This subject introduces students to Europe through the prism of its biggest annual media extravaganza, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). This pan-European event attracts more than 40 participating countries and hundreds of millions of viewers around the world. The ESC offers a rich site for exploring many issues at the core of Europe today: the expansion of the European Union, the integration of Europe as well as the ‘nation branding’ of new participating states. Through a series of case studies, this subject will examine a range of dimensions of Europe, including language, culture, diversity, the national and the transnational, as well as issues of gender and sexuality.

This subject will provide students with an introduction to the complexity, challenges and richness of Australian Indigenous life and cultures. Drawing on a wide range of diverse and dynamic guest lecturers, this subject gives students an opportunity to encounter Australian Indigenous knowledges, histories and experiences through interdisciplinary perspectives. Across three thematic blocks - Indigenous Knowledges, Social and Political Contexts and Representation/Self-Representation - this subject engages contemporary cultural and intellectual debate. Social and political contexts will be considered through engagement with specific issues and a focus on Indigenous cultural forms, which may include literature, music, fine arts, museum exhibitions and performance, will allow students to consider self-representation as a means by which to disrupt and expand perceptions of Aboriginality.

Who we are and what we do is all tangled up in our identity. This subject considers how identities are constructed and maintained through mediated processes of self and other. The subject investigates the myriad demands and devices that figure in constructing our senses of self and other (including language, leisure, beliefs and embodied practices). By exploring identity in diverse contexts, across time and place, the subject maps varying conceptions of self and other and how these conceptions are constructed and maintained. A key focus is on how these mediated conceptions of self and other are translated into material practices of inclusion, exclusion, discrimination, violence and criminalisation.

Language plays a central role in the central disciplinary areas in the humanities and social sciences. This subject gives students tools for thinking about language in a range of disciplines, including linguistics, history, sociology, politics, literary studies, anthropology, language studies, psychology and psychoanalytic theory. It shows how language can be analysed as a system, but also how language features centrally in politcal and social contexts: for example, in the processing of the claims of asylum seekers, in developing views of ethnicity, race and nation, and in colonialism; and in the construction of gendered and sexual identity. The role of language in the psyche, and the process of acquisition of languages in children and in adults, are also important topics. Knowing how to think about language, and familiarity with the main thinkers who have discussed language in a range of humanities and social science disciplines, provide an indispensable basis for study in any area of the Arts degree.

Reason, many believe, is what makes us human. Until recently, most scientists and philosophers agreed that the ability to use the mind to analyse and interpret the world is something intrinsic to the nature of our species. Reason has a long and extraordinary history. We will explore a number of inter-related themes: the nature of reason from Ancient Greece to our contemporary world; the ever shifting relationship between reason and faith; reason's place in the development of scientific experimentation and thinking; shifting perspectives about the uses of Reason and, finally, how reason relates to theories of the mind, exploring the tensions between reason, the passions and the will.

Reason will take you on a journey from Plato's cave to the neuro-scientists' lab. We will visit revolutions in science, thinking and politics. We will explore the impact of some of the great philosophers of history, including Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Bentham, Coleridge, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault and many more besides. By the end of this subject you will have a deep understanding of the importance of the idea of reason to human history and philosophy. You might, even, be able to answer the question: 'does reason exist?'

Reason is an Arts Foundation Subject and we will argue that understanding the history and philosophy of reason provides great insights into many aspects of the humanities from political philosophy to understanding history. We will, of course, be paying particular attention to the foundational skills that will help you successfully complete your Arts major: particularly critical thinking and argument development.

Humans grapple with representations of themselves and their contexts. They also like to imagine other possible worlds. We use words, language, images, sounds and movement to construct narratives and stories, large and small, about the trivial and the profound, the past and the future. These representations can help us to understand worlds but they can also create worlds for us. This subject explores how different genres such as speech, writing, translation, film, theatre and art generate representations of social life, imagination and the human condition. A key aim of the subject is to develop a critical appreciation of how language, images and embodied gestures are used to construct empowering and disempowering discourses.

