Laufende Kurse

This course offers additional exercises for students participating in a BA English module 1 Introduction to Linguistics course at the Department of English and American Studies.

The seminar addresses the works of William Wordsworth within the broader context of Romanticism. Looking at selected poetry, some prose essays as well as his verse autobiography The Prelude, we shall study Wordsworth’s engagement with poetics, his conception of poetic memory and subjectivity, as well as the politics of his literature. Related key issues will be Wordsworth’s concern with the natural environment against the backdrop of the socio-economics of the English countryside, of contemporary travelling and tourism as well as landscape painting. Finally, the seminar will also attempt to situate Wordsworth within the circle of his contemporaries and to study the process of his canonization through his first biographers.

Required Works (please obtain your own copies):
1. William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (OUP)
2. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, et al. (Norton)
3. A moodle platform with additional material will be available as of mid October.

Part II:

This seminar on “Victorianism”, a notoriously problematic term difficult to define, operates in tandem with my course on the Victorian novel. Against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world, from upheavals in theology, science and new technologies to empire, we will be exploring a broad range of phenomena such as popular fiction (in extracts), conservative cultural criticism, the “movement” of the Pre-Raphaelites (entwining literature/poetry and art), and, finally, the aesthetic turn at the fin de siècle.

A considerable part of the course reading will be made available on Moodle but please obtain your own paperback copy of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1867–68) and of Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest. A Trivial Comedy for Serious People (1895).

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).