Traditional
61
14
Conclusions
Tales. Ed. Alan Bruford and Donald A.
MacDonald. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1994, pp. 1-28
 Henderson, Hamish. “The Man with the Big Box.”
The Summer Walkers: Travelling People and PearlFishers in the Highlands of Scotland. By Timothy
Neat. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996 , pp. 65-85
 MacInnes, John. “Looking at Legends of the
Supernatural.” Transactions of the Gaelic Society of
Inverness LIX (1994-96): 1-20
Alternative perspectives. Future possibilities. Looking
beyond national identity

Whyte, Christopher. “Scottishness and Scottish
Poetry.” Modern Scottish Poetry. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh U.P., 2004: 7-17
* Each unit is accompanied by a variety of extracts from texts including those listed
above; these will be made available to students before each class. Books of general
relevance in the British Cultural Studies Centre collection include:




David Daiches ed., The New Companion to Scottish Culture, Edinburgh: Polygon, 1993
Thomson, Derick S. The Companion to Gaelic Scotland. New ed. Glasgow: Gairm, 1994
J.D. Mackie, A History of Scotland, 2nd ed.; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978
David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: the sociology of a stateless nation, London:
Routledge, 1992
Marshall Walker, Scottish Literature since 1707, London: Longman, 1996
62
8. History of Ideas II
– Cultural Identity
Module Supervisor: Mihaela Irimia
Syllabus for Term II
#
Title
Themes for Presentation & Discussion
Bibliography
1
STRUCTURALISM to
POST-STRUCTURALISM,
or from ‘le champ du signe’
to ‘le chant du cygne’
The ‘strong moment’ of the Western critical
tradition; Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology,
Barthes’s partiality and the ‘death of the author’,
Foucault’s demise of the classic paradigm; basic
oppositions from the in vitro to the in vivo
situation; text – cotext – context, from text to
context; sign(ification)s in cultural context: the reinsertion of the ‘lived’ (the human element,
history, time, contingency); the historicity of
meaning and the call of the local; from truth to
truths, the dissemination of the ruling centre,
bipolar into multipolar reality; the question of
interestedness.
Total amount: 51 pages
 Roland Barthes, “Positions” [IF] – English trans.
“Taking Sides”, in Critical Essays, Evanston:
Northwestern U.P., 1972, pp. 159-170 [MI]
 Roland Barthes, “Conférance inaugurale,
Collège de France” (1977) [IF] – English trans.
“Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France” (1978),
in Susan Sontag (ed.), A Barthes Reader, New
York: Hill & Wang, 1982, pp. 457-478 [BCSC]
[MI]
 Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur” (1968)
[IF] - English trans. “The Death of the Author”,
in Image - Music - Text, New York: Hill & Wang,
1977, pp. 228-231 [MI]
 Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory” (1986),
63
in Douglas Tallack, Critical Theory - A Reader,
New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo,
Singapore: Harvester, Wheatsheaf, 1995, pp. 7887 [MI]
 Mihaela Irimia, The Stimulating Difference (1995)
[BCSC] [ED] [BN] [MI]
FURTHER READING
 Appleby, Joyce, Elizabeth Covington, David
Hoyt, Michael Latham, Allison Sneider (eds.),
Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical
Perspective, New York & London: Routledge,
1996
 Barry, Peter (ed.), Issues in Contemporary Critical
Theory, London: Mcmillan, 1987
 Barthes, Roland, Critical Essays, Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1972
 Barthes, Roland, Image - Music - Text, New York:
Hill & Wang, 1977
 Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993
 Cahoone, Lawrence (ed.), From Modernism to
Postmodernism: An Anthology, Cambridge:
Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1996
 Girard, René, La violence et le sacré, Pars: Grasset,
1972
 Macksey, Richard, The Structuralist Controversy:
The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,
Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1970
 Pavel, Toma, Le mirage linguistique: Éssai sur la
modernisation intellectuelle (1988) – English trans.
The Feud of Language (1989) – Romanian trans.
Mirajul lingvistic, Bucureşti: Univers, 1993, pp.
9-27, 181-202 [BN] [ED] [MI]
 Sarup, Madan, An Introduction to PostStructuralism and Postmodernism, New York,
London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore:
Harvester / Wheatsheaf, 1993 (© 1988)
 Sontag, Susan (ed.), The Barthes Reader, New
York: Hill and Wang, 1982
 Tallack, Douglas, Critical Theory - A Reader, New
64
2
POSTMODERNISM (1):
The Postmodern Condition
– towards a Fragmented
Identity
Total amount: 58 pages
York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo,
Singapore: Harvester, Wheatsheaf, 1995
The postmodern, postmodernity, postmodernism
– continuity and discontinuity with the modern,
modernity, modernism; period concepts more than
ever (?): modernity vs. postmodernity or late
modernity; from the whole to the fragment, from
the one to the multiple, from identity to identities;
the question and questioning of Kantian space:
physical vs. virtual space, living in several places,
travelling abroad while at home (polytropia); the
question and questioning of Kantian time: beating
time records, living in several ages at one time
(polychronia); computer apocalypse, or the
‘apocalypse now’ syndrome; diffusion, looseness,
undecidability; postindustrial societies: the death of
the real, the advent or ‘precession’ of simulacra;
artificial intelligence, alternative knowledges;
multiculturalism.
 Jean François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne:
Rapport sur le savoir, Les Éditions de Minuit,
1979 [IF] [NEC] – English trans. The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1984, pp. 55-68
[MI] – Romanian trans. Condiţia postmodernă Raport asupra cunoaşterii, Bucureşti: Babel, 1993
[BN] [MI]
 Jean François Lyotard, “Qu’est-ce que le
postmodernisme?” (1983) [IF] – English trans.
“Answering
the
Question:
What
Is
Postmodernism?” in Thomas Docherty (ed.),
Postmodernism: A Reader , 1993, pp. 38-50
[BCSC] [MI]
 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, in Thomas
Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, 1993,
pp. 62-75 [BCSC] [MI]
 Daniel Bell, “The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society” (1976), in Lawrence Cahoone (ed.),
From Modernism to Postmodernism, 1996, pp. 423433 [MI]
 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation (1981)
[IF] – English trans. Simulacra and Simulations
65
(1988), in Peter Brooker (ed.), Modernism /
Postmodernism, London & New York: Longman,
1996, pp. 151-161 [MI]
FURTHER READING

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

Bauman, Zygmunt, Life in Fragments: Essays
in Postmodern Morality, Oxford: Blackwell,
1998 (© 1995)
Bertens, Hans, The Idea of the Postmodern: A
History, London & New York: Routledge,
1995
Cambers, Ian, Migrancy, Culture, Identity,
London & New York: Routledge, 1995 (©
1994)
de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday
Life, trans. S. Rendell, Berkeley & Los
Angeles: University of California Press,
1984
Michel de Certeau, Hétérologies – Discours
sur l’Autre (1986) [IF] – English trans.
Heterologies: Discourse on the Other,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986, pp. vii-xx [MI]
Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987
Deleuze, Giles & Félix Guattari, “L’AntiOedipe” (1972) [IF] – English trans. “AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”
(1977), in Lawrence Cahoone (ed.), From
Modernism to Postmodernism, 1996, pp. 401420 [MI]
Gabardi, Wayne, Negotiating Postmodernism,
Minneapolis & London: University of
Minnesota Press,
Harvey,
David,
The
Condition
of
Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996 (©
1990)
Hunt, Lynn (ed.), The New Cultural History,
Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University
of California Press, 1989
McHale, Brian, Constructing Postmodernism,
London & New York: Routledge, 1992
66
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3
POSTMODERNISM (2):
Postmodern Theory – from
Essentialism to Relativism,
from Strong to Weak
Thinking
Total amount: 71 pages
Lyotard, Jean-François, Le postmoderne
expliqué aux enfants, Paris: Galilée, 1986
Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern
Condition:
A
Report
on
Knowledge,
Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1992 (© 1984)
Pile, Steve & Nigel Thrift, Mapping the
Subject:
Geographies
of
Cultural
Transformation, London & New York:
Routledge, 1995
Tester, Keith, The Life and Times of PostModernity, London & New York: Routledge,
1993
Vattimo, Gianni, Al di là del soggetto, Milano:
Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1981
An unprecedented display of relativism; the
revisionism of European values (logocentrism,
Western metaphysics, classic Greek philosophy,
Christian religion, liberal humanism); the
promotion of alternatives (antifoundationalism,
multiculturalism, local knowledge, minority rights,
minority ideologies etc.); reality as/is narrative –
textualist tropes; literature and the liminal;
rhetorical reading (after the death of the author
and the birth of the reader) – the hermeneutic
moment: interpretation as invention; reality as
invention: ‘cultural constructs’.
 Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in
Postmodern Theory and Culture, Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 1987, pp. 84-96 [MI]
 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in
the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), in
Writing and Difference, Chicago University Press,
Chicago, 1978; and in Joyce Appleby et al.
(eds.), Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical
Perspective, 1996, pp. 223-241 [MI]
 Gianni Vattimo, Il pensiero debole, Feltrinelli,
Milano, 1983 – Romanian trans. Gândirea slabă,
Constanţa: Pontica, 1998, pp. 11-24 [BN] [MI]
 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism
(1989), Routledge, London & New York, 1995
[MI]
–
Romanian
trans.
Politica
67
postmodernismului, Bucureşti: Univers, 1998, 1-28
[BN]
FURTHER READING
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


Chaney, David, The Cultural Turn: SceneSetting Essays on Contemporary Cultural
History, London & New York: Routledge,
1994
Connor, Steven, Postmodernist Culture: An
Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1997 (©1989)
Cunningham, Valentine, In the Reading Gaol:
Postmodernity, Text, and History, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994
Docherty, Thomas (ed.), Postmodernism: A
Reader, New York, London, Toronto, Tokyo,
Singapore: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993
Eagleton, Terry, The Idea of Culture, Oxford:
Blackwell’s, 2000
Hassan, Ihab, “POSTmodernISM: A
Paracritical
Bibliography”
(1975),
in
Lawrence Cahoone (ed.), From Modernism to
Postmodernism, 1996, pp. 382-400 [MI]
Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act¸ Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1982
Lucy, Niall (ed.), Postmodern Literary Theory:
An Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000
McGuigan, Jim (ed.), Cultural Methodologies,
London-Thousan Oaks-New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 1997
Milner, Andrew, Contemporary Cultural
Theory: An Introduction, London: UCL Press,
1994
Norris, Christopher, The Truth about
Postmodernism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996
(©1993)
Payne, Michael (ed.), A Dictionary of
Cultural and Critical Theory, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998 (© 1996)
--- The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory,
68
Oxford: Polity Press, 1994




4
DECONSTRUCTION, or
the Decentering of the
World
Vattimo, Gianni, La fine della modernità,
Milano: Garzanti Editore, 1985
Vattimo, Gianni & Pier Aldo Rovati,
Gîndirea slabă, trans. Ştefania Mincu,
ConstanţaŞ Pontica, 1998
Waugh, Patricia, Practising Postmodernism,
Reading Modernism, London-New YorkMelbourne: Edward Arnold, 1992
Willett,
Cynthia
(ed.)
Theorizing
Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current
Debate, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998
Deconstruction
or
deconstructions?
A
poststructuralist method, an attack on the
Enlightenment paradigm, the drama of power vs.
freedom, a democratic interplay of the said and
the (still) silent/silenced, mere rhetoric? Undoing
the basic hierarchical oppositions of Western
metaphysics; revealing their logocentric reliance on
a centre called ‘presence’; the absence of the
‘presence’; promoting ‘différance’, the margin,
dissemination; the ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’
principle; the abolition of signifier-signified
correspondence, floating signifiers, the free play of
language.

