Introduction

Aims:
-learn about the cultures from the perspective of literature
-learn how to approach literature from their own perspective as readers
-improve language skills and foster generic competences like: intra- and inter-personal
competencies (EI), conducting research – choosing the right information from the pile!,
critical and creative thinking, preparation and giving presentations, gaining self-awarenes
- check and recheck their value systems

Theoretical concepts: the Spiral Dynamics concept (Back and Cowan), the Maslow’s
Pyramid of needs and other(?) relevant paradigms (Transformative learning (Mezirow),
Emotional intelligence (Goleman), allquadrants integral evolution (Wilber), the World Value
System Survey)

Material: books, films, blogs, any relevant source on the topics.

Method: complete involvement of the studenst in the course: give lectures on their own:
must prepare material for other students in the class and for their reference after the classes.

Content:
1. Introduction of the Theoretical concepts

British Literature
2. Old Saxon Literature :(main characteristics)
-Beowulf:
- Second level consciousness; Grendel and his mother – can we get into their
shoes!
- the mythical layers in the epic

3. Medieval Literature: religious literature, romance, Chaucer :......................

-the 3th and 4th levels SP consciousness:
Excalibur (film)
“Marriage of King Arthur”,.....
“The Wedding of Sir Gawain” , code of chivalry + what every woman desires!!!

4. Renaissance :......
- The Shakespeare enigma : Anonymus(film)
- Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare in Love(film)
- reading John Donne: “The Flea”, “the Relic”

5. Enlightenment and the 5th level of consciousness: (main characteristics and

representatives)
-Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – post-colonialistic approach (first explain the
concept of post-colonialism)

6. The Jane Austen Phenomenon:

Mansfield park (analysis of characters based on emotional intelligence concepts)
The Jane Austen Book Club (film)- trying to figure out why she is sill ‘in’!
 7. Romanticism- first appearance of the 6th level of consciousness: main characteristics:
the Byron hero (steps towards healthy evolution of consciousness!)
-Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
8. Victorian moral (struggling between 5th and 6th level!)
- The Bronte sisters’ heroines: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights
-Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
-Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
9. Modernism: 6th level puts down roots (main characteristics)
- V. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway + The Hours (for both films are available!)
10. Contemporary fiction:
-Doris Lessing: Room 19
NB In addition 9. and 10. will be treated with respect to the women issues, especially suicidal
intentions and transformative learning and other means for solving these issues!

American Literature
11. American Romanticism basic characteristics (http://www.shmoop.com/american-
romanticism/characteristics.html)
12. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter (see in attachment) (+ a film -with Demi Moore?)
13. Edgar Allan Poe : short stories: The Fall of the House of Usher; The Masque of the Red Death;
Ligeia; The Oval Portrait (or some others, up to students’ interest)
14.Ralph Waldo Emerson (any information about Self-reliance) and Henry David Thoreau (any
information about Walden) (Transcendentalism and its influence on western culture)
15. Walt Whitman Leaf of Grass: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1322/1322-h/1322-h.htm
(selected poems + comparison with the Macedonian translation)
16. Racial issues: H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, M. Twain’s The adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, Toni Morrison’s The Song of Solomon :
http://dl.keywin.org/9/4/944ba7ebdbeb47efdd4fd547c7f55e89.pdf
17.The American dream: Jack London’s Martin Eden and F. S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
18. The Lost generation – Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and/or For Whom the Bell Tolls
19. The Beat generation: Allen Ginsberg’s poem The Howl:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49303
+the film
20. Sylvia Plath’s poem Daddy: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-
poets/poems/detail/48999
21. Utopias and Dystopias: T. More’s Utopia (summary, any information, or the book:
http://history-world.org/Utopia_T.pdf + films about utopian and dystopian novel and film (A.
Burgess’s Cloak work Orange, A. Huxley’s Brave New World or G. Orwell’s 1984, H.G Wels’s Time
Machine)