The idea of power is a way to grasp the character of social relations. Investigating power can tell us about who is in control and who may benefit from such arrangements. Power can be a zero-sum game of domination. It can also be about people acting together to enact freedom. This subject examines the diverse and subtle ways power may be exercised. It considers how power operates in different domains such as markets, political systems and other social contexts. It also examines how power may be moderated by such things as regulation and human rights. A key aim is to explore how differing perspectives portray power relations and how issues of power distribution may be characterised and addressed.

European modernism refers to a wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in literature and arts at the end of the 19th and early 20th century and has proven a major influence on current (Western) literature, film and the arts. This course introduces students to key themes of modernist literature, theatre, and film in Europe. The course familiarizes students with key writers and thinkers of this period and will address the ways in which they provoked their readers/viewers through new and complex forms and styles. Major themes comprise the crisis of representation, the representation of cosmopolitanism and urban cultural dislocation, consciousness and memory, and sexuality. (Students undertaking this subject will be expected to regularly access an internet-enabled computer).

The eye-witness account and the personal memoir offer powerful ways of exploring the human legacy of overwhelming historical events on individual lives. But how do literary genres like the memoir and autobiography manage to speak about unspeakable topics, how do they represent the unrepresentable and write about trauma? What is the function, and what the effect, of writing memory for the victim, for the reader, and for the perpetrator? How do the offspring of the victims and perpetrators "remember" their parents" traumas and shape memories of events they have only experienced second-hand? What is the relationship between fiction and memory in memoir writing and how do we read a testimonial of a Holocaust survivor that has been faked? This subject will introduce students to a selection of testimonial writing and films that tell individual stories of a shameful national past. It explores the effect of generic convention on the relation of history and memory, and the need for generic invention to speak trauma and tell the un-tellable. Its focus will be on the Holocaust, the Algerian War, and life under Eastern bloc communist regimes. This subject will focus on writing from France, Germany, and Italy in the first instance, but may from time to time include writing from other parts of Europe.

In this course students learn about a selection of European cuisines and how they have been plated up for consumption in Melbourne. Food and wine are often used to support national and regional identity. In the first part of this course, students will consider the relationship between gastronomy and identity. Students will be introduced to a range of key culinary concepts and practices and the way we talk about them. Through analysis of some of the key features of French, Italian and Spanish cuisines, students will consider how these countries' culinary profiles speak to wider socio-political issues such as authenticity, food and space, cultural practices and the history of food and wine.

In the second part of this course, students will consider issues of "authenticity" in the way cuisines are plated up for consumption in Melbourne. This will require students to interrogate their assumptions and expectations about European foods and wines and to reflect on their personal experience of the "taste" of Europe.

This subject will be offered on campus and online.

What does the art of nineteenth-century Europe tell us about the society that made it? This period was marked by immense social and cultural change: political upheaval; rapid industrialisation; an expanding colonial empire; a society altered by shifting attitudes to class, race, gender, bodies, senses and emotions; rapid urbanisation (and dislocation) as people moved from countryside to city. Artists responded to these changes in revolutionary ways of their own, defying the traditional approaches of the academy and creating their own modes for representing their world. From Romanticism and Orientalism to Impressionism and the avant-gardes of the late-nineteenth century, these artists’ shifting representations of social relations, the landscape, the human body, and sexual and gender identity fundamentally altered both the function of visual art and the role of the artist. In this subject, students will explore how painting and sculpture of nineteenth-century Europe was instrumental in creating new identities and new modes of being in and imaging the world amid the conditions of modernity and the emergence of Industrial capitalism. Although the primary case study will be France, art from other European countries will also be discussed. Engaging with recent scholarship, students will be encouraged to question and critique the ways in which art has the capacity to embody, reflect, and challenge ideologies of its time.

How should one live? What makes an action right or wrong and how can we tell which actions are which? Can critically engaging with what philosophers say about these questions make you a better person, or a moral expert?