Total amount: 78 pages
Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (1967) [IF]
– English version Of Grammatology, trans.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 (© 1974),
pp. 1- 26 [MI]
 Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (1967)
[IF] – English trans. Writing and Difference,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, Ch.
Seven: ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, pp.
196-215 [MI]
 Jacques Derrida, La dissémination (1972) [IF], –
English
trans.
Dissemination,
Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981, ‘Plato’s
Pharmacy’, pp. 65-84 [MI]
 Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference,
69
Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987, pp. 69-85 [MI]
FURTHER READING
 Culler, Jonathan, On Deconstruction: Theory and
Criticism after Structuralism, Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 1985 (©1982)
 Deleuze, Gilles, Différence et repetition, Paris:
Presses Universitaires, 1968
 de Man, Paul, The Resistance to Theory,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986
 Derrida, Jacques, L’écriture et la difference, Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1967 – English trans. Writing
and Difference, Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1978
 Derrida, Jacques, Disssemination, trans. Barbara
Johnson, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1981
 Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982
 Evans, J. Claude, Strategies of Deconstruction,
Oxford & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991
 Felperin, Howard, Beyond Deconstruction: The
Uses and Abuses of Literary Theory, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1987 (© 1985)
 Hartman, Geffrey H., Saving the Text: Literature /
Derrida / Philosophy, Baltimore & London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981
 Irzik, Sibel, Deconstruction and the Politics of
Criticism, New York & London: Garland
Publishers, 1990
 Johnson, Barbara, The Critical Difference: Essays
in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading,
Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1980
 Johnson, Barbara, A World of Difference,
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1987
 Norris, Christopher, Deconstruction – Theory and
Practice, London: Routledge, 1982
 Norris, Christopher, Derrida, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987
70
 Norris, Christopher, Deconstruction and the
Interests of Theory, London: Pinter Publishers,
1988
5
NEW HISTORICISM &
CULTURAL
MATERIALISM – A
Poetics of Culture & the
Culture of the Everyday
Total amount: 76 pages
From the ‘old historicism’ to the ‘new historicism’
– the vexing question of history; from a ‘cultural
poetics’ to
‘new historicism’ as cultural identity; cultural
identity and the material identity of history; the
man-madeness of history (objects, texts, practices,
rituals, values,
negotiations); the role of
representation(s), ‘inscribing’ the body of culture
in time – the historicity of texts & the textuality of
history; the circulation of values, exchange,
emplotment, embeddedness; reconsidering the
centre-margin relationship in view of cultural
rather than literary (im)print(s): the anecdote, the
peripheral account, the oral tradition, the
suppressed voice, samizdat, erotica, propagandist
and antipropagandist underground activities.
 Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of
Culture”, in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New
Historicism, New York & London: Routledge,
Chapman and Hall Inc., 1989, pp. 1-12 [MI]
 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations:
The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance
England, University of California Press, Berkeley
& Los Angeles, 1988, pp. 1-20 [ED] [NEC] [MI]
 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991, pp. 86-118
[BCSC] [NEC] [MI]
 Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote:
Fiction and Fiction”, in H. Aram Veeser (ed.),
The New Historicism Reader, New York &
London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 49-64 [MI]
 Jonathan Dollimore & Alan Sinfield, “Culture
and Textuality: Debating Cultural Materialism”,
in Textual Practice, 4/1, 1990, pp. 91-100 [MI]
FURTHER READING
 Gallagher, Catherine & Stephen Greenblatt,
Practicing the New Historicism, Chicago &
71
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

6
REPRESENTATION(S), or
the Tropology of Life
London: University of Chicago Press, 2000
Greenblatt, Stephen (ed.), Allegory and
Representation, Baltimore & London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1981
Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations:
The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance
England, University of California Press, Berkeley
& Los Angeles, 1988
Greenblatt, Stephen, Learning to Curse: Essays in
Early Modern Culture, New York & London:
Routledge, 1990
Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The
Wonder of the New World, Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 1991
Greenblatt, Stephen, Hamlet in Purgatory,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001
Louis A. Montrose, “Eliza, Queene of
Shepheardes and the Pastoral of Power”, in H.
Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism, 1989,
pp. 88-112 [MI]
Veeser, H. Aram (ed.), The New Historicism,
Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc., New York
& London, 1989
The inescapable trope from St. Augustine to
Baudrillard: presence as representation(s), history
as story, the human, too human need for narrative
as inscribing and describing the world(text);
unavoidable teleology – the ‘figuram implere’
syndrome; the ‘get the story crooked’ syndrome,
text and/as cultural implication/encodation;
‘tropics of discourse’ – the tropology of culture; the
Vicoian tradition, natural vs. human sciences, the
‘philosophy of history’, ‘cultural criticism’, the
taxinomy of cultures; the Auerbachian insertion:
figura between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of the text,
the figural method; Hayden White’s linguisticrhetorical humanism; from Auerbach’s mimesis, or
representation of reality, to White’s figural realism;
postmodern consequences: the ‘everything-is-text’
stance, ‘du textualisme avant toute chose’.

Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical
72
Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe,
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1973, 1-11, 31-38 [MI]

Total amount: 55 pages
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse; Essays in
Cultural Criticism, Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978, Ch. 3: ‘The
Historical Text as Literary Artifact’, pp. 81-99
[MI]
 Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the
Representation of Reality”, in The Content of the
Form (1987) [MI]; and in Joyce Appleby et al.
(eds.), Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical
Perspective, 1996, pp. 395-407 [MI]
 Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the
Mimesis Effect, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1991, pp. 43-65 [MI]
FURTHER READING







Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representaion
of Reality in Western Literature, New York:
Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957
Auerbach, Erich, Scenes from the Drama of
European Literature, Foreword by Paolo
Valesio, Theory and History of Literature,
Volume 9, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984 (© 1959), Ch.
“Figura”, pp. 49-60 [MI]
Baudrillard, Jean, Amérique, Paris: Grasset,
1986
Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacres et simulations,
Paris: Galilée, 1981
Burwick, Frederick, Mimesis and Its
Romantic Reflections, University Park, PA:
The Pennsylvania State University Press,
2001.
Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class?
The Authority of Interpretive Communities,
Cambridge, MA & London, England:
Harvard University Press, 1980
Greenblatt,
Stephen,
Allegory
and
Interpretation, Baltimore & London: The
73
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

7
RACE STUDIES, or the
Demise of Racial
Eurocentrism
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981
Taussig, Michael, Mimesis and Alterity: A
Particular History of the Senses, New York &
London: Routledge, 1993
White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical
Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe,
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1973
White, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse; Essays
in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978
White, Hayden, Figural Realism: Studies in
the Mimesis Effect, Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1991
The discourse of the Other in Western modernity:
classical modernity adumbrations (Montaigne,
Voltaire, Goldsmith, Rousseeau). The Europe –
non-Europe
dichotomy;
racial
otherness/difference from ‘classic’ Enlightenment
and 19th-century to modern and postmodern 20thcentury positions; from essentialist to contextualist
theories; ‘racism’ vs. ‘racialism’, race and/as
historical embeddedness; race as cultural construct,
race as text, inscribing race, ‘race, “writing” and
difference’, from power, domination, and
hegemony to pc and ‘affirmative action’. Edward
Said’s Orientalism or the discourse of power
inscribed on the subaltern other: Talal Asad’s
diachroric varieties of Orientalism (from
Functional Anthropology to African Studies, from
Orientalism to Islamic Studies), Maria Todorova’s
Balkanism, Vesna Godsworthy’s Ruritania, Larry
Wolff’s Eastern Europe.
 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of
the Orient, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978, pp.
49-72 [NEC] [BCSC]
 Edward Said, “Afterword” to Orientalism,
London: Penguin Books, 1995, pp. 329-354 [MI]
 Tzvetan Todorov, La conqûete de l’Amérique. La
question de l’autre, Éditions du Seuil, 1982 [IF] –
English trans. The Conquest of America: The
74
Total amount: 60 pages
Question of the Other, New York: Harper & Row
Publishers, 1982, “Columbus and the Indians”,
pp. 34-49 [BCSC] [MI] – Romanian trans.
Cucerirea Americii – Problema Celuilalt, Iaşi:
Institutul European, 1994 [BN] [MI]
FURTHER READING
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
8
COLONIALISM &
POSTCOLONIAL
Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture,
London & New York: Routledge, 1994
Carrier, James G., “Occidentalism: the
world turned upside-down”, in American
Ethnologist, vol. 19, no.2, May 1992, pp. 195212
D’Souza, Dinesch, Liberal Education: The
Politics of Race and Sex on Campus, New
York: Free Press, 1991
Gates Jr., Henry Louis, The Signifying
Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary
Criticism, New York & Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), ‘Race’, Writing
and Difference, Chicago & London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 1-19
[MI]
Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of
Cultures, London: Fontana Press, 1975
Hartog, François, The Mirror of Herodotus:
The Representation of the Other in the Writing
of History, trans. Janet Lloyd, Berkeley-Los
Angeles-London: University of California
Press, 1988
Lane, Christopher (ed.), The Psychoanalysis
of Race, New York: Columbia U.P., 1998
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, In Other
Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, London:
Methuen, 1978
Cornel West, “A Genealogy of Modern
Racism” (1982), in Joyce Appleby et al.
(eds.), Knowledge and Postmodernism in
Historical Perspective, 1996, pp. 476-486 [MI]
Cultural criticism and society – a world of powergeared reality: the metropolis vs. the colony, the
75
STUDIES – Inscribing the
Body in History, or a Tale
of Possession
Total amount: 57 pages
centre vs. the margin, white vs. coloured; ‘us’ vs.
‘them’; the colonial epic/text: conquering,
(re)naming, inhabiting, possessing, manipulating,
subduing; the self vs. the other and assimilation
practices: liquidating the ‘other’, marginalizing the
‘other’, agglutinating the ‘other’; asymmetry;
colonial discourse, the question of language, the
‘learning to curse’ syndrome; postcolonial critical
attitudes: constructing racial and cultural difference,
dislocating the centre, supplanting metropolitan
culture, bringing the margin to the fore, the savage
as object of desire.
 Simon During, “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism Today” (1987), in Thomas Docherty
(ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, 1993, pp. 448-462
[BCSC] [MI]
 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture,
London & NY: Routledge, 1994, pp. 139-170
[BCSC]
 Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism,
London & NY: Routledge, 1998, Ch. 1: “Colonial
Discourse”, pp. 43-56 [MI]
FURTHER READING







Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffith, Helen Tiffin,
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in
Postcolonial Literature, London: Routledge,
2001 (© 1989)
Ashcroft Bill, Gareth Griffith, Helen Tiffin,
The Postcolonial Studies Reader, London:
Routledge, 2001 (© 1995)
Bratlinger, Patrick, Crusoe’s Footprints, New
York: Routlegde, 1990
Loomba, Ania, Colonialsim / Postcolonialism,
London: Routledge, 1998
Parker, Michael & Roger Starkey,
Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai,
Walcott, London: Mcmillan, 1995
Roy Porter, Myths of the English, London:
Polity Press, 1992, pp. 13-32 [BCSC]
Tiffin, Chris & Alan Lawson (eds), De76
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9
OPEN SEMINAR
10
OPEN SEMINAR
Scribing
Empire:
Postcolonialism
and
Textuality, London & NY: Routledge, 1994
Todorov, Tzvetan, La conqûete de l’Amérique.
La question de l’autre, Éditions du Seuil, 1982
[IF] – English trans. The Conquest of America:
The Question of the Other, Harper & Row
Publishers, New York, 1982 [MI] –
Romanian trans. Cucerirea Americii –
Problema Celuilalt, Iaşi: Institutul European,
1994, “Columbus as Interpreter” pp. 14-33
[BN] [BCSC] [MI]
Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997
Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The
Map of Civilization of the Mind of the
Enlightenment,
Stanford,
California:
Stanford University Press, 1994
Total amount: 506 pages
Average / Module: 50.6
pages
Students are expected to do individual presentations in class, on the basis of compulsory
readings and the synopsis provided one week in advance. The weekly reading assignment
is 50 pages on average.
Each semester will be concluded by a viva voce examination testing the information
accumulated, the students’ critical skill, their capacity to apply the critical terminology
acquired to any ‘cultural text’ of their choice. To this end, they will be supposed to do a
presentation of one critical method (from the overall amount studied) and analyse the ‘text’
chosen from this particular perspective. A number of credits will be obtained on this basis,
which will go into the final average mark assessing each student’s activity.
77
9. Narratives of Diasporic Identity
Core Unit for the American Studies and British Studies MA Programmes
Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures
University of Bucharest
Dr. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Assoc. Prof.
msdraga@yahoo.co.uk
SEMINAR DESCRIPTION AND REQUIREMENTS:
This seminar will be a text-applied comparative approach to some thematic aspects of
identity formation in a set of chosen fictional texts belonging to diasporic literatures in
English, at the intersection of various geographical, ethnic and cultural spaces. Rather than
aiming at an exhaustive survey of diasporic fictions in English (a next to impossible task,
given the amount of such writing that is being produced in the contemporary global age),
we shall aim rather at focusing on a number of recurrent topics approached through
comparing texts produced in the global English space. Our main intention will be to point
out various ways in which the textuality of written fictional texts reflect on issues related to
migration, nomadism and diasporic identity from a variety of theoretical perspectives, but
situated mainly in a postcolonial, transnational and global light. Students are encouraged
to bring in their own theoretical perspectives, however reference critical and theoretical
articles to be used in the approach to texts, as well as handouts with basic material, will be
emailed to students and should be read in advance of each session.
Students are expected to attend a minimum of 50% percent of the classes (given the
seminar status of this MA core unit) and to read ten short stories (or one novel and five
short stories) and a minimum of two critical texts from the seminar reading list (to be found
on the coursepack CD which everybody is expected to make a copy of), as well as to be
familiar with all the handout and reference material emailed to them in advance of each
session. Grading will be based on a 1200-1500-word midterm comparative essay based on 2
primary texts and 2 theoretical texts from the seminar reading list (on a comparative topic
of the student’s choice, but different from the seminar headings below), due to be
submitted to the above email address by April 20, 2010), and a final written exam with
short questions based on the required readings. Class participation is strongly encouraged
and will count as a bonus to the final mark.
SEMINAR TOPICS AND PRIMARY TEXTS:
1.Introduction: Defining Diasporas and Diasporic Writing
78
2.After the Buddha’s Suburbia: Recent Diasporic London
Zadie Smith, “The Embassy of Cambodia”, The New Yorker, 2013.
Monica Ali, “Sundowners”, The New Yorker, 2006.
Zadie Smith. White Teeth (2000). London: Penguin, 2001.
Monica Ali, Brick Lane. London: Doubleday, 2003.
3. Refocusing on the Self: Individual Psychology and Minority Resistance to Politics of
‘Normalisation’
Hanif Kureishi, from Something to Tell You. London: Faber and Faber, 2008.
Hanif Kureishi, “Long Ago Yesterday”, The New Yorker, 2004.
Chang-rae Lee, from Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead, 1995.
4-5.Stories of Belonging/Unbelonging
Yiyun Li, “A Man Like Him”, 2008.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “The Teacher”, 2008
Jhumpa Lahiri, from “Interpreter of Maladies”;
Hari Kunzru, “Raj, Bohemian” , 2008
6. Fluidity and Indirectness in Global Writing in English
Edwige Danticat, “Ghosts”, The New Yorker, 2008.
Michael Ondaatje, from The English Patient. London: Vinage, 1993
Vikram Seth, from An Equal Music, 1999.
7.Archaeologies of the Self: Fictionalising the Other
Salman Rushdie, from Joseph Anton, 2012.
Aleksandar Hemon, “The Noble Truths of Suffering”, 2008; “Stairway to Heaven”, 2006.
8.New East-European Diasporas: Questioning Return
Kapka Kassabova, from Street without a Name
Domnica Radulescu, from Train to Trieste
9-10. Gender, Diaspora and Memoir
Yiyun Li, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers”, 2005; “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl”, 2008.
Ha Jin, “The House Behind a Weeping Cherry”, 2008.
Vesna Goldsworthy, from Chernobyl Strawberries, London: Atlantic, 2005.
Lara Vapnyar, from Memoirs of a Muse, 2006; “Luda and Milena”, 2007
Marina Lewycka, from A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, London: Penguin, 2005.
11-12.Globalising the “Exotic” Other
Vikram Chandra, “Eternal Don”, 1997
Salman Rushdie, “The Shelter of the World”, 2008.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Headstrong Historian”
Zadie Smith, “Hanwell Senior”, 2007
Aravind Adiga, “The Elephant”, 2009.
79
13.From Diasporic Identity to Global Nomadism in Romanian and Romanian American
Writing
Ruxandra Cesereanu and Andrei Codrescu, Forgiven Submarine (bilingual edition,
translated from the Romanian by Andrei Codrescu), Boston, MA: Black Widow Press, 2009.
14.Conclusion
SECONDARY READINGS:
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora. Contesting Identities. London and New York:
Routledge, 1996.
Braziel, Jana Evans and Anita Mannur (eds.). Theorizing Diaspora. A Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003.
Castle, Gregory. Postcolonial Discourses. An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge, 2008.
Draga, Maria-Sabina. “Michael Ondaatje: Obsesia lui Anil si intoarcerea in Sri Lanka”.
Afterword to Michael Ondaatje, Obsesia lui Anil, Iasi: Polirom, 2002.
---.
Identity Performance in Contemporary Non-WASP American Fiction. Bucuresti: Editura
Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2008.
Draga Alexandru, Maria-Sabina si Teodora Serban-Oprescu. Cultura româneasca in
perspectiva transatlantica. Interviuri. Bucuresti: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2010.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. London and New York:
Verso, 1993.
Nasta, Susheila. Home Truths. Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. London:
Palgrave, 2002.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New
York: Routledge, 1992.
Said, Edward W. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University
Press, 1983.
80
Young, Robert. Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London and New York:
Routledge, 1995.
81
10. Shaping the Republic of Letters:
Crisis and Reformation in Early Modern Europe
Dr. Sorana Corneanu
Fall 2011-2012
The impact of the early modern reconfiguration of knowledge on the European ‘modern
mind’ has been long acknowledged, yet continues to be subject to renewed appraisal. By
‘early modern’ we understand the period between the late sixteenth and the early
eighteenth centuries, and by ‘modern mind’ we designate the fundamental questions that
have shaped the thought and intellectual practices of modern man. That the early modern
period was one of a consciousness of crisis in all areas of life and thought, and that various
projects of reformation were proposed in response is again well-known. But the actual
terms in which both crisis and reformation were conceived, the significance of those terms
for later developments, as well as their relevance to the shapes of the early modern
‘Republic of Letters’, are still a matter of debate. Equally topical is the cross-fertilization of
early modern disciplines in addressing the double phenomenon of crisis/reformation.
This course aims to familiarize students with the current historiographical debate around
this question, as well as to invite investigation into some of the relevant historical issues
and texts. We will look at philosophical, scientific, literary, moralist or educational
writings, while also exploring the early modern phenomenon of the reconfiguration of
disciplinary boundaries. The expectation is that, at the end of this course, students will a/
become fluent in the critical vocabulary that addresses one currently thriving area of
intellectual history; b/ be able to identify and discuss the important questions asked by the
historical actors we will look at concerning the issues of ‘crisis’ and ‘reformation’; c/
distinguish between and compare positions relative to these issues in both the primary and
the secondary literature; d/ refine their skills of intellectual debate; e/ write and defend
academic essays.
The structure of the syllabus reflects such expectations in that it is divided into two halves,
one devoted to the historiographical debate, the other to a detailed investigation of primary
sources, and in that it makes room for discussion of possible topics which students may
pursue in their essays. Thus:
Week 1: Introduction
Weeks 2-6: The current critical debate
Week 7: Round-up and discussion of possible essay topics and bibliographies
Weeks 8-12: The historical investigation
Weeks 13, 14: Discussion of essay topics and plans
82
The evaluation will take into account the essays, the defense of these essays in a public
session, as well as the students’ performance in the debates throughout the term.
Title
Description & Bibliography
1.
Introduction
The meanings of ‘crisis’ and of
‘reformation’; their relevance to the
modern mind. Aims of the course.
2.
Crisis and Reformation in
Theology
The Protestant Reformation: a protest
against whom and for what reasons?
Major issues and attitudes. Its impact on
the social, cultural, and philosophical
landscape. A template for
understanding the (sorts of) ‘crisis’ lying
at the origin of modernity.
Historiographical discussion:
paradigms, epistemes, shifts.
Bibliography
 MacCulloch, Diarmaid.
Reformation. Europe’s House
Divided 1490-1700. Penguin
Books, 2004.
Further Reading
 Trevor-Roper, Hugh. The Crisis of
the Seventeenth Century: Religion,
the Reformation, and Social Change
– and other Essays. London:
Macmillan, 1967.
 Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism.
London, 1930.
 Webster, Charles. The Great
Instauration: Science, Medicine, and
Reform, 1626-1660. London, 1975.
3.
Crisis and Reformation in
Philosophy
The ‘New Philosophy’: the other major
reformation in early modern Europe.
Correspondence in conceptions and
83
vocabulary to the religious reformation.
Were they parallel developments or
branches of a common project?
Taxonomical problems: philosophy,
natural philosophy, science.
Bibliography
 Bacon. The Advancement of
Learning, Bk.1, Works III.
Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1989.
 Glanvill. Plus Ultra. London,
1668.

