Laufende Kurse

The Humboldt Book Club is open to both staff and students of Humboldt University Berlin. We will meet up seven times a year to discuss books we have read or would like to read. 

Everyone is free to make suggestions and, at the end of each meeting, we will take a vote on what our next top pick is. 

Looking forward to fostering the love of literature which we all share.

Regards,

Eimear

This seminar offers the opportunity for in-depth study of a range of novels from the Victorian period (named after the reign of Queen Victoria 1837–1901), frequently subsumed under the auspices of ‘realism’. Next to the poetics of the Victorian novel, its philosophical, political and ideological concerns will be addressed, as will be gender and authorship. In the light of the recent prominence of material cultures in Victorian studies, we shall also be looking at modes of publication and reception (serial publication) etc.

Core reading (please obtain your own copies):

• Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist (1837–39) (Penguin Classics)
• George Eliot: Middlemarch (1871–72) (Penguin Classics)
• Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) (Penguin Classics)

A further title is to be announced. Reading at least one of these novels in advance of the course is recommended.

In this course, we shall be exploring a broad range of literary and poetological writings (mainly from the field of English Literature) pertinent to the manifold relations of literature and emotions, or affect. With a view back to antiquity, our choice of key texts and genres will be stretching from the Early Modern Period from Shakespeare (A Midsummernight’s Dream), 18^th century sentimental fiction (Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa) and aesthetics, the literature of terror, the early Romantics’ insistence on “powerful feelings” and “emotion recollected in tranquillity”, Victorian love and melodrama, modernist T. S. Eliot’s notion of the “objective correlative”, to postcolonial refigurations of emotions and affect in literature (J M Coetzee’s Disgrace).

The full range of reading will be decided upon in dialogue with seminar participants. Shorter primary texts will be made available on moodle. You certainly need to obtain your own copy of our core texts, Richardson’s Clarissa (abridged version: Riverside edition) and Coetzee’s Disgrace (Vintage).