Professor Sean Homer received his Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Sheffield. He teaches Modern as well as Postmodern Fiction, Psychoanalysis in Literature and, separately, in Film, Balkan Cinema, and Film Criticism courses at AUBG. One of the methods he uses in his classes is the reader-response theory where students share how the text makes them feel rather than what it might mean.
Listen to the podcast to know more about Professor Homer’s fascination with punk and why “The Roma Do Not Exist”.
“I provide particularly through the introductory classes, the students with the vocabulary with which to articulate how they respond to a film, why they actually like certain films and don’t like other films, why they like some directors and not other directors. They can begin to actually articulate this in an intelligent and meaningful way.”
The Reader Response Theory
“I try to stop you interpreting texts and I try to get you to analyze texts by looking at what texts do,” says Professor Homer.
He believes that students should have the vocabulary to express what they are feeling and how they are feeling when reading a text or watching a movie and not just come up with an interpretation of what it might mean.
“I provide particularly through the introductory classes, the students with the vocabulary with which to articulate how they respond to a film, why they actually like certain films and don’t like other films, why they like some directors and not other directors. They can begin to actually articulate this in an intelligent and meaningful way,” Homer said.
Balkan Cinema
One of the courses Professor Homer teaches is about Balkan cinema, which he started watching even before he moved to the Balkans. However, he is not interested in historical movies per se, but rather in those that reflect the reality of the historical period.
“I’m interested in more experimental or what have been called oppositional films, which try to revisit history in different ways. I also look, for example, at the Romanian New Wave films of 2006 to 2005…They’re about everyday events in Romania. But what I look at and what I explore there is the traces of history within the everyday,” shares Homer.
Academia-wise
Professor Homer’s interest in how and why he made art the way he did gradually led him to academia.
“I could make things visually. I could do performances and different staff. And people liked what I did. What I always found difficult was to articulate what I was doing… I started to become more and more interested in thinking theoretically about what I was doing, looking at art history, looking at film history. And when I graduated from an art school, I became more and more interested in the kind of academic side of it rather than making it because I could make things, but I couldn’t talk about them very well,” shares Professor Homer. Almost 30 years later this interest led him here.
“My job is to read books and watch films and to talk to people about them. Can you possibly think of anything better to spend your life doing”
