Courses
You will find our courses in the Alma system. Remember: in order to register for certain courses via Alma during the registration period, you need to be logged in. From Summer term 2020 onwards all course registrations take place in Alma (not Campus!).
Courses Winter term 2024/2025:
Lehrveranstaltungen Wintersemester 2024/25
Prof. Dr. Christoph Reinfandt
VL Functions of Fiction: What Novels Can Do
Thursday, 10-12, R 037, first lecture: 24 Oct
What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true? Can there be true lies? What is the truth of fiction? Answers to these questions will be discussed in this lecture course: From its inception at the turn from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, the modern novel has fulfilled various functions ranging from entertainment to edification and education, from constructing bourgeois subjectivity to deconstructing it, from confirming the social order to satirizing it or posing imagined extensions and alternatives, all the while drawing on an ever-expanding range of narrative and literary techniques not delimited by strict genre rules. The lecture course will try to map the emergence and evolution of the modern novel in English systematically by conceiving of it as a medium of world observation and making sense under specifically modern cultural conditions. The historical survey of the history of the novel emerging from this approach will be
S Romantic Poetry in Translation
Wednesday 16-18, R 306, first session 23 Oct
In this seminar, we will try to develop a better understanding of what Romantic poetry is doing by translating it into German. After trying our hands on a carefully selected body of shorter texts by seminal Romantic writers like Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and John Clare against a backdrop of basic assumptions about the differences and continuities between the period of Romanticism and today, we will then critically discuss a variety of existent translations of longer poems in the later stages of the seminar. It is the aim of the seminar to use translation as a more immersive approach to dealing with poetry as opposed to the more distanced procedures of formal analysis (which will nevertheless be necessary to establish the formal coordinates at the beginning of the translation process).
Please note that a good knowledge of German is necessary for attending this seminar, Texts will be provided on Moodle.
Please read beforehand:
Christoph Reinfandt, Englische Romantik: Eine Einführung. Berlin: E. Schmidt, 2008:9-130, 173-196.
S Writing Northern Ireland: The Fictions of Jan Carson
Do 8.15-09.45, R 108, first session: 24 Oct
After the exceptional success and global visibility of Anna Burns’s Booker Prize-winningnovel Milkman (2018), Jan Carson established herself as a second sustained presence in Northern Irish writing by moving away from the American setting of her debut novel Malcom Orange Disappears (2014) to her home turf in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In the seminar we will concentrate on her Belfast novel The Fire Starters (2019), which is very much alert to the simmering tensions beneath the seemingly calm surface of the post-Good Friday Agreement state of affairs in Northern Ireland that has been much ruffled by Brexit lately. Our second stop is The Last Resort (2021), Carson’s collection of interlinked short stories set in a bleak Northern Irish seaside caravan park, which brings together ‘family dynamics, ageing, immigration, gender politics, the decline of the Church and the legacy of the Troubles,’ as the blurb points out. And finally, we will discuss her powerful recent novel The Raptures (2022), in which she goes back to the pre-Good Friday Agreement late phase of the Troubles in the early 1990s, when, as the novel makes strikingly clear, the boundaries between the North and the South were not as hard and fast as they seemed from the outside. The seminar will begin with a discussion of a selection of independent short stories from Carson’s most recent
publication, Quickly, While They Stilll Have Horses (2024).
Texts:
Jan Carson, The Fire Starters (2019). Black Swan pb., 2020.
Jan Carson, The Last Resort (2020). Penguin Randomhouse Ireland, 2021.
Jan Carson, The Raptures (2022). Penguin pb. 2023.
S Introduction to Literary Studies
Mi 08.15-09.45, R 306; first session: 23 Oct
This course provides a general survey of the field of literary studies and introduces aterminological and methodological ‘tool kit’ for analysing literary texts. Towards the end of term we will also have a look at recent developments in the field such as the increasing importance of literary theory, media studies and cultural studies.
Requirements:
Oral presentation, take-home-exam at the end of term on this seminar and the Lecture Course.