Jalobeanu, Dana. Inventarea
modernităţii. Cluj, 2006.
Further Reading
 Foster-Jones, Richard. Ancients
and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of
the Scientific Movement in
Seventeenth-Century England.
Dover, 1982.
 Gaukroger, Stephen. The
Emergence of a Scientific Culture.
Science and the Shaping of
Modernity 1210-1685. Oxford,
2006.
 Koyre, Alexandre. From the Closed
World to the Infinite Universe. The
Johns Hopkins Press, 1956.
4.
The Epistemological
Account
The criterion of truth/knowledge:
Popkin’s influential account of the
transformations in early modern
thought in terms of a skeptical
questioning of epistemological criteria.
The mutual reinforcement of the
Protestant challenging of authority and
the skeptical revival, and its
consequences for philosophical and
scientific thought.
Bibliography
84

Popkin, Richard. The History of
Scepticism. From Savonarola to
Bayle. Oxford, 2003.
Further Reading
 Shapiro, Barbara. Probability and
Certainty in Seventeenth-Century
England. Princeton, 1983.
 Steadman, John. The Hill and the
Labyrinth. Discourse and Certitude
in Milton and his NearContemporaries. Berkeley, 1984.
5.
The TheologicalAnthropological Account
Early modern Augustinianism:
Harrison’s recent challenging of the
epistemological account. The problem of
knowledge is at bottom a problem of
theological anthropology: questions
about the foundations of knowledge are
grounded in questions about the state of
nature and of human nature after the
Fall.
Bibliography
 Harrison, Peter. The Fall of Man
and the Foundations of Science.
Cambridge, 2007.
Further Reading
 Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and
the Scientific Imagination.
Princeton, 1986.
 Harrison, Peter. The Bible,
Protestantism and the Rise of
Natural Science. Cambridge, 1998.
6.
The ‘Moral’ Account
Intellectual personae, medicina mentis:
complementing / challenging the
epistemological and the theologicalanthropological accounts. Recent
attempts at describing early modern
intellectual self-fashioning in terms of
the building of moral personae, or of
85
programmes for ‘curing’ the mind.
Bibliography
 Condren, Conal et al. (eds.). The
Philosopher in Early Modern
Europe. Cambridge, 2006.
 Corneanu, Sorana. Regimens of the
Mind. Chicago, 2011.
 Jalobeanu, Dana. ‘Experimental
philosophers and doctors of the
mind: the appropriation of a
philosophical tradition’ (2010).
Further Reading
 Gaukroger, Stephen. Francis
Bacon and the Transformation of
Early-Modern Philosophy.
Cambridge, 2001.
 Jones, Matthew L. The Good Life in
the Scientific Revolution: Descartes,
Pascal, Leibniz and the Cultivation
of Virtue. Chicago, 2006.
 Shapin, Steven. A Social History of
Truth. Oxford, 1999.
7.
Round-up and Essay Topics
Drawing the historiographical map and
rehearsing the main questions.
Formulation of possible topics for the
end-of-term essays and discussion of the
relevant bibliographies.
8.
Certainty and Belief
Testing the epistemological account
against several key texts. What was the
discursive context of the problem of
knowledge?
Bibliography
Excerpts from:
 Montaigne. Essays. Tr. M.A.
Screech. Penguin Books, 1991.
 Shakespeare. Hamlet. Oxford,
1998.
 Descartes. Meditations on First
86

9.
Fallen Man
Philosophy. Cambridge, 1996.
Locke. An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding. Oxford,
1975.
Testing the theological-anthropological
account against several key texts. What
were the terms of the bigger scenario in
which the Fall was a key ingredient?
Bibliography
Excerpts from:
 Pascal. Pensées. Tr. R. Ariew.
Indianapolis/Cambrdige, 2004.
 Bacon, The Great Instauration,
Works IV. Stuttgart-Bad
Cannstatt, 1989.
 Donne. Sonnets and Sermons.
Everyman’s Library, 1995.
 Glanvill. The Vanity of
Dogmatizing. London, 1661.
10.
Idols and Cures
Testing the moral account against
several key texts. What function does
the language of
‘idols’/‘maladies’/‘distempers’ of the
intellect and their ‘cures’ have?
Bibliography
Excerpts from:
 De la Primaudaye. The French
Academy. Trans. T.B. London,
1594.
 Bacon, The New Organon, Bk. 1,
Works IV. Stuttgart-Bad
Cannstatt, 1989.
 Walker. Of Education. London,
1673.
 Barrow. Of Industry. London,
1693.
11.
The Christian Philosopher
A distinctive type of intellectual persona
fashioned in early modern Europe; the
87
relevance to this figure of the
epistemological, the theological, and the
moral issues. What became of it in
subsequent periods?
Bibliography
Excerpts from:
 Shakespeare. The Tempest.
Oxford, 1998.
 Bacon. The New Atlantis. Works
IV. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1989.
 Charleton. The Immortality of the
Soul. London, 1657.
 Boyle. The Christian Virtuoso.
London, 1690.
12.
The Republic of Letters
Alternatively to a sociological account,
the early modern Republic of Letters
may be seen as the intellectual and
physical site to match the figure of the
Christian philosopher. Its place in
between utopia and real-life project; the
career of the idea in later periods.
Bibliography
Excerpts from:
 C17 rewritings of The New
Atlantis
 Sprat. History of the Royal Society.
London, 1667.



Furey, Constance. Erasmus,
Contarini, and the Religious
Republic of Letters, Cambridge,
2006
Jalobeanu, Dana. ‘Bacon’s
Brotherhood and its Classical
Sources’, Intersections 11, 2008
Miller, Peter. Peiresc’s Europe.
Learning and Virtue in the
Seventeenth Century, New Haven
and London, 2000
88
Further Reading
 Goldgar, Anne. Impolite Learning.
Conduct and Community in the
Republic of Letters. New Haven
and London 1995
 Stewart, Larry. The Rise of Public
Science. Rhetoric, Technology, and
Natural Philosophy in Newtonian
Britain, 1660-1750. Cambridge,
1992.
13.
Discussion: Essay Topics (1)
14.
Discussion: Essay Topics (2)
Presentation and discussion of essay
plans.
Presentation and discussion of essay
plans.
Profile
Sorana Corneanu: Lecturer in English, English Dept., University of Bucharest. BA (1997),
MA (1998), PhD (2008) – University of Bucharest. Doctoral research scholarships: Oxford,
St Hilda’s (2005-2006), New Europe College, Bucharest (2006-2007). Post-doctoral research
fellowships: Francis Bacon Fellowship, The Huntington Library, California (October 2011).
Member of European Research Council grant “Francis Bacon and the Medicine of the
Mind” (PI: Guido Giglioni, The Warburg Institute, London), 2009-2014. Member of FME
(Foundations of European Modernity) Research Centre, University of Bucharest, ISIH
(International Society for Intellectual History), HOPOS (International Society for the
History of the Philosophy of Science), SSOR (Romanian Association for Eighteenth-Century
Studies).
Recent and forthcoming publications
Books
Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2011
Edited volumes
Francis Bacon and the Medicine of the Mind, co-edited with Guido Giglioni and Dana
Jalobeanu, special issue of Perspectives on Science, forthcoming 2012
Francis Bacon and Natural History, co-edited with Guido Giglioni and Dana Jalobeanu,
special issue of Early Science and Medicine, forthcoming 2012
(In)Hospitable Translations: Fidelities, Betrayals, Rewritings, co-edited with Madalina
Nicolaescu, Bucuresti: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2010
89
Articles
“Idols of the Imagination: Francis Bacon on the Imagination and the Medicine of the Mind”
(co-authored with Koen Vermeir), special issue of Perspectives on Science, forthcoming 2012
“Of Statues and Vines: Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and the Question of Persuasion”,
Studii de stiinta si cultura 4.23 (2010): 46-58
“Devout Affections: Theology, Medicine, and the Novel” in Mihaela Irimia and Dragos
Ivana (eds.), Imitatio-Inventio: The Rise of ‘Literature’ from Early to Classic Modernity,
Bucuresti: Editura Institutului Cultural Roman, 2010, 179-197
“Robert Boyle on ‘Right Reason’ and ‘Physical and Theological Experience’” in Vlad
Alexandrescu and Robert Thais (eds.), Nature et Surnaturel: Philosophies de la nature et
métaphysique aux XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag,
2010, 125-136
“Locke on the Study of Nature” in Vlad Alexandrescu (ed.), Branching Off: The Early
Moderns in Quest for the Unity of Knowledge, Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2009, 187-207
90
11. Britishness in the Arts:
Visual Arts
Module Supervisor: Lecturer dr. Daniela Davidescu Brown
Syllabus for Term 2
#
1
Title
Themes for Presentation & Discussion
Love in the Middle
Ages: Gifts, Signs
and Places of Love
The unit focuses upon works of medieval art on the
theme of love, works which have a decorative
function or are signs in the manufacture of desire. The
unit will analyse the aesthetic value of a work of art
and its proclaimed status as a love gift or a love sign,
its function as a married couple’s legitimation, its
intensity of desire or the love gift giver’s submission
to one’s beloved.
Camille, Michael. The Medieval Art of Love. London:
Laurence King, 1998, pp 3- 42
FURTHER READING
 Huizinga, Johan. Amurgul Evului Mediu. Bucuresti:
Humanitas, 2002.
 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality….1976.
2
Medieval
Illuminated
Manuscripts: The
Book of Kells
The Book of Kells, of c. 800 AD, is one of the most
remarkable illuminated manuscripts ever created in
the British Isles. The unit focuses particularly on the
symbolism of its pictures, but also deals with the role
of monastic memorising strategies in the creation of
early medieval illuminated manuscripts. An
important matter looked into the influence of preChristian Pictish symbolism on the art of the Book of
Kells.
91



Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought:
Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images,
400-1200. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2000,
pp. 7-24
Meehan, Bernard, The Book of Kells: an Illustrated
Introduction to the Manuscript in Trinity College
Dublin, Thames and Hudson, 1994, pp. 9-36
Henry, Francoise, The Book of Kells:
Reproductions from the Manuscript in Trinity
College Dublin with a Study of the Manuscript,
Thames and Hudson, 1974, pp. 205- 21
FURTHER READING
3
The Architecture of
faith:
Gothic
Cathedrals in the
Middle Ages

Henderson, George, Early Medieval, Penguin
Books, 1972

Cartianu, Virginia and Dene, Viorica, Miniatura
Medievală în Anglia, Editura Meridiane, 1980
From the Middle of the 12th century, a totally new
style of architecture emerged in the great cathedrals
of France [in 1140, Abbot Suger, a profound mystic
inaugurated the new church of Saint-Denis in Paris,
the first truly Gothic building]. Incorporating
improved building techniques and a new perception
of symbolic values, this style quickly spread out
throughout Europe, where, in many countries, it
would endure for three centuries or more. This was
Gothic art… The unit deals with the cultural and
religious symbolism of the cathedral and describes the
three phases of the Gothic style in England.




Humphrey, Caroline; Vitebsky, Piers. Sacred
Architecture. Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1997
Day, Fergus; Williams, David. Art. A World
History. London: Dorling Kindersley, 1998
Yarwood, Doreen. Outline of English
Architecture. London: B. T. Batsford;
Martindale, Andrew. Gothic Art. London:
Thames and Hudson, 1979
Cormack, Patrick. English Cathedrals. London:
92
Artus Books, 1984
4
The
Knight
Castle
Medieval The unit argues that there is a difference between the
and His knight in history and the knight in literary texts. The
model of the medieval knight and his connection to
the medieval feudal system is a target for discussing
another consequence of the Norman Conquest:
building
castlesinstruments
of
exerting
administrative power.




5
Power and
Propaganda 1: The
English Miniature
Portrait of the
Renaissance
Burke, John. Life in the Castle in Medieval
England. New York: Dorset Press, , 1978
Giles, Frances. The Knight in History. New York:
Perennial Library, 1984
Grape, Wolfgang. The Bayeux Tapestry:
Monument to a Norman Triumph. Munich:
Prestel
McKean, Charles. The Scottish Chateau: the
Country House of Renaissance Scotland. Stroud:
Sutton Publishing, 2001
This unit applies an anthropological approach to the
painter/ sitter relationship as it is seen in the
miniatures of the English Renaissance, as opposed to
the full-sized stately portraits of King Henry VIII and
Queen Elizabeth. It also deals with some of the
technical problems involved in painting a miniature.


