Course aims:

Knowing, understanding and a correct using of fundamental ideas concerning concepts specific to Historical Semantics in Transylvania.
Finding and using of the sources which are characteristic to historical semantics for Transylvania as well as for East-Central Europe.
Knowing, understanding and a correct using of fundamental ideas concerning concepts specific to Historical Semantics in Transylvania.

Course Entry Requirements:

Regional identity - national identity in Enlightenment Transylvania; Culture and civilization in Romanian society in the modern epoch

Course contents:

1. Historic discourse and semantics analyse: Fundamental directions. 2. About text. 3. About context. 4. About text’s hermeneutics. 5. The historical discourse and its analysis in the historical research. 6. Types of analysing the historical discourse. 7. Meaning and semnification in the Transylvanian historical discourse. 8. Context - text – subtext. Politics and culture in Enlightnment Mitteleuropa. 9. Types and categories of sources used in Transylvanian Enlightment. 10. Politics terminology from Transylvanian School to 1848. 11. Historical discourse in Transylvania after 1848: historical semantics and politics semantics. Conceptual History in Romanian Historiography. 12. The meaning of the concepts homeland, patriotism, Europa/European for 18th-19th centuries Transylvania. 13. The meaning of the concept poverty: Poorness in the Transylvanian Romanian’s Language (in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries). 14. Course’s conclusions. Evaluation

Teaching methods:

Lecture, conversation, exemplification.

Learning outcomes:

• retrieval of written sources on the historical past; • establishing historical facts on the basis of historical sources and outside of these; • the concrete production of new historical knowledge on the basis of deeper insights within the study of an epoch and/or of a medium complexity historical subject.

Learning outcomes verification and assessment criteria:

Written paper – interpretative essay – 60%; continuous assessment – 40%.

Recommended reading:

Koselleck, Reinhart, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Series: Cultural Memory in the Present Stanford, 2002, 180.
Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Series: Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought New York, 2004, 240.
Stanciu, Laura, „About National Identity in Transylvania. The Concept of Fatherland for Transylvanian Romanians between 1700 and 1848”, în Brukenthalia, Romanian Cultural History Review. Supplement of Brukenthal. Acta Musei, Sibiu, 2011, 29-43.
Neumann, Victor, Essays on Romanian Intellectual History Timisoara, 2008, 36.
Munslow, Alun, Deconstructing History London & New York, 1997, 120.