Texts:
Please buy for backup reading:
Michael Meyer, English and American Literatures. Tübingen/Basel: Francke (UTB), 4 thedition, 2011. A reader of poems and a play, Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort: A Tragedy (1798), will be made available on the E-Learning platform Moodle.
The following longer texts will also be dealt with in class, please buy and read/watch them in advance:
Weir, Andy, The Martian: A Novel (2011/2014). Ballantyne Books Mass Market International Paperback Edition, 2021.
The Martian (directed by Ridley Scott, 2015).
Topics for Candidates I: MEd
Mi 10-12, R 306 (1-stg./14-tägig); first session: 23 Oct
The colloquium is for MEd/Lehramt candidates who wish to prepare for their final oral exams in the Module ENG_ME_3. It will provide a recap of methods of textual analysis as well as a grid of coordinates for dealing with literary history and literary theory. Candidates will have to prepare a reading list comprising 20 entries for the 40-minute oral exam (4 ECTS) at the end of term.
Please note that the colloquium will take place basically every two weeks (with irregularities due to other commitments on my part).
Registration: Please register for the colloquium on Alma.
Topics for Candidates II: MA
Do 16.15-17.45, R 106 (1-stg./14 tägig); first session: 24 Oct
The colloquium is for MA students wishing to present and discuss their projects for their final thesis as part of Module Research I (ELC-MA 07: 6 ECTS). Please note that the colloquium will take place basically every two weeks (with irregularities due to other commitments on my part).
Registration: Please register on Alma.
Srishti Chaudhary (Lehrauftrag)
S Introduction to Creative Writing (Fiction)
Mi 14-16, H 404 (Geographie)
Bed, BA Advanced Module Literary and Cultural Studies
MA ELC ELC-MA 08 (Project: Applied English Literatures and Cultures
MA AS ???
This course aims to introduce students to the basics of creative writing in fiction. The course is split up in two parts- seminars, which include a study of plot, character, perspective and other elements of writing, and workshops, which will involve writing their own fiction. The writing workshop will also involve giving and taking feedback from other students. The course will also involve a series of talks with other guest authors. The students are expected to work a longer creative writing project in the course of the semester.
Dr. Raphael Zähringer
Fr 12-14, 306 (Neuphilologicum)
For Information about where you can use your ECTS from this seminar please refere to the link and select "Module / Studiengänge"
Borders are an inherent part of our world. In the words of Frenk and Steveker, “borders need to be defined, debated, operationalized, and changed according to political, socio-cultural, and sometimes geographical changes” (2022, 125). British borders – both in the sense of ‘related to the British Isles’ as well as ‘created by the British elsewhere’ – are no exception, of course. These borders keep fascinating us because they tell us so much about how people conceive of themselves in a specific time and place. First, then, this course is based on exploring the vast amount of critical discourse on borders, which has multiplied over the last couple of decades. Commonly referred to as ‘border studies’, we will read key texts from this field of research that discuss different types of borders from various angles (politics, culture, economics, cognition…) in order to be able to actually talk about borders in an academic sense. Second, we will read selected border narratives, and find out how these texts negotiate British borders. As we move through different genres, we will generally move from rather ‘material’ and actually existing borders (such as that between Northern Ireland and Ireland) to more fictional(ized) ones (such as those depicted in the Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom, a novel in which the United Kingdom is split up according to different psychological types), as well as to more abstract ones such as the temporal one in Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall or the cognitive ones in China Miéville’s The City & The City. We will not only investigate the borders themselves, though – of equal importance is the exploration of border-related performances, as characters walk along, across, or on borders, and thus stage themselves as subjects that determine and are determined by their surroundings.
(This is an updated version of a course already taught in WS 2022/2023, hence the "II" in the title.)
S Contemporary Irish Drama: Marina Carr
Fr 8:30-10:00 s.t, 106 (Neuphilologicum)
For Information about where you can use your ECTS from this seminar please refere to the link and select "Module / Studiengänge"
Marina Carr (*1964) is a cutting-edge Irish playwright. Her oeuvre consists of almost thirty plays and draws heavily upon classical mythology. Nonetheless, these plays are modern in a sense that they are part and parcel of the larger ramifications of Irish drama in the post-Troubles and post-Celtic Tiger era. Experimental and haunting, Carr's tragedies depict Irish (rural) life based on ancient mythological elements and rewritings. Predominantly, Carr challenges monolithic assumptions of motherhood and female agency by showcasing characters struggling with notions of both gender and class.