Murdoch, John, et al., The English Miniature,
Yale University Press, 1981, pp. 1-24
Gent, Lucy; Llewellyn, Nigel ed. Renaissance
Bodies: the Human Figure in English Culture c.
1540-1660. London: Reaktion Books, 1995, pp.
11-35
FURTHER READING
 Hall, T. Edward, The Hidden Dimension,
Anchor Books, 1969
 Stoichiţă, Victor Ieronim, Efectul Don Quijote,
Humanitas, 1995
6
The Lavishness of
Court Masques
Although they tend to be neglected today, court
masques must have been among the most
93
extraordinary artistic creations of their time,
bringing together music, poetry, dance, costume and
architecture in displays of Baroque eclecticism. This
unit looks at the place of the Masque in the life of the
early 17th century royal court, with an emphasis on
its propaganda role in building an aura of glory
around royalty (unsuccessfully, as it turned out,
from the point of view of the King’s puritan
subjects).


Rogers, Pat, ed., An Outline of English Literature,
Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 150-175
Peacock, John. “Inigo Jones as a Figurative
Artist” in Renaissance Bodies: the Human Figure
in English Culture c. 1540-1660, ed. Lucy Gent
and Nigel Llewellyn, Reaktion Books, 1995,
154-173
FURTHER READING
 Ford, Boris, ed., The Cambridge Guide to the Arts
in Britain: the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge
University Press, 1989
7
British Rococo and
the Vauxhall
Gardens
In this unit we consider the cultural significance of the
garden, with particular reference to the Vauxhall
Gardens, a well-known leisure place of 18th century
London. The Gardens no longer exist, but can be
reconstructed from paintings and written texts, which
show them to have been an encyclopaedic display of
half-invented realities (concerning space and time),
meant to entertain, not to educate.


Hind, Charles ed. Rococo in England: A
Symposium. London: Victoria and Albert
Museum, 1984, pp. 113-132
Enge, Torsten Olaf, Garden Architecture in
Europe, Taschen, 1990, pp. 5-15
FURTHER READING
 Rococo: Art and Design in Hogarth’s England, The
Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984.
 Hubala, Erich, Baroque and Rococo, The Herbert
Press, 1989
94
8
Power and
Propaganda 2: The
Contact with India
Buildings of shelter and entertainment and those of
the authority represent central locations of power, and
architecture may be an emblem of domination. Here
we look both at the influence of Indian architecture in
Britain (the Royal Pavilion, Brighton) and at the
transplantation of Victorian neo-Gothic architecture
onto Indian soil. Comparisons are drawn with the
treatment of cross-cultural contact in the literature of
the British Empire.



Fletcher, Banister, The History of Architecture,
chapter 41: “The Indian Subcontinent”, pp. 42-57
George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant”
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, pp. 70-73
95
9
19th Century
Photography in
Britain: Art or
Science?
Starting with the late 1830s, photography made its
debut in Britain and had a powerful impact on British
culture. This unit explores the way in which 19th
century photography and the exterior world mirrored
each other, since it was not a one way influence: major
and minor events, social life and fashion fed
photographers, engineers busily improved the
camera, while literature and painting lent
photography many of their cliches: melancholy
atmosphere, theatrical gestures, symbolical elements
and dramatic surges.


Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on
Photography. London: Vintage, 2000, pp. 9-18
Bajac, Quentin. The Invention of Photography: the
First Fifty Years. London: Thames and Hudson,
2002, pp. 15-45
FURTHER READING


10
The Impact of
William Morris’
Arts and Crafts on
Britain and the
Continent
Macdonald, Gus. Victorian Witnesses. London:
B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1979
Stevenson, Sara. Facing the Light: the Photography
of Hill and Adamson. Edinburgh: Scotish
National Portrait Gallery, 2002
“William Morris, designer, poet and social reformer,
preached with tremendous vigour that all healthy art
must be ’by the people for the people’. But meanwhile
he made in his workshops the most wonderful woven
stuffs so expensive as to be accessible only to a few
appreciative patrons.”(Pevsner 67). This unit focuses
upon the contrast between Morris’ idealism of
socialistic goals to be attained through his art and the
ironically expensive artifacts that came out of his
factory, as well as the influence the Arts and Crafts
Movement had in Germany and Austria.
The Movement was an effort to reform the domestic
environment by uniting the useful with the beautiful,
it was meant to recapture the spirit and quality of
medieval craftsmanship. It reacted against the massproduced domestic objects made in the wake of the
Industrial Revolution.
96






11
Rebels in
Victorianism: The
Four and Charles
Rennie Mackintosh
Pevsner, Nikolaus. The Englishness of English
Art. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976, pp.
65-70
Arts and Crafts Movement: a Superb Visual Guide
to This Significant Period of Design Reform: 18501920. London: Grange Books, 2002, pp. 67-79,
95-110, 155-170
Van Zandt, Eleanor. The Life and Works of
William Morris. Bristol: Parragon, 1995
Wardropper, Ian and Lynn Springer Roberts.
European Decorative Arts. Chicago: The Art
Institute of Chicago, 1991
Carrassat, Fride R. and Isabelle Marcade.
Curente în Pictură. Oradea: Editura Aquila, 1993
Graham-Dixon, Andrew. A History of British
Art. London: BBC Worldwide, 1999, pp192-194
This unit examines the innovative symbolism,
combining Celtic, Egyptian, Rosicrucian and Japanese
elements, in the paintings, designs and architectural
work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his
companions. It traces the relationship between the
evolution of their arts and the evolution of their
personal lives, and focuses on the definition of the
‘total work of art’ in which Mackintosh believed.

Neat, Timothy, Part Seen, Part Imagined:
Meaning and Symbolism in the Work of Charles
Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald,
Canongate Press, 1994, pp. 13-19, 20-54
FURTHER READING
 Crawford, Alan, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Thames
and Hudson, 1998.
97
12
Victorian Heritage
in the 20th Century:
British Modern Art
This unit deals with the way experiment and tradition
have influenced each other in the visual arts on the
Continent and in Britain from the beginning of the 20th
century until the 40’s.




13
British NeoRomanticism?:
British Post
Modern Art
Modern Art -Zane Library C.D.Rom
John Ashberry’s poem The Painter
Gombrich, E. H. The Story of Art. Oxford: Phaidon,
1984, 442-476
Bowness, Alan. Modern European Art. London:
Thames and Hudson, 1989, pp. 129-157
Post-Modern art in Britain is rather different from that
of Europe in the sense that it remains much more
figurative and it even returns to Romantic features.
Perhaps the Britishness of 20th century art consists in
its isolation and in its resistance to continental or
American artistic movements.

Graham-Dixon, Andrew. A History of British
Art. London: BBC, 1999, pp. 197-227
 Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques. Filozofia
Imaginilor.Bucuresti: Polirom, 2004, pp. 222-235
 Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: a Study in the
Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Oxford:
Phaidon, 1983
Profile
Dr. DANIELA BROWN, lecturer in English at the University of Bucharest, teaches
Medieval, Renaissance, Victorian literature and Visual Arts in Britain. Her interests
include: the history and theory of literature, visual arts and academic essay writing. She
holds a Postgraduate Certificate in British Cultural Studies from the University of
Warwick, U.K.
Recent Publications
98

“The Victorian Taste for the Medieval” in University of Bucharest Review: A Journal of
Literary and Cultural Studies, ‘A Matter of Taste’, vol VII, 2005

Rococo in Britain: A Comparative Approach in the Visual Arts and Literature. Bucureşti:
Editura Universităţii Bucureşti, 2004
“The Secret Influence of Photography on Late Victorian Literature and Painting” in
University of Bucharest Review: A Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, ’The Secret
and the Known’ Vol. VI, No. 3, 2004
“Photography as Memory in Victorian Literature” in University of Bucharest Review:
A Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, ‘Sites of Memory’ Vol. V, No. 4, 2003
“Robin Hood- A Recycled Hero”, in Culture, History, Heritage, Theoretical Readings of
the British Past. Bucharest: The British Council, 1996



99
12. Remapping Cultural Space (II)
Global Media
Module Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Mădălina Nicolaescu
Syllabus for Term 2
(only two titles are compulsory)
#
1
Title
Globalization and
Localization
Themes for Presentation & Discussion;
Bibliography
a.)Roland
Robertson.
“Globalization
or
Glocalization” in
Roland Robertson and
Kathleen white Globalization. Critical Concepts,
vol 3. London: Routledge, 2003
b.)George Ritzer .Globalization: the Essentials..
London: wiley-Blackwell, 2010- chapter 7.
Global and Cultural Flows
2
Globalization of Media
Mirza Jan. Globalization of Media : Key Issues and
Dimensions. In European Journal of Scientific Research
, no.1.(2009)
George Ritzer-see above , from chap 6- Media and
Internet
3
Global Television
Jean Chalaby (ed.) Transnational Television Worldwide.
Macmillan ,2005 – chap1 “Towards an Understanding
of Media Transnationalism”.
5
Global Shakespeare
Othello/O/ Omkara; Hamlet (Almereyda, Brannagh,);
The Merchant of Venice or Macbeth—films and Manga
versions/possibly also games
a. Mark Thronton Burnett. Filming
Shakespeare
in
the
Global
Marketplace.London : Palgrave, 2007 –
100
chapters: The Local and the Global,
Racial
Identities,
(Remembrance,
Holocaust,
globalization
or
Spirituality/Meaning
/Shakespeare)
[HEMIN]
b. M/T.Burnett. Applying the Paradigm :
Shakespeare and the World [va fi trimis
pe mail in weekend]
c. Toni Johnson Woods (ed) Manga. An
Anthology of Global and Cultural
Perspectives. London: Continuum, 2010
–chapt Manga in the World [.RAR]
6-7
New Media
o Martin Lister, Jon Dovey - cap. 2 New Media
and the Visual Culture, cap. 3 Networks, Users
and Economics in New Media : A Critical
Introduction. Routledge 2008
o Jodi Dean. Blog Theory . Cambridge :Polity,
2010. Chap.2. The Death of Blogging (also
Affective Networks)
o Mark Bauerlein (ed) The Digital Divide. London:
Penguin, 2011 : N. Carr,” Is Google Making us
Stupid”, Sherry Turkle “Identity Crisis”, Andrew
Keen “Web 2. The second generation of
internet”
o Bryan Alexander. The New Digital Storytelling.
Greewood Pub. Group. 2011-“No Story is A
Single hing; or the Networked Book” o (Chadwick, The Policy of the Internet, chap. on
surveillance, BCU)
o ( Laurie Osborne . IShakespeare : Digital
Art/Games- a game?, such as Macbeth –
Interactive, or hamlet-X or HyperMacbeth )
101
o Fan-fiction on Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Othello
102
13. Postcolonial Inscribings(II):
Multiculturalism inCanada, Britain and
the United States
Module Supervisor: Prof. Monica Bottez
Syllabus for Term 2
Course Description:
The course sets out to explore the current debate over Multiculturalism in Canada, the
United States and Britain. Multiculturalism is a concept used to refer to a society that is
characterized by ethnic or cultural heterogeneity, and in this case the term multicultural society
should be preferred; it may be also be used to refer to the ideal of equality and mutual respect
among a population’s ethnic or cultural groups and to refer to the Canadian government policy
proclaimed by the federal government in 1971(and used to replace the term “cultural pluralism”, a
term that is still favoured in Quebec) and subsequently inscribed in the Canadian Constitution
(The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982) and the Multiculturalism Act of 1988.
The course will then discuss the various reactions the implementation of this cultural policy
has stirred in Canada but also in the post Civil Rights Movement U.S and in the U.K., a
multicultural society in the wake of the dissolution of the British Empire. The discussion will define
the variety of theoretical and practical problems of Multiculturalism as emphasized by its various
brands, such as American Critical Multiculturalism, Revolutionary Multiculturalism, Imperial
Multiculturalism, Polycentric Multiculturalism and Mainstream or Pluralistic Multiculturalism. The
related concepts of interculturalism and transculturalism will also be introduced .
The course will have a double focus: the rich theoretical frame this concept has initiated will
be correlated with the analyses of concrete literary examples that illustrate the enrichment of
“mainstream” Canadian, American and British literature with a variety of voices and traditions
which are at the same time attuned to these postmodern times. The discussion will concentrate on
the representation of class, race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation in the construction of
identity and on the liminal zones and hybridity of identities specific to multicultural/multiethnic
societies which foreground displacement as a characteristic of today’s global world. In addition to
the study of ethnic literatures in their socio-cultural contexts, the course will also discuss the
aesthetics of ethnic literature and the oppositional character of male culture and female culture.
#
Title
The concept of
1
Themes for Presentation & Discussion
Bibliography
The three meanings of multiculturalism.
The “Canadian mosaic” (Kate Forster:
103
Multiculturalism ; its
Objectives
Our Canadian mosaic, 1926; J.M. Gibbon:
Canadian Mosaic, 1938) versus the
American “melting pot”, that is
integration versus assimilation.
The third meaning of Multiculturalism:
defined and used in Canada by Pierre
Trudeau as a state policy to be
implemented in the framework of official
French-English
bilingualism
and
biculturalism; further enshrined in the
Canadian Constitution (The Charter of
Rights and Freedoms, 1982) and the
Multiculturalism Act (1988).


