Western Literary Tradition II
Code: 100252Credits: 6
| Degree programme | Type | Course |
|---|---|---|
| Catalan Philology: Literary Studies and Linguistics | OP | 4 |
Contact lecturer
- Name :
- Miriam Ruiz-Ruano Risquez
- Email :
- miriam.ruizruano@uab.cat
Group languages
You can consult this information at the end of the document.
Prerequisites
By obtaining the minimum of credits in basic training subjects, students have demonstrated to have acquired the basic competences and they will be able to express themselves orally and in writing. For this reason, any spelling and expression errors that may be committed will lead to a score decrease in the final grade.
Activities, practical sessions and papers submitted in the course must be original and under no circumstances will the total or partial plagiarism of third-party materials published on any medium be admitted. Any submission of non-original material without properly indicating its origin will automatically result in a failure rating (0).
It is also expected that students know the general rules of submission of an academic work. However, students could apply the specific rules that the teacher of the subject may indicate to them, if they deem it necessary.
Objectives
The course is an approach to the debate around literary modernity and postmodernity. The texts chosen to reflect about these themes hold an eminent place in the current canon, they have been studied from different methodologies and they have received some of the most celebrated practical achievements of literary criticism.
In conversation with the previous ones, we will study texts that, due to their poetic capacity and critical force, appear as vanishing points to the Western canon, and have shown to be capable of generating their own genealogies. The objective of this module is that the selected readings constitute the starting point for a critical reflection on the Western literary tradition.
We will work on the development of a critical perspective informed by feminisms and cultural studies.
Learning outcomes
- Express ideas effectively in formal academic texts by adopting argumentative and textual procedures.
- Submit assignments in formats tailored to requirements and personal styles, whether carried out individually or in a small group.
- Seek out, choose and manage information independently, both from structured sources (databases, bibliographies, or specialist journals) and from internet searches.
- Write text commentaries from a critical standpoint.
- Summarise the knowledge acquired about the origin of the various fields within the discipline and the transformations they have undergone.
- Argue a case regarding several literary topics and problems arising from different works and evaluate the results.
- Critically interpret literary works, taking into account the relationships between the different areas within literature and their relationship to humanistic, artistic and social areas.
- Resolve tasks on authors, methods and trends in comparative literature by drawing on knowledge of other humanistic disciplines.
- Identify the ancient Greco-Latin sources that have inspired artists and literati of the Western cultural tradition.
- Recognise the influence of the Greco-Latin literary genres and works in texts of the post-classical European literary tradition.
- Set a plan for working on an assignment on the subject area.
- Match literary texts to their corresponding genres.
- Match literary texts to their corresponding formal and cultural contexts.
- Argue a case regarding several literary topics and problems arising from different works, and evaluate the results.
- Solve problems related to methods of study of different literatures.
- Solve problems related to the theoretical foundations and the main concepts in the study of literary criticism.
- Solve problems related to the historical placement of literary texts.
- Explain the basic characteristics of the compared literary texts.
- Detect the degree of cohesion and coherence of the different genres and identify the factors that contribute to these and to their suitability in different contexts.
- Identify and explain the fundamentals of the literary communication process in each genre and those of the interpretation process based on questions and theoretical and/or practical activities.
- Identify and explain the basic characteristics of literary texts and the interpretation process.
- Identify different literary elements and their insertion in different texts and styles of discourse.
- Analyse literary texts using the different concepts and methods of comparative literature.
Contents
1. Modernity and Postmodernity. History, meaning and discussion of two concepts
2. Modern poetry: from Baudelaire to Fernando Pessoa
3. Beyond 19th century Realism: sybolism, psychologism and the absurd
4. Concentrationary literature: the end of Enlightenment ideals
5. Distopia
6. Postmodern narrative: magical realism and fantastic literature
Learning activities and methodology
| Title | Hours | ECTS | Learning outcomes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Master classes | 55 | 2.2 | |
| Programmed tutorials | 20 | 0.8 | |
| written papers | 75 | 3 |
The learning of this subject by the students is distributed as follows:
- Directed activities (35%). These activities are divided into master classes and seminars and classroom practices led by the faculty, in which theoretical explanation is combined with discussion of all types of texts.