This subject is divided into three parts, with a part devoted to each of the three main families of ethical theories. We start by looking at John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, or the view that actions are “right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness” and go on to consider the views of contemporary heirs to this tradition. Some object that utilitarianism delivers counter-intuitive verdicts and can, if the calculations turn out right, support seemingly repugnant actions. This worry leads naturally to an investigation of Kantian ethics, which puts good will rather than good consequences at the heart of its analysis of right action, and argues that reason is key to moral judgment and action. Some object that Kantianism does not acknowledge the centrality of emotion in our moral lives. The virtue ethics tradition, a tradition with roots in both Ancient Greece and China, seems well equipped to address these concerns. But can it provide sufficient guidance about what to do when we are in moral quandaries? As we examine each of these main approaches, we ask ourselves what we want from an ethical theory. Are we hoping to find a decision procedure that would simplify moral choice, a framework for identifying considerations that matter in making moral decisions, or do we want something more ambitious but more elusive, such as a conception of what it is to live a good life?

This subject examines how social and cultural factors influence language, and the role language plays in structuring and representing social categories across cultures. It examines how society and language shape each other: how language represents and enables social interaction, and how social interaction influences the form of language. Specific topics to be covered include socially determined variation in language styles and registers, language varieties reflecting social class, gender and ethnic group. It also examines factors affecting language choice such as, bi- and multi-lingualism, and factors of language contact and change.

This subject examines modernism, a revolution in literature and other arts that took place between roughly 1890 and 1950. Modernism was an international and experimental enterprise, at once highly local and truly global, emerging in sites as diverse as Paris, Tokyo, New York, and Buenos Aires — as well as between them. In lieu of surveying every major modernist writer, we will emphasize a number of significant figures and movements. Students will learn about movements and contexts such as Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Francophone Négritude movement, and the queer enclaves of Paris’s Left Bank. Course readings will be drawn from a range of genres, including novels, short fiction, essays, poetry, plays, and manifestos by writers such as Walter Benjamin, Aimé Césaire, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, and will touch on other arts, such as cinema, music, and painting.

Nietzsche’s bold and original challenges to traditional morality and the primacy of reason have made him one of the best known and most influential of modern thinkers. This course provides a broad introduction to Nietzsche as a philosopher by addressing his views on a range of themes such as tragedy, history, morality, knowledge, the eternal recurrence and the will to power. We also consider some of Nietzsche’s more prominent critics and the wide range of interpretations to which his rich but controversial work have given rise.

This subject maps the intertwined (and sometimes antagonistic) trajectories of Romanticism and early Feminism, as they emerge in Britain in the wake of the American and French Revolutions. Drawing on prose, poetry and drama from this period (including texts by Byron, Blake, Bronte, Hays, Radcliffe, Robinson, Mary Shelley, P. B. Shelley and Wordsworth), it studies the construction of modern notions of literature, culture, sexuality, emancipation and revolution. In so doing, the subject brings into dialogue late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophies of imagination and reason, accounts of the artist as Satan/Prometheus and Sappho, and myths of the lover as Don Juan and femme fatale. Students completing this subject should have a firm understanding of the literary, philosophical and cultural foundations of Romanticism and early Feminism, movements that have played key roles in the construction of the modern world.

In 1789 huge numbers of French peasants, urban workers and middle-class people successfully rebelled against absolute monarchy and the privileges of the nobility. But the struggle over what social and political system should replace the 'Old Regime' was to divide French people and finally the whole of Europe. This subject examines the history of the French Revolution from its origins to 1795. It then examines its significance. Was this really a revolutionary age? What were its consequences for ethnic minorities, women, and slaves in French colonies?

This subject will focus on the second total war of the twentieth century and will explore questions about the causes of armed conflict, the nature of total war, and some of the consequences (social, economic, cultural and political) of total war for modern European and global history. Among the topics we will examine this semester are the following: the situation of Europe and Japan after World War I, the rise of facism in Italy and Germany, interwar diplomacy and its failure to preserve peace, the origins of WWII in Aisa and Europe, the barbarism of warfare, the home front experiences in the conditions of total war, the Holocaust, and the legacy of total war.