2
Multiculturalism,
Interculturalism,
Transculturalism
Canadian Multiculturalism:
Failure or Success?



Pask, Diane. “The Charter, Human
Rights, and Multiculturalism in
Common Law Canada”, in Berry,
J.W.
and
J.A.
Lafonce(eds).
Ethnicity and Culture in Canada: The
Research Landscape, Toronto: U. of
Toronto Press, 1994, 124-152
Caws, Peter. “Identity: Cultural,
Transcultural and Multicultural”,
in
David
Theo
Goldberg,
Multiculturalism. A Critical Reader.
Oxford, UK &Cambridge, USA:
Blackwell, 1994, 371-387.
Bannerji, Himani. “On the Dark
Side of the Nation: Politics of
Multiculturalism and the State
of’Canada’”,ch. 3 of The Dark Side
of
the
Nation:
Essays
on
Multiculturalism, Nationalism and
Gender.
Toronto:
Canadian
Scholars’ Press, 2000, 87-124.
Bissondath, Neil. Selling Illusions:
The Cult of Multiculturalism in
Canada. Toronto: Penguin, 1994
Choy, Wayson. “Intercultural, Not
Multicultural”, interview by Rocio
Davis, in Davis Rocio and Rosalia
Baena (eds). Tricks with a Glass:
104





3
Communitarianism
Liberal Democracy
versus
Writing Ethnicity in Canada.
Amsterdam/Atlanta, Ga: Rodopi,
2000, 269-286.
Hutcheon,
Linda.
“Critical
Perspectives on Writing Ethnicity
in Canada”, interview by Rosalia
Baena, in Davis Rocio and Rosalia
Baena (eds). Tricks with a Glass:
Writing Ethnicity in Canada, ed. cit.,
2000, 287-298.
Harles, John. ”Multiculturalism,
National Identity, and National
Integration: The Canadian Case”,
in Kenneth McRoberts (ed).
Representation. International Journal
of Canadian Studies, 17, Spring,
1998, 217-245.
Mackey, Eva. The House of
Difference. Cultural Politics and
National Identity in Canada. London
and New York: Routledge, 1999.
Paquet,
Gilles.
“Political
Philosophy of Multiculturalism” in
Barry J.W. and J.A. Lafonce.
Ethnicity and Culture in Canada. The
Research Landscape, ed. cit., 60-80.
Kymlicka, Will. “The Canadian
Model
of
Diversity
in
a
Comparative
Perspective”,
Multiculturalism and the Canadian
Constitution, ed. Steven Tierney.
Vancouver, Toronto: University of
British Columbia Press, 2007, 6190.
 Taylor, Charles.” The Politics of

Recognition’, in David Theo
Goldberg,
Multiculturalism.
A
Critical Reader, ed. cit. , 75-107.
Fraser,
Nancy.
“From
Redistribution to Recognition?
Dilemmas of justice in a ‘PostSocialist’ Age” in Willett, Cynthia.
105
Theorizing
Multiculturalism.
A
Guide to the Current Debate.
Malden, Mass., Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1998, 19-49.
 Habermas,
Jűrgen.“Multiculturalism and the
Liberal State”, Stanford Law Review,
1995.
 -----------------“Struggles
for
Recognition
in
Constitutional
States”, I EUR. J. PHIL. 128 (1993)
 Fish,
Stanley.
”Boutique
Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals
Are Incapable of Thinking about
Hate Speech”
 Blum, Lawrence. “Recognition,
Value, and Equality: A Critique of
Charles Taylor’s and Nancy
Fraser’s
Accounts
of
Multiculturalism”
in
Willett,
Cynthia, op. cit., 1998, 73-99.
 Bauman,
Zygmund.
2001.
Comunitate:. Căutarea siguranţei
într-o lume nesigură, cap. 5-9,
Filipestii de targ, Prahova: Antet
XX Press, 2005.
 Outlaw
Jr.,
Lucius.
“’Multiculturalism’, Citizenship,
Education and American Liberal
Democracy” in Willett, Cynthia,
op. cit., 382-398.
 Jussawalla, Feroza. “Cultural
Rights Theory: A view from the
U.S.Mexican
Border”
in
Fludernik, Monika. Diaspora and
Multiculturalism.
Common
Traditions and New Developments.
Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi,
2003, 115-148.
 Green, Judith M. “Educational
Multiculturalism,
Critical
Pluralism, and Deep Democracy”
in Willett, Cynthia, op. cit., 422-448.
106

4-5
Multiculturalism in the
United States
Harris,
Leonard.
“Universal
Human Liberation: Community
and Multiculturalism”, in Willett,
Cynthia, op. cit., 449-457
American Critical Multiculturalism,
Revolutionary
Multiculturalism,
Imperial Multiculturalism, Polycentric
Multiculturalism and Mainstream or
Pluralistic Multiculturalism.




Turner, Terence. “Anthropology
and Multiculturalism: What Is
Anthropology
that
Multiculturalism
Should
Be
Mindful of It?” ” in D. T. Goldberg,
Multiculturalism. A Critical Reader.
ed. cit., 406-425.
Berlant, Lauren and Michael
Warner. “Introduction to ‘Critical
Multiculturalism’”, in David Theo
Goldberg,
Multiculturalism. A
Critical Reader, ed. cit., 107-113.
Matuštik, Martin J. Beck. ”Ludic,
Corporate
and
Imperial
Multiculturalism: Impostors of
Democracy and Cartographers of
the New World Order” in Willett,
Cynthia.
Theorizing
Multiculturalism. A Guide to the
Current Debate, ed. cit., 100-118.
McLaren,
Peter.
Revolutionary
Multiculturalism.
Pedagogies
of
Dissent for the New Millenium.
Boulder,
Colorado,
Oxford:
Westview Press, 1997, Chapter 5
“Gansta
Pedagogy
and
Ghettocentricity”;
Chapter
8
“Unthinking
Whiteness,
Rethinking Democracy”; Epilogue:
“Beyond the Threshold of Liberal
Pluralism:
Toward
a
Revolutionary
Democracy”;
107



6
Multiculturalism
United Kingdom
in
the 



Afterword: “Multiculturalism: The
Fracturing of Cultural Souls”,
Donaldo
Macedo
and
Lilia
Bartolomé, 150-191; 237-304.
Stam, Robert & Ella Shoat.
”Contested
Histories:
Eurocentrism,
Multiculturalism
and the Media” in D. T. Goldberg,
Multiculturalism. A Critical Reader,
ed. cit., 298-324
Hill,
Mike.
“Muscular
Multiculturalism”, After Whiteness.
Unmaking an American Majority.
New York and London: New York
University Press, 2004, pp 83-93.
Mihăilă, Rodica. “The Taming of
American multiculturalism: From
Balkanization to Empire”.
Karim, Karim H. ”Multiculturalism in
Australia, The United States and the
United Kingdom: An Overview”, The
Battle over Multiculturalism, Andrew
Cardozo and Louis Musto (eds).
Ottawa: Pearson-Shoyama Institute,
1997, 137-148.
Rushdie,
Salman.
‘Imaginary
Homelands’, Imaginary Homelands:
Essays
and Criticism
1981-1991,
London: Granta, 1991.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, Helen
Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory
and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature ,
second edition, Routledge, 2003, 193223.
Fludernik, Monika. “The Diasporic
Imaginary:
Postcolonial
Reconfigurations in the Context of
Multiculturalism”
in
Fludernik,
Monika
(ed.).
Diaspora
and
Multiculturalism. Common Traditions
and New Developments. AmsterdamNew-York: Rodopi, 2003, xi-xxxviii.
108


7-9
The Multicultural Landscape
of
the
Contemporary
Canadian Novel: Cultural
Identities and Traumas
Cheyette, Bryan. “Diasporas of the
Mind: British –Jewish Writing
beyond
Multiculturalism”,
in
Fludernik, Monika (ed.). Diaspora
and
Multiculturalism.
Common
Traditions and New Developments,
ed. cit., 45-82
Sommer, Roy. “ ‘Simple Survival’
in ‘Happy Multicultural Land’?
Diasporic Identities and Cultural
Hybridity in the Contemporary
British Novel” in Fludernik,
Monika
(ed.).
Diaspora
and
Multiculturalism.
Common
Traditions and New Developments,
ed. cit., 149-182
Native Voices
 Campbell, Maria. Halfbreed.
Lincoln & London: U. of Nebraska
Press, 1982
 King, Thomas. Green Grass.
Running Water .Toronto: Harper
Collins Publishers, 1993.
or The Medicine River Penguin
Books Canada, 1995.
Optional
Kroetsch, Robert. Gone Indian. Toronto:
Nanaimo, B.C.: Theytus Books,1973.
Asian
 Vassanji, M. G.. No New Land
or Mistry, Rohinton. Such a Long Journey,
1991
 Kogawa, Joy. Obasan.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
or Lee, Sky. The Disappearing Moon Cafe
Caribbean
Bissondath, Neil. A Case of Casual
Brutality. Markham,Ont.: Pengin
Books, Canada, 1989
109
Romanian
Giurgiu, Eugen. Ewoclem sau
Intortochiatele carari (Ewoclem or The
Entangled Paths). Montreal:
“Humanitas”,Editura Fuindatiei
Culturale Romane, 1996
Optional
 Alexander, Vera. “Postponed
Arrivals: The Afro-Asian Diaspora
in M.G. Vassanji’s No New Land”,
in Fludernik, Monika (ed.).
Diaspora and Multiculturalism.
Common Traditions and New
Developments. Amsterdam-NewYork: Rodopi, 2003,149-182
 Firth, Kathleen.”Home Is NoPlace: Neil Bissondath’s A Casual
Brutality”in inDavis, Rocio and
Rosalia Baena (eds). Tricks with a
Glass:Writing Ethnicity in
Canada.Amsterdam/Atlanta, Ga:
Rodopi, 2000, 59-69
 Olos, Ana. “Hyphenated Writers’
Representations of Canada” in
Felbabov, Vladislava and Jelena
Novakovič(eds) . Other Language:
Otherness in Canadian Culture,
Beograd : Yugoslav Association for
Canadian Studies, 2005, 75-88
 Bottez, Monica. Infinite Horizons:
Canadian Fiction in English,
Bucuresti: Editura Universitatii
Bucuresti, 2004
 Petrone, Penny. Native Literature in
Canada. Toronto: Oxford U. P.,
1990