Dr. Ellen Dengel-Janic
S Ethics, Emotions and Literature
Do 12-14, 108 (Neuphilologicum)
For Information about where you can use your ECTS from this seminar please refere to the link and select "Module / Studiengänge"
In this seminar, we will explore the connection between different types of narration, ethics and emotion. We will firstly ask, what narrative strategies and forms were chosen for what purpose and secondly, from which perspective does the narrative render stories that are centred on the protagonist’s emotions. Thus the question pertaining to narrative strategies goes hand in hand with the representation of emotions in literature.
We will consider novels that depict a particular case of a moral dilemma which is related to a particular form of emotional realities. Often these affects are hidden, suppressed and subconscious but they nevertheless trigger a morally and ethically charged narrative. In Ian McEwan’s Atonement, for example, the entire narrative is constructed on the ground of feelings of guilt and regret A closer look at firstly, “the ethics of the told” (Phelan) will consider the protagonists’ attitude to moral questions and their behaviour as a consequence thereof. Secondly, “the ethics of telling” (Phelan) will help us to investigate ethical discrepancies between content and narrative discourse in a number of exemplary novels. The moral stance on the level of the “ethics of the told” needs to be therefore read alongside the meaning created by “the ethics of telling.”
Do 10-12, 306 (Neuphilologicum)
For Information about where you can use your ECTS from this seminar please refere to the link and select "Module / Studiengänge"
In this seminar, we will examine the tradition of British theatre as a cultural event that includes both the play as text and as performance. In studies of eighteenth-century theatre, the theatre as a place of cultural performance has increasingly gained more attention. Over the course of this seminar, we will discuss all elements that constitute a theatrical event, from the type and architecture of the theatre or place of performance, to the performers, actors and acting styles, as well as the costumes and scenery.
Moreover, we will look at a range of eighteenth-century playwrights and also investigate the marketing of plays to a target audience. We will consider, in our analysis of the history of theatrical performance in the eighteenth-century British theatre, what the basic elements of a theoretical approach to drama is as well as the practical aspects of performance and acting. Spanning the drama from early eighteenth-century plays until its new formation and transition into the Romantic era, we will familiarize ourselves with the different trends in dramatic performance and what it will reveal about the cultural and social milieu of the plays, their performance and audience.
S Introduction to Literary Studies
Mo 14-16, 406 (Neuphilologicum)
Di 8:30-10:00 s.t., 406 (Neuphilologicum)
For Information about where you can use your ECTS from this seminar please refere to the link and select "Module / Studiengänge"
Please note, each course/parallel group differs slightly from the others (e.g. teaching format or reading list).
To learn more details about an individual group navigate to "Parallelgruppen/Termine" ("Parallelgroups/Appointments") and click "Details einblenden" ("Open details").
The Basic Module Literary Studies comprises the lecture course "Introduction to Literary Studies", a seminar of the same title, and a tutorial. In the summer semester, students watch the recording of the lecture course. You do not sign up for the lecture course on Alma, but will receive the link to the lecture course from the instructor of your introductory seminar. Each seminar/parallel group "Introduction to Literary Studies" is accompanied by a tutorial. Day, time and tutor will show up as a second series of session dates for each course once they are set.
Please note each course's single/cancelled dates under "Parallelgroups/Appointments"/ "Parallelgruppen/Termine".
S = Seminar, L = Lecture, KO = Kolloquium, EPG = Ethisch-Philosophisches Grundlagenstudium
For everyone who is going to attend Intoduction to Literary Strudies: The links do not directly redirect you to the seminar's page (at least not to the group you are most likely looking for). Please select "parallel groups" and then scroll to the seminar you would like to attend (the numbers of the groups on this page match the ones on the alma page). There you can also find announcements and who you have to contact if you have questions (under "details").