The eye-witness account and the personal memoir offer powerful ways of exploring the human legacy of overwhelming historical events on individual lives. But how do literary genres like the memoir and autobiography manage to speak about unspeakable topics, how do they represent the unrepresentable and write about trauma? What is the function, and what the effect, of writing memory for the victim, for the reader, and for the perpetrator? How do the offspring of the victims and perpetrators "remember" their parents" traumas and shape memories of events they have only experienced second-hand? What is the relationship between fiction and memory in memoir writing and how do we read a testimonial of a Holocaust survivor that has been faked? This subject will introduce students to a selection of testimonial writing and films that tell individual stories of a shameful national past. It explores the effect of generic convention on the relation of history and memory, and the need for generic invention to speak trauma and tell the un-tellable. Its focus will be on the Holocaust, the Algerian War, and life under Eastern bloc communist regimes. This subject will focus on writing from France, Germany, and Italy in the first instance, but may from time to time include writing from other parts of Europe.

European modernism refers to a wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in literature and arts at the end of the 19th and early 20th century and has proven a major influence on current (Western) literature, film and the arts. This course introduces students to key themes of modernist literature, theatre, and film in Europe. The course familiarizes students with key writers and thinkers of this period and will address the ways in which they provoked their readers/viewers through new and complex forms and styles. Major themes comprise the crisis of representation, the representation of cosmopolitanism and urban cultural dislocation, consciousness and memory, and sexuality. (Students undertaking this subject will be expected to regularly access an internet-enabled computer).

In this course students learn about a selection of European cuisines and how they have been plated up for consumption in Melbourne. Food and wine are often used to support national and regional identity. In the first part of this course, students will consider the relationship between gastronomy and identity. Students will be introduced to a range of key culinary concepts and practices and the way we talk about them. Through analysis of some of the key features of French, Italian and Spanish cuisines, students will consider how these countries’ culinary profiles speak to wider socio-political issues such as authenticity, food and space, cultural practices and the history of food and wine.

In the second part of this course, students will consider issues of “authenticity” in the way cuisines are plated up for consumption in Melbourne. This will require students to interrogate their assumptions and expectations about European foods and wines and to reflect on their personal experience of the “taste” of Europe.

This subject will be offered on campus and online.

The subject examines major approaches and debates within contemporary sociological theory, and the different research directions that emerge from these approaches. Beginning with an overview of the classical foundations of sociological theory, the subject explores contemporary sociological theories which engage with questions of power, social order, and conflict. The subject also examines contemporary sociological approaches to critical issues including globalization, individualization, and identity. As the subject proceeds, we will examine how researchers construct, evaluate and modify theory to respond to transformations in social relations and practices. In this way, it will become evident that sociological theory is in a constant process of interaction with everyday social structures, relations and experiences. Students will complete the subject with knowledge of key approaches and debates in contemporary sociological theory, and with the capacity to use sociological theory to construct social research questions.

This subject examines decadence as a textual, historical, sexual and cultural formation, across a range of literary texts of the 19th and early 20th centuries. A predominantly masculine mode of radical aestheticism, manifesting symptoms of cultural crisis and informed by anxieties about class, gender and sexuality, decadence elaborated such key figures of modernity as the dandy, femme fatale, fetishist and aesthete. Students will be introduced to European and British varieties of literary decadence and aestheticism; art for art's sake theories of aesthetic production; relations between lifestyle, aestheticism and commodity culture; and emergent discourses of degeneration and sexology. The subject asks students to consider how decadent aestheticism was shaped by regulatory categories of taste and vulgarity, and by cultural practices of tastemaking, lifestyling and the aestheticisation of sexuality. Students will also consider the relationship between sexual dissidence and social and cultural distinction as produced in the representative examples of decadent literature studied.

This subject examines the visual culture of Europe in the period 1660–1815, from the reign of Louis XIV of France to the end of the Napoleonic wars. We will consider several significant centres of power in France, England, Italy and the Holy Roman Empire to study how powerful political, religious, social and cultural factors shaped changes in the production, patronage and reception of images, objects and buildings. We will also consider how European contact with cultures around the globe led to a fascination with the foreign other that indelibly shaped European visual culture at this time. Close study of artworks in local collections – including paintings, prints, furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork and textiles – will explore how these objects were deployed in the construction of social identity in the courts and cities of eighteenth-century Europe.