- Supervised activities (15%). These tutorials are programmed by the teacher, dedicated to correcting and commenting on problems both related to the syllabus of the subject and, above all, to the written papers that the student must present.
- Autonomous activities. These activities include both time devoted to individual study and production of written papers.
Assessment
Continuous assessment activities
| Title | Weight | Hours | ECTS | Learning outcomes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exam (2) | 35% | 0 | 0 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 |
| Exam 1 | 35% | 0 | 0 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23 |
| Test on critical discourses | 30% | 0 | 0 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23 |
The evaluation will be carried through two tests in the classroom and a short test of 30 minutes on critical texts related to the subject. The student will only be able to take the recovery in the event that he/she has submitted all the work and has obtained an average grade failure.
1) Exams 1 and 2: a partial exam of the first part of the course and an exam of the second part are foreseen. The tests will include: a) a text commentary on one of the compulsory readings b) a test with questions of synthesis and interpretation of the contents seen in class. In the correction, the ability to respond in a clear, orderly and relevant way to the question asked will be valued.
2) Test: They will consist of short tests carried out in the classroom and will deal with (a) lectures related to the contents of the subject and accessible in written or digital format and (b) critical texts from the bibliography.
Erasmus and exchange students who request to advance an exam must present a document from their home university justifying their request.
In case the student makes any irregularity that may lead to a significant variation in the grade of an evaluation act, this evaluation act will be graded with 0, regardless of the disciplinary process that may be instituted. In case of several irregularities in the evaluation acts of the same subject, the final grade of this subject will be 0. Activities in which fraud or misuse of AI has been detected cannot be retaken. That is to say, in no case will plagiarism (total or partial) or the use of Artificial Intelligence be admitted in any of the evaluation exercises.
The student will receive the grade of Not evaluable as long as he/she has not completed more than 30% of the evaluation activities.
At the time of each evaluation activity, the teacher will inform the student of the procedure and the date of review of the grades. In the case of a non-positive evaluation, the student may make new deliveries (work, commentary) and extraordinary tests that will have the same level of difficulty and the same typology as the ordinary tests. Only those students who have submitted at least one of the two final exams will be eligible for the re-evaluation of the subject, and only those exams that have been previously evaluated may be re-evaluated, provided that a minimum grade of 3 points in the average of the subject.
Single evaluation
The student may complete all three assessment tasks, each carrying the same weighting, at the end of the academic year on a single day. The date will be set at the beginning of the academic year and will coincide with the date of the final assessment. The same resit policy as for continuous assessment will apply.
Bibliography
Mandatory readings
Atwood, Margaret, El cuento de la criada, Salamandra, Barcelona, 2017.
Baudelaire, Charles, Las flores del mal, edición de Alain Verjat y Luis Martínez de Merlo, trad. Luis Martínez de Merlo, Cátedra, Madrid, 1997.
Borges, Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones, Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 2006.
Carroll, Lewis, Alicia en el País de las Maravillas. A través del espejo, edición de Manuel Garrido, trad. de Ramón Buckley, Cátedra, Madrid, 2006.
Conrad, Joseph, El corazón de las tinieblas, edición de Fernando Galván y José Santiago Fernández Vázquez, trad. de Araceli García Ríos e Isabel Sánchez Araujo, Cátedra, Madrid, 2006.
Kafka, Franz, El castillo, edición y traducción de Luis Acosta, Cátedra, Madrid, 1998.
Bibliography
This list contains the basic bibliographic references for the theoretical framework of the subject (definition and study of modernity and postmodernity).
The specific bibliography for each author will be shared during the course.
Barth, John, «Literatura postmoderna», Quimera, 46/47 (1984-1985), pp. 13-21.