Kambourelli, Smaro, Scandalous
Bodies. Diasporic Literature in
English Canada. Don Mills, Ontario:
Oxford University Press Canada,
110
2000.
1011
The Multicultural Landscape Native American Voices
of
the
Contemporary
 Momaday, N.Scott. House Made of
American
Novel:
Dawn (1968)
Representation of Difference,
 Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony
Cultural
Identities
and
(1977)
Traumas
 Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine
(1984)
 Vizenor, Gerald. Bearheart: The
Heirship Chronicles (1990)
 Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger
and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New
York: Harper Perennial, 1993 or
The Toughest Indian in the World.
New York: Grove Press, 2000.
African American Voices
 Morrison, Toni. Jazz (1992)
 Walker, Alice. The Color Purple
(1982)
Asian American
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club.
Mexican
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera
1213
The Multicultural Landscape
 Brookner, Anita. A Friend from
of the Contemporary British
England. London: Grafton Books,
Novel: Cultural Identities
Collins, 1987
and Traumas
or Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Unconsoled.
London: Faber & Faber,1995
 Naipaul, V.S.The Magic Seeds, 2004
 Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London:
Hamish Hamilton, 2000
 Newland, Courttia. Society Within.
London: Abacus, 1999
Optional
Storry, Mike and Peter Childs (ed). British
Cultural Identities. London: Routledge,
1997
111
14
Conclusions



Hardt, M. and A. Negri. Empire.
Cambridge Mass.: Harvard U. P.,
2000
______________________.
Multitude. War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire.
New
York:
Penguin, 2004
Kostash, Myrna. “The Next
Canada: In Search of a Future
Nation”, Individual and Community:
Canada in the 20th Century, ed.
Monica Bottez, Brno : Massaryk
University Press, 2004
Assessment:
-50 % class participation: discussion of one theoretical article (25%)
discussion of one novel (25%)
-50% -final comparative essay on two novels from a theoretical perspective
OR final written test.
Profile
Prof. MONICA BOTTEZ teaches Victorian and 20th Century British Literature at the
University of Bucharest, English Department. Her research interests also include the
contemporary American novel, narratology, and cultural studies. She introduced the study
of English Canadian Literature on the Canadian Studies M.A. Programme in 1997, which is
now part of the Cultural Studies M.A. Programme .She has been an active Canadianist in
the past 12 years.
She was the representative of Romania on the Executive Council of the Central European
Network for Canadian Studies (1998-2004), and organized the Second International
Conference of Central European Canadianists, Bucharest, 2001.
On a competitive basis she was awarded research grants by the “John Kennedy” Institute
for North American Studies, Berlin (1999) and by the Government of Canada(1998, 2002).
In May 2001 she was invited to make a lecture tour on Canadian topics to GermanyUniversities of Marburg, Cologne, Kiel, Trier.
112
14. Postcolonial Inscribings :
Indian Identities
Tutor: Dr. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru
Syllabus for Term II
Course Description: The course sets out to explore and challenge the postcolonial mission of “the
Empire writing back to the Centre” (Salman Rushdie) in the case of contemporary Indian fiction in
English and show that this fiction is highly relevant to contemporary (postcolonial) identity
concerns. It is also among the most articulate, readable and popular of writing in today’s world,
due to its overcoming of the postmodern crisis of form through its use of the Indian tradition of oral
storytelling.
The focus will be double: we shall discuss postcolonial theory in direct relation to concrete
literary examples chosen so as to address the negotiation between the British legacy and the epic,
mythic, storytelling and theatrical traditions of India. Whilst recent fiction will be our main focus
(approached from a thematic rather than chronological perspective), narrative texts will be read in a
wide historical, social and cultural context and in their relation with Indian traditions, mostly with
the tradition of Indian theatre and oral storytelling. We shall discuss the significance of the gesture
of writing in English and focus on the continuous opening-up of Resident and Non-Resident Indian
writing to a worldwide readership. This goes beyond the postcolonial centre-margin dichotomy
towards a cultivation of specific individualities that draw inspiration from storytelling,
performance and myth.
The purpose of the course is to open up the students’ horizon of literary and contextual
knowledge to some important names in the contemporary writing scene related to the question of
postcolonialism in different ways and to ask questions regarding their situatedness on the common
ground between the literary traditions of British culture, Indian traditions and the identity crises of
displacement that characterise today’s global world.
Assessment: Students will be expected to study the required theoretical and literary
reading(s) in advance of each seminar and present one novel of their choice from a theoretically
informed perspective. They will also write an original, well-researched comparative 3000-word
essay on two other novels, using a theoretical perspective informed by minimum three titles listed
under “Further readings” and/or other readings of their choice, relevant to the focus of this
seminar. Some of the novels on the reading list lend themselves to discussion in more than one
seminar. Texts that are not in the course package, on the course CD or in the library will be
provided.
#
1
Title
Introduction:
Themes for Presentation & Discussion
Bibliography
The first two sessions will provide a general
113
Situating India within presentation of the course and will discuss
Postcolonial Studies postcolonialism and hybridity in relation to
and beyond
the idea of situated knowledges and the
position of India within this. The postcolonial
gesture of writing back to the former centre of
the empire will be challenged from the
perspective of a particular tendency in recent
Indian fiction to rely on a rewriting of the
country’s traditions as a source of originality.




Timeframe of India and the British
Rule
Salman
Rushdie,
‘Imaginary
Homelands’, Imaginary Homelands:
Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, London:
Granta, 1991, pp. 9-21.
Homi Bhabha, ‘The Commitment to
Theory’, in The Location of Culture,
London and New York: Routledge,
1994, pp. 19-39.
A. K. Ramanujan, ‘Is There an Indian
Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay’,
in Amit Chaudhuri, ed., The Picador
Book of Modern Indian Literature,
London: Picador, 2001, pp. 420-437.
FURTHER READING
(the titles below will be used as reference
sources throughout the course)




Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: A
Historical
Introduction,
Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001.
Neil Lazarus (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Postcolonial Literary
Studies,
Cambridge:
Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
C. L. Innes, The Cambridge Introduction
to Postcolonial Literatures in English,
Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2007.
Ania
Loomba,
Colonialism
/
Postcolonialism, London and New York:
114

2
British
India
Fictions
Routledge, 1998.
Ranbir Vohra, The Making of India: A
Historical Survey, Armonk, N.Y. and
London: M.E. Sharpe, 1997
of This session will examine the colonial
beginnings of Indian writing in English and
will look at constructions of India in British
imagination.
Meenakshi
Mukherjee’s
distinction between Indo-Anglian and AngloIndian writing will be used as a useful
working tool, yet we shall aim to look at the
interactions and connections between the two.



Rudyard Kipling, Kim, London:
Penguin, 1994.
Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the
Hills, London: Wordsworth, 1993.
Peter Morey, ‘Introduction: PostColonial Criticism: A Transformative
Labour’, in Fictions of India. Narrative
and Power, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000, pp. 1-20.
FURTHER READING




Meenakshi Mukherjee, The Twice Born
Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the
Indian Novel in English, New Delhi &
London: Heinemann, 1971.
‘India in English Fiction: Kipling,
Thompson, Myers, Forster, Scott and
Farrell’, in Indian Literature in English,
London & New York: Longman, 1990,
pp. 159-186.
Peter Morey, ‘Gothic and Supernatural
– Allegories at Work and at Play in
Kipling’s Indian Fiction’ and ‘E. M.
Forster and the Dialogic Imagination’,
in Fictions of India, ed. cit., pp. 21-52
and 53-79.
Christiane Hartnack, Psychoanalysis in
Colonial India, Oxford & New York:
115
Oxford University Press, 2001 (pp. 119, 163-199).
3
Writing in English.
After India gained its independence from the
British Empire in 1947, the nationalist political
line that surrounded the making of the Indian
nation came in conflict with the act of writing
in English. English seemed the legacy of the
Empire, yet Indian writing in English soon
developed a life of its own.



Raja Rao, Foreword to Kanthapura
(1938), Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1989, pp. v-vi.
Amit Chaudhuri, ‘The Construction of
the Indian Novel in English’, in The
Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature,
ed. cit., pp. xxiii-xxxi.
Bill Buford, ‘Comment: Declarations of
Independence’, in The New Yorker, June 23
&30, 1997, pp. 6-11.
FURTHER READING


4
The
personal
biography/
national
history
allegory.
Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie, ‘Damme, This Is
the
Oriental Scene for You!’, in
The New Yorker, June 23 & 30, 1997,
pp. 50-61.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (ed.), A
History of Indian Literature in English,
New York: Columbia University
Press, 2003.
The June 23&30, 1997 issue of The New Yorker,
which celebrates 50 years of Indian
independence, projects Salman Rushdie as the
father-figure of contemporary Indian fiction
in English.
This assumption can be
challenged from a number of perspectives, yet
Rushdie is representative of a certain
identification of the private and the public in
postcolonial Indian history.
116






Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children,
London: Vintage, 1995.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses,
Dover, Delaware: The Consortium,
1992.
Salman
Rushdie,
‘“Errata”:
or,
Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s
Children’, in Imaginary Homelands, ed.
cit., pp. 22-25.
Fredric
Jameson,
‘Third
World
Literature In the Era of Multinational
Capitalism’, Social Text 15 (Fall), 1986,
pp. 65-88.
Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of
Otherness
and
the
“National
Allegory”’, in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds., The
Postcolonial Studies Reader, London &
New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 77-82
Maria-Sabina Draga, ‘Intre patrie si
exil: literaturile postcoloniale de
expresie engleza si reinterpretarea
canonului’, in Conditia postmoderna:
Spre o estetica a identitatilor culturale,
Bucuresti: Editura Universitatii din
Bucuresti, 2003, pp. 126-181.
FURTHER READING
 Homi Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Narrating
the Nation’, in Homi Bhabha, ed.,
Nation and Narration, London & New
York: Routledge, 1990.
 Meenakshi Mukherjee, ed., Rushdie’s
‘Midnight’s Children’: A Book of Readings,
Delhi: Pencraft, 1999.
 Fletcher, M.D., ed., Reading
Rushdie:
Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman
Rushdie, Amsterdam and Atlanta:
Rodopi, 1994.
 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Reading
The Satanic Verses, in Outside in the
Teaching Machine, New York & London:
Routledge, 1993, pp. 217-242.
117



5/6
Rewriting
History,
Myth and Tradition.
Re-definitions
of
Indian Storytelling
Lisa Appignanesi and Sarah Maitland,
The Rushdie File, London: ICA/Fourth
Estate, 1989.
From Margareta Petersson, Unending
Metamorphoses : Myth, Satire and
Religion in Salman Rushdie’s Novels,
Lund University Press, 1996.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, The Cambridge
Companion
to
Salman
Rushdie,
Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007.
As signalled by Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,
there is a tendency in contemporary Indian
fiction in English to rewrite the past and
present history of India from a personal mythinformed perspective. Mythical and cultural
traditions have long been reinterpreted in
India through performance and storytelling
and are still the basis of contemporary
identity constructions.




