The online registration for 3rd-year BA students for elective courses (‘zajęcia fakultatywne’) will commence on Wednesday, September 27, at 7.00 pm and close on Friday, September 29, at 11.59 pm. In order to register students access the following website: usosweb.uni.lodz.pl.
Each student chooses one course labelled A and one course labelled B (two courses altogether):
Zajęcia fakultatywne A (Tuesdays)
Zajęcia fakultatywne B (Thursdays)
There are limits to the number of students in the groups. In the case of denied access to the group, please make an alternative choice. Students who register for Mark Tardi’s class on one day need to register for someone else’s course on the other.
Course descriptions can be found below:
Zajęcia fakultatywne A:
1. Dr hab. prof. UŁ Piotr Pęzik, Making sense of Large Language Models (LLMs). Theoretical foundations and practical implications for linguists, translators, teachers and other language experts
Large Language Models (LLMs) based on Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs) such as OpenAI’s chatGPT, Meta’s LLama have recently been advertised as a genuine example of Artificial Intelligence, possibly even exhibiting features of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). LLMs have been expected to largely replace translators, writers, programmers, foreign language teachers, customer support agents, etc. effectively calling into question the need to educate a wide spectrum of professionals. This course puts the advent of the LLM technology into a wider theoretical context of AI and natural language processing research. It introduces the basic principles underlying this technology, emphasizing its key advantages as well as its fundamental limitations, which are not likely to be solved in the immediate future. We will address a number of questions about when and how LLMs can be used in research and professional applications. The author of the course has considerable hands-on experience in fine-tuning Trurl.ai, the first open LLM adapted for a variety of Polish-English tasks, and therefore feels qualified to explain key notions issues which determine the usability of LLMs, such as prompt engineering, hallucinations, temperature sampling, fine-tuning, the curse of reversal, self-reflection, next-word-prediction and model benchmarking/ evaluation.
2. Mark Tardi, MFA, Smells Like Teen Spirit: Exploring the 1990s
It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: it started when the Berlin Wall fell and ended when the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, grunge replaced hair metal, irony was a form of currency, and having a personal brand was so uncool as to be unthinkable. “The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany,” writer Chuck Klosterman reminds us (with perhaps a hint of irony), but there were epiphenomena like Lilith Fair, Lollapalooza and Titanic, the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without algorithms that remembered everything and on any given Thursday night, more people watched a random episode of Seinfeld than the finale of Game of Thrones.
This course will explore some key elements from the pivotal decade of the 1990s: from Boyz N the Hood to The Big Lebowski, The Backstreet Boys to Britney Spears, Michael Jordan to Oprah Winfrey, Friends to Fight Club, and the myriad changes regarding race, class, and sexuality. The ’90s brought about a revolution in the human condition that we are still scrambling to understand. Or whatever.
3. Dr hab. prof. UŁ T. Dobrogoszcz, Postmodernism in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction and Film
The goal of the course is to provide students with a general understanding of the main tenets of postmodernism and demonstrate typical examples of contemporary postmodern fiction and film. After a brief theoretical introduction to basic philosophical and aesthetic assumptions of postmodernism, we will discuss the reading materials (short stories and fragments of novels by A. Carter, J. Barnes, P. Carey, J. Fowles, D. Barthelme) and films (by D. Lynch, R. Scott, S. Kubrick). We will critically approach the contemporary notions of language and identity, examining such concepts as irony, metafiction, intertextuality and hyperreality.
4. Dr hab. prof. UŁ Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka, Doing things with words in social contexts
The seminar focuses on language as a type of action in professional and other social contexts. The students will get familiar with a number of socio-pragmatic variables and research methods that can be used in linguistics projects. Accepting that speech is a type of action we are naturally interested in the varied interactions between language and society, therefore the course will invite discussions issues including the relationship between linguistic variation and social factors such as (national, ethnic or gender) identity, class and power, code choices in bi-dialectal or bilingual communities (e.g. Spanglish), attitudes towards language and culture. We will also explore selected aspects of communication in professional contexts (e.g. legal, medical or journalistic varieties) and explore implications with regard to how sociolinguistic issues can be used in teaching English as a foreign language. Theoretical issues will be illustrated with sample research tasks. The course is relevant for students interested in the nature of meaning in natural language, which includes face-to-face interaction, but also interaction found in fiction, literature, multimodal contexts, computer-mediated communication, and professional settings and the ones whose BA projects involved speech action in a phonetic perspective.
Zajęcia fakultatywne B
1. Dr Maria Szymańska, Lexis in Linguistic Research
The course provides an overview of various methodologies and approaches used in the study of lexis. During the course, students will delve into such topics as:
- what is a word?, gaining an understanding of the boundaries and structures of lexical units
- lexical semantics, examining concepts like polysemy, synonymy, antonymy, and connotation
- morphology, studying the internal structure of words and analysing the rules and processes governing word formation
- lexical variation, exploring how lexical choices vary across different sociolinguistic contexts
- neologisms, investigating the dynamic nature of language and analysing the role of technology and culture in lexical innovation
By the end of the course, students will have multifaceted understanding of the domain of research on vocabulary and be equipped with a diverse toolkit for their independent exploration of the world of lexical studies.
2. Dr hab. Małgorzata Myk, Extreme States: North American Writing in the Times of Extremity
Our course will be devoted to cutting-edge XXI-century North American writing and its current responses to different states of extremity: social, political, economic, etc.. How does literature respond to extremity in the face of such global phenomena as wars, the pandemic, late-capitalism, fascism, racism, AI and other new technologies? How does writing’s form change in response to psychological pressures and social challenges produced by such realities? Reading some of the most thought-provoking and formally-innovative literary texts by XXI-century North American authors, including Don DeLillo, Robert Fitterman, Kathy Acker, Divya Victor, Joey Yearous-Algozin, Trisha Low, Kevin Davies or Syd Zolf, among others, we will try to find answers to these questions. The reading list will be supplemented by new critical and theoretical commentaries on the status of texts in the present-day technologically-mediated milieu.
3. Dr Justyna Stępień, Robots, Cyborgs and Hybrids in the Anthropocene,
This course examines the idea that our bodies might be more aptly described as cyborgs, hybrids or as part of the ‘posthuman’ realm. While exploring our engagements with technology, biotechnology and our embodied relations to nonhuman animals and the material planet, the course addresses the notion of the posthuman. In the contemporary debate, the concept is a crucial tool for comprehending the current conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing upon research and concepts from technology studies, feminist and queer theory, and environmental and animal studies, we will work through specific examples of reproductive technologies, pharmaceuticals, self-tracking, and animals in space, amongst others – to think about who and what we are today. In addition to reading short theoretical and literary essays, we will discuss films, visual art, TV series, videos, fashion and games.
4. Mark Tardi, MFA, Smells Like Teen Spirit: Exploring the 1990s
It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: it started when the Berlin Wall fell and ended when the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, grunge replaced hair metal, irony was a form of currency, and having a personal brand was so uncool as to be unthinkable. “The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany,” writer Chuck Klosterman reminds us (with perhaps a hint of irony), but there were epiphenomena like Lilith Fair, Lollapalooza and Titanic, the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without algorithms that remembered everything and on any given Thursday night, more people watched a random episode of Seinfeld than the finale of Game of Thrones.
This course will explore some key elements from the pivotal decade of the 1990s: from Boyz N the Hood to The Big Lebowski, The Backstreet Boys to Britney Spears, Michael Jordan to Oprah Winfrey, Friends to Fight Club, and the myriad changes regarding race, class, and sexuality. The ’90s brought about a revolution in the human condition that we are still scrambling to understand. Or whatever.