Reading Transnational Cultures

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 5
• Convenor: Professor Luciana Martins
• Tutors: Professor Luciana Martins, Dr Ann Lewis, Dr Eckard Michels, Dr Damian Catani, Professor Akane Kawakami
• Assessment: a 2500-word essay (50%) and three-hour in-class test (50%)

In this module we explore the ways in which culture relates to the ideas of nation and the transnational by encouraging you to work with cultural artefacts which engage with more than one cultural context.

We will consider questions like:

• How important or restricting is it to explore culture within a national context?
• What does a text need to do to be described as transnational?
• Can our understanding of these categories be transformed by our engagement with literary and filmic works?
• What are some of the multiple ways in which a text can engage with more than one culture?
• Are these always liberating and transformative or can they also be oppressive and reactionary?
• How important is language to these questions?
• Do texts have to be monolingual or does transnationality require an engagement with more than one language?

We will work together as experts in different cultural contexts to explore these ideas in relation to specific texts.

Indicative syllabus

• Introduction
• Enlightenment encounters: Voltaire, Lettres concerning the English Nation
• Enlightenment encounters: Montesquieu’s Persian Letters
• Historical perspectives: what defines Europe
• Historical perspectives: the idea of Europe in the interwar period; European integration in the 1950s
• Franco-American relations: Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America (1835-40) and Bernard Henri-Levy: American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville (2006)
• Diaspora in Latin America: Sandra Kogut, The Hungarian Passport (2001)
• Diaspora in Latin America: Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, Terra Estrangeira (Foreign Land, 2012)
• From France to Madagascar: Michaël Ferrier, Over Seas of Memory

By the end of this module, you will:

• understand the ways in which culture relates to the ideas of nation and the transnational
• understand the complexities of working with cultural artefacts from more than one cultural context
• have gained skills in literary and filmic analysis
• be able to reflect in depth on the significance of language for understanding cultures.