Moodle UK pro výuku 1

Summer Term 2024, Mondays 15:50–17:20
Course number: AAALC036AE
Room: P001
Credit value: 5 ECTS

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Content and aims of the course: The seminar will introduce students to some of the female Irish writers dominating the anglophone literary scene in recent years, bring attention to a variety of issues that they address, as well as outline the ongoing discussion of Irish women’s writing in literary studies. Furthermore, it aims to suggest some trends emerging in contemporary Irish women’s writing, including a preoccupation with space and place, a tendency to reappropriate age old imagery, a focus on character driven writing, and an opening up of themes such as social inequality, gender identity, trauma, and plurality of experience.

The course will start with an introductory session giving a brief summary of Irish women writing’s history and the status of women writers in Ireland now. Selected works of fiction and drama will be discussed in the following ten weeks. Each session will feature a brief introduction to the author and her works, a student presentation on one of the assigned texts, and a discussion aided by prompt questions (posted beforehand by the lecturers and students in a Moodle forum).

ASSESSMENT

1. Regular attendance

2. Active participation in debates (based on the assigned reading), as well as participation in the weekly forum (posting a question related to the assigned reading)

3. A fifteen–minute, in-class presentation on the text provided for the week’s session

4. A final essay of 2,500–3,000 words on a topic chosen by the student and consulted with the lecturers


Essays must include full bibliographical references and footnotes for all works cited or paraphrased in accordance with the Notes and Bibliography Chicago style (for basic guidelines, see https://ualk.ff.cuni.cz/students/essay-guidelines-2/). Students are advised not to use Internet sources in place of adequately researching texts available in print or in academic digital collections.
Essays that have no research base or fail to cite sources transparently and appropriately (i.e., are plagiarised) will not be graded and will result in failing the course. Should an essay be unsatisfactory for reasons other than plagiarism, students have the opportunity to submit a rewrite on condition that the rewritten work is submitted with the marked original.

Can you name all the political powers that have had a colonial presence on Taiwan?
Why do Taiwanese today look favorably at the Japanese colonial period, when most other places in Asia have a very negative view of that time?
How do Taiwanese deal with the ever-looming possibility of war across the Taiwan Strait?

In this introductory class to Taiwan, we will be exploring questions like these.
Located at the edge of empires, Taiwan has a unique colonial history that connects Asia, Europe, and North America.
We will delve into history from the vantage of contemporary Taiwan, which is both post-colonial and democratic, and investigate what role the colonial experience plays in nation-building today.
With this complex historical backdrop, the class will then focus on new, “aquatic” as well as land-based perspectives on Taiwan that have the potential of moving the island and its inhabitants out of the orbit of empire.

The class will be held in English. No prior knowledge of Taiwan is required, but I expect active participation, an interest in challenging your own biases and assumptions, and the willingness to read about one or two academic articles or chapters per week (typically around 30 pages though the assignments can occasionally exceed that number).

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The question of relation between state and religion is, has been, and will be essential to Western political thought. In this seminar, we will look at various Medieval Western Christian political thinkers and discuss how they
conceptualize religion within their works and theories, and what space they provide for religious otherness, especially with regards to Islam. This goal presupposes first discussing the more general Western perceptions of
Islam and Muslims during the Long Middle Ages.