“Virtual
Reality
on
Infinite
Bandwidth”:
Vikram
Chandra
interviewed
by
Maria-Sabina
Alexandru,
The
Journal
of
Commonwealth Literature 40:2, pp.5-21.
Vikram Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring
Rain, London and Boston: Faber &
Faber, 1995.
Anita Desai, In Custody, London:
Penguin, 1982
Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land,
London: Granta, 1992.
FURTHER READING


Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality
and the Artifice of History: Who
Speaks
for
“Indian”
Pasts?’,
Representations nr. 37 (Winter 1992), pp.
1-26.
Geetha Ganapathy-Dore, ‘The Story118






7
Storytelling and
Performance:
Instances
of Postcolonial
Translation.
Teller’s Voice in Vikram Chandra’s Red
Earth and Pouring Rain’, Commonwealth
Essays and Studies, 19: 1, Autumn 1996.
Maria-Sabina
Draga
Alexandru,
‘Alternatives to the Novel Form: Oral
Storytelling and Internet Patterns in
Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and
Pouring Rain’, Journal of Commonwealth
Literature 43.3, 2008, pp. 45-60.
Amina Yakin, ‘The Communalization
and Disintegration of Urdu in Anita
Desai’s In Custody’, in Peter Morey and
Alex Tickell, eds., Alternative Indias:
Writing, Nation and Communalism,
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi,
2005, pp. 89-114.
Marta Dvorak, ‘The Politics of
Language
and
the
Poetics
of
Creolization in Anita Desai’s In
Custody’, Commonwealth Essays and
Studies 31:2, Spring 2009, pp. 95-106.
Sujala Singh, ‘The Routes of National
Identity in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow
Lines’, in Peter Morey and Alex Tickell,
eds., Alternative Indias, ed. cit., pp. 161180.
Thieme, John. "Amitav Ghosh".
‘Amitav Ghosh’, in A Companion to
Indian Fiction in English, ed. Pier
Paolo Piciucco, New Delhi: Atlantic,
2004: 251-75.
Gavin Flood, An Introduction to
Hinduism, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
The rewriting of history as a mythical
narrative in contemporary Indian fiction in
English relies on the traditional marriage of
storytelling and performance in traditional
Indian culture. Oral storytelling is revived in
written fiction in English, which is an act of
geographical,
political
and
linguistic
translation of identity narratives.
119






Girish Karnad, ‘Author’s Introduction’
to
Three
Plays:
Naga-Mandala,
Hayavadana, Tughlaq. Delhi: Oxford
India Paperbacks, 1994, pp. 1-18.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children,
London: Vintage, 1995
Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of
Stories, London: Viking, 1999.
R. K. Narayan, Under the Banyan Tree,
London: Penguin, 1985.
Vikram Chandra, Love and Longing in
Bombay, London: Faber, 1998.
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies:
Stories (1999), London: Flamingo, 2000.
FURTHER READING
 G.J.V.Prasad, ‘Writing Translation: The
Strange Case of the Indian Novel in
English’, in Postcolonial Translation:
Theory and Practice, eds. Susan Bassnett
and Harish Trivedi, London and New
York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 41-57.
 From Peter Malekin and Ralph Yarrow,
Consciousness, Literature and Theatre:
Theory and Beyond, London: Macmillan,
1997 (‘Theatre and Drama: Spirit in
Performance’, pp. 126-150).
 Ralph Yarrow, Indian Theatre: Theatre of
Origin, Theatre of Freedom, Richmond,
Surrey: Curzon, 2001.
8/9
Indian
Theatre, Having examined the performativity of
Performance and Film Indian storytelling, in this session we shall
examine the ways in which Indian theatre and
film make use of storytelling. The interactions
between storytelling and performance as they
co-operate in retelling contemporary identity
narratives are even more significant when the
storytelling is located on the border between
“East” and “West”.

Girish
Karnard,
Naga-Mandala/
120





Hayavadana in Three Plays, Delhi: OUP,
1995; The Fire and the Rain, Delhi OUP,
1998.
K. N. Panikkar, Karimkutty and The
Lone Tusker, Calcutta: Seagull, 1992.
Jean-Claude Carriere, The Mahabharata:
A Play Based Upon the Indian Classic Epic
(1987), trans. Peter Brook, London:
Methuen, 1988.
Peter Brook, The Mahabharata (1985)
(video screening)
Omkara, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s
Othello by Vishak Bhardwaj (2006)
(video screening)
Peter Brook, ‘The Mahabharata’, in The
Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical
Exploration
1946-1987,
London:
Methuen, 1988, pp. 160-165.
FURTHER READING
 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies:
An Introduction, London and New
York: Routledge, 2002.
 David Williams, Peter Brook and the
Mahabharata.
Critical
Perspectives,
London and New York: Routledge,
1991.
 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘Indian Cinema’,
in John Hill and Pamela Church
Gibson, eds., The Oxford Guide to Film
Studies, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998, pp. 535-542.
 Brian Crow and Chris Banfield, ‘Girish
Karnad and an Indian Theatre of
Roots’, in An Introduction to PostColonial
Theatre,
Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996.
 Dwyer, Rachel, Filming the Gods:
Religion and Indian Cinema, London and
New York: Routledge, 2006.
 Gokulsing, E. Moti and Wimal
Dissayanake, Indian Popular Cinema: A
Narrative of Cultural Change, Stoke on
121
Trent: Trentham, 2004.
10
Diasporic India:
Reinventing Home
Motherland and otherland as homes of the
body and homes of the mind overlap in
literature more often than not. ‘East’/‘West’
encounters within Bhabha’s Third Space are
accompanied by displacement and conflicts
between self and other which result in the
formation of diasporic communities and the
expanding category of NRI (Non-resident
Indian) writers.






Hanif Kureishi, ‘Hanif Kureishi on
London’,
interview
with
Colin
McCabe, Critical Quarterly, 41:3,
Autumn 1999, pp. 37-45.
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia,
London: Faber & Faber, 1990.
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners
(1956), London: Longman, 1979.
Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines,
London: Penguin, 1990.
V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men, New
York: Random House, 1986.
Homi Bhabha, ‘Of mimicry and man:
The ambivalence of the colonial
discourse’, in The Location of Culture,
London and New York: Routledge,
1994, pp. 85-92.
FURTHER READING
 Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2000, pp. 173-186.
 Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of
the South Asian Diaspora in Britain,
London: Palgrave, 2002.
 Thomas Wägenbaur, ‘“East, West,
Home’s Best. Homi K. Bhabha’s and
Salman Rushdie’s Passage to “Third
122


11/12 Negotiating an
écriture feminine
between ‘East’ and
‘West’. The New
Indian Exotic
Space”’, Theo d’Haen and Patricia
Krüs, eds., Colonizer and Colonized,
Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000,
pp. 109-121.
Bart Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi,
Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2001.
Irina Grigorescu Pana, The Tomis
Complex. Exile and Eros in Australian
Literature, Berne: Peter Lang, 1996.
In contemporary Indian fiction female
identities are constructed between tradition
and emancipation under the sign of a double
subaltern
condition
reconfigured
as
empowered mother-figures or feminists
placed under the sign of a seductive exotic
which supplements an important creative
strength.





Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the
Subaltern Speak?’, in Patrick Williams
and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. A
Reader, New York: Columbia UP, 1994,
pp. 66-111.
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things,
London: Flamingo, 1997.
Githa Hariharan, The Thousand Faces of
Night, London: Viking, 1992.
Sunetra Gupta, A Sin of Colour, London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999.
Manju Kapur, Difficult Daughters,
London: Faber and Faber, 1998.
FURTHER READING
 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial
Exotic: Marketing the Margins, London
and New York: Routledge, 2001.
 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under
Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship
and Colonial Discourses’, in Williams
and Chrisman, op. cit., pp. 196-220.
 Sara Suleri, ‘Woman Skin Deep:
123






13
Feminism
and
the
Postcolonial
Condition’, in Williams and Chrisman,
op. cit., pp. 244-256.
Tirthankar Chanda, ‘Sexual/Textual
Strategies in The God of Small Things’,
Commonwealth Essays and Studies 20:1.
Cécile Oumhani, ‘Hybridity and
Transgression in Arundhati Roy’s The
God of Small Things’, Commonwealth
Essays and Studies, 22:2.
‘Performative Symbols and Structures
in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small
Things’, Commonwealth Essays and
Studies 31.2, 2009, pp. 62-77.
Elleke Boehmer, ‘“First Realise Your
Need”: Manju Kapur’s Erotic Nation’,
in Peter Morey and Alex Tickell,
Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and
Communalism, Amsterdam-New York:
Rodopi, 2005, pp. 53-69.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, ‘Myself in
India’, in John Thieme, ed., The Arnold
Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in
English, London: Arnold, 1996, pp. 849856.
Roxana Marinescu, Violated Bodies: A
Cross-Cultural Reading of the EnglishLanguage Fiction by Authors of SouthAsian Origin, Bucuresti: Editura
Universitara, 2009.
Rhizomatic Narratives Non-Resident Indian writing is an outcome of
and Nomadic Selves
a condition that involves migration, exile and
identity performance across borders. As old
stories are retold to match contemporary
issues, migrant identities are redefined as
nomadic identities.

Robert J. C. Young, ‘Colonialism and
the Desiring Machine’ (from Colonial
Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and
Race, London: Routledge, 1995), in
Gregory Castle, ed., Postcolonial
124
Discourse: An Anthology,
Blackwell, 2001, pp. 73-98.





Oxford:
Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath
Her Feet, London: Vintage, 2000.
Salman Rushdie, Fury, New York:
Random House, 2001.
Vikram Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring
Rain, London: Faber & Faber, 1995.
Amit Chaudhuri, A Strange and Sublime
Address, London: Vintage, 1992.
Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger,
London: Harper Collins, 2008.
FURTHER READING
 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A
Thousand
Plateaus,
Continuum
International Publishing, 2002.
 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner,
‘Deleuze and Guattari: Schizos,
Nomads, Rhizomes’, in Postmodern
Theory: Critical Interrogations, London:
Basingstoke, 1991.
 Amit Chaudhuri, The Picador Book of
Modern Indian Literature, London:
Picador, 2001.
 Sneharika Roy, ‘The White Tiger: The
Beggar’s Booker’, Commonwealth Essays
and Studies 31.2, Spring 2009, pp.57-67.
14
Alternative
Constructions of
India. Beyond
Postcolonialism.
Conclusions
This session aims to draw the conclusions to
our course by going back to the question of
postcolonialism and its relevance to a body of
writing that has overcome any framework
through its pronounced originality. Indian
fiction in English is in a continual process of
reinventing India at home and elsewhere. We
shall draw conclusions whilst looking at a few
less typical novels meant to make us take the
discussion further.

R. K. Narayan, The Man-Eater of
Malgudi, New York: Viking, 1961.
125



Amitav
Ghosh,
The
Calcutta
Chromosome, New York: Avon, 1995.
Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate (1986),
London: Faber and Faber, 1987.
Vikram Seth, An Equal Music, London:
Phoenix, 1999.
FURTHER READING
 Peter Morey and Alex Tickell,
Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and
Communalism, Amsterdam-New York:
Rodopi, 2005.
 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing
Europe:
Postcolonial
Thought
and
Historical Difference, Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2000.
 Angela Atkins, A Suitable Boy, London
and New York: Continuum, 2002.
 John Thieme, ‘The Cultural Geography
of
Malgudi’,
Journal
of
Commonwealth Literature, 43, 2 (2007),
pp. 113-26.
 John
Thieme,
‘The
Discoverer
Discovered: Amitav Ghosh’s The
Calcutta Chromosome’, in Tabish Khair
(ed.), Amitav Ghosh: A Critical
Companion, Delhi: Permanent Black,
2003.
126