North-American Culture Studies

Description

The programme combines literary and linguistic instruction and provides a broader cultural overview of the countries in North America, combining both Anglophone and Francophone and Spanish-speaking regions, from Canada to the United States through Mexico and the Caribbean. The programme is designed so that the students gain an overview of each of the two cultural areas at the same time and are instructed on their mutual linguistic, literary, and cultural influences. For this reason, the programme is structured in a modular manner. The mandatory part of the curriculum consists of core courses that have a methodological section in which students learn the basic theoretical approaches toward the concept of identity of oneself, of the other, and of various social groups, and focus on the concept and its various manifestations in literature, linguistics, and culture. The core section is followed by a variety of in-depth courses in which students gain an orientation in the specific cultural phenomena in the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone worlds. The two compulsory modules combine either the Anglophone-Francophone area or Anglophone-Spanish-speaking area, allowing for an informed comparison. The advantage of the North American study programme lies in the fact that it offers excellent material for the study of some highly topical issues of today’s world: otherness, migration, immigration, and cultural and linguistic phenomena associated with integration in areas where different ethnic groups, languages, and cultures interact. In this respect, North America represents a model laboratory allowing us to study the processes that increasingly confront European and Czech society.

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