This subject provides students with an in-depth analysis of the politics of the European Union (EU). It analyses the policy-making of the EU and examines the tensions of nationalism and Europeanism in the attitudes of the member states and other participants in the integration process and especially in recent crises. The subject analyses the institutions and participants in the EU, including a detailed examination of the objectives and roles of the 28 member states and the benefits and disadvantages of membership for these states. It scrutinises EU policies, including the Common Agricultural Policy and the Euro; Foreign and Security Policy and Immigration. It further discusses the issues raised by the EU's crises, including the contested issues of protest, belonging and legitimacy and Europe's boundaries.

This subject offers an introduction to the contexts, form, and enduring cultural power of Gothic fiction in modernity. It examines the formal conventions of Gothic Fictions in relation to the social, cultural and political contexts in which it first appeared in the late 18th century, while also mapping the ways in which the genre is reworked in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The subject connects changing historical structures of patriarchal and paternal authority to the aesthetics of horror and terror; investigates links between modern notions of individuality and conceptions of monstrosity; and explores the power of literary fiction to evoke virtual worlds more expansive than the everyday.

With special emphasis on Hitler’s Germany and National Socialism, this subject explores the history of fascism in Europe between 1919 and 1945. The origins, development and significance of the Third Reich are placed in the wider social, cultural and political context of interwar Europe and the rise of authoritarian regimes. Topics include the post-WWI crisis, the emergence of Italian Fascism, Nazi and fascist ideology, the rise of the Nazi movement, the destruction of the Weimar republic, the Nazis’ seizure of power, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as charismatic leaders, the racist character of Nazi society and politics, the role of women in fascist regimes, the Spanish Civil War, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, the origins and development of the Second World War, the nature of the Nazi empire and its global influence.

As a History third level subject, there is a focus on historiography and on the different perspectives and ways of analysing and interpreting the past. Students will become familiar with the work of several generations of historians and with the latest trends in historical research in this field. Political history, diplomatic and military history, social and cultural history, gender history, comparative history, and transnational and global history are the key historiographical approaches discussed in the subject. The subject will also engage with the fundamental public and historiographical debates that have left an imprint on how societies today understand the uncomfortable past of fascist and national-socialist experiences.

Translation is not a simple language replacement exercise; it is one of the main ways in which cultures shape political thought, literature, and science. This subject will offer answers to basic questions about how this happens. What are the main solutions available to translators? What goes on in the translating brain? How can technologies help translators? How does translation change in accordance with different languages and text genres? Students will also gain hands-on experience with the practical skills of post-editing, translation memories and subtitling.

We read all the time: graffiti, text messages, articles in The New York Times, fiction like Harry Potter or Shakespeare’s sonnets, scientific reports, or even philosophy articles. But what exactly is involved in understanding these texts?

“The goal of interpretation is to reconstruct the author’s intentions.” “The reader plays an essential role in determining the meaning of a text.” “The author, literature, the human subject are all dead.” “Texts should be deconstructed, not interpreted.” “Binaries like male/female also need to be deconstructed.” “Everything is a text.”

In this subject we’ll explore the theories of meaning and interpretation which ground these influential and conflicting slogans. Our starting point will be Schleiermacher’s suggestion that interpretation is a form of “mental tourism” aimed at the simulation of the author’s original mental states. All the approaches we’ll then consider will be increasingly radical departures from this simple idea. We’ll first look at German Hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas) and its concepts of the hermeneutical circle and a fusion of horizons. We’ll examine the French postmodernist tradition (Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, Butler) and the ideas of structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction. Finally, we’ll take a look at seminal contributions to the understanding of interpretation in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. We’ll consider whether radical interpretation – the interpretation of the language of a totally foreign culture – is possible, and if so by which methods (Quine, Davidson). We’ll also examine whether there is a robust distinction between fiction and non-fiction (Walton). We’ll ask whether fiction helps explain the mechanisms behind propaganda, whether photography is fictional (or whether it affords transparent access to the world), and whether imaginative engagement in fictional games, rather than beauty, is what’s central to art.