Calinescu, Matei, Cinco caras de la modernidad, Tecnos, Madrid, 1991.
Calvino, Italo, Seis propuestas para el próximo milenio, Ediciones Siruela, Madrid, 1989.
Feher, Ferenc, “Comentario sobre el intermezzo postmodernista”, Revista de Occidente, núm. 66 (noviembre de 1986), pp. 57-74.
Foster, Hal (ed.), La posmodernidad, Kairós, Barcelona, 1985.
Gay,Peter, Modernidad. La atracción de la herejía de Baudelaire a Beckett, Paidós, Barcelona, 2007.
Habermas, Jurgen, El discurso filosófico de la modernidad, Taurus, Madrid, 1989.
Hart, J., “Comparative Poetics, Postmodernism and the Canon: An Introduction”, Canadian Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 20:1-2 (1993), pp. 1-8.
Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory and Fiction, Routledge, Londres, 1988.
Jameson, Fredric, Teoría de la postmodernidad, Trotta, Madrid, 1996.
Jauss, Hans-Robert, «Italo Calvino: Si una noche de invierno un viajero. Informe sobre una estética postmoderna», en Las transformaciones de lo moderno, Visor, Madrid, 1995, pp. 223-251.
Lipovetski, Gilles, La era del vacío. Ensayos sobre el individualismo contemporáneo, Anagrama, Barcelona, 1993.
Lipovetski, Gilles, y Sébastien Charles, Los tiempos hipermodernos, Anagrama, Barcelona, 2006.
Llovet, Jordi, “Vigencia de la modernidad”, La Página, núm. 3 (junio de 1990), pp. 8-15.
Lyon, David, Postmodernidad, Alianza Edtorial, Madrid, 1996.
Lyotard, Jean-François, La condición postmoderna, Cátedra, Madrid, 1986.
Lyotard, Jean-François, «Reescribir la modernidad», Revista de Occidente, 66 (noviembre de 1986), pp. 23-33.
Marchán Fiz, Simón, «Le bateau ivre: para una genealogía de la sensibilidad postmoderna», Revista de Occidente, 42 (noviembre de 1984), pp. 7-28.
Navajas, Gonzalo, «Retórica de la novela postmoderna española», en Teoría y práctica de la novela española posmoderna, Edicions del Mall, Barcelona, 1987, pp. 13-40.
Navajas, Gonzalo, Más allá de la posmodernidad, EUB, Barcelona, 1996.
Pardo, José Luis, «Filosofía y clausura de la modernidad», Revista de Occidente, 66 (noviembre de 1986), pp. 35-47.
Perloff, Marjorie, «Modernist Studies», en S. Greenblatt-G. Gunn, Redrawing the Boundaries, Modern Language Association, Nueva York, 1992, pp. 154-178.
Picó, Josep (comp.), Modernidad y postmodernidad, Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1988.
Roas, David, Tras los límites de lo real. Una definición de lo fantástico, Páginas de Espuma, Madrid, 2011.
Rowe, John Carlos, «Postmodernist Studies», en S. Greenblatt-G. Gunn, Redrawing the Boundaries, Modern Language Association, Nueva York, 1992, pp. 179-208.
Ruiz-Ruano, Míriam. L'autor que mira de reüll: la tradició a la literatura moderna i postmoderna. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, 2022.
Saldaña, Alfredo, “Postmodernidad: Todo vale, aunque de nada sirva”, Tropelías, núm. 5-6 (1994-1995), pp. 349-369.
Santiáñez, Nil, Investigaciones literarias. Modernidad, historia de la literatura y modernismo, Crítica, Barcelona, 2002.
Vattimo, Gianni, et al., En torno a la posmodernidad, Anthropos, Barcelona, 1990.
Wellmer, Albrecht, Sobre la dialéctica de modernidad y postmodernidad, Visor, Madrid, 1993.
Software
No
Course groups and languages
The information provided is provisional until November 30. After this date, you will be able to consult the language of each group through this link. To access the information, you will need to enter the course CODE