Course Schedule
Lehrveranstaltungen
Englisch/FSZ:Modern American Poetry (Seminar)
Dozent/in: Maria Moss
Inhalt: The first part of the 20th century was unarguably one of the most prolific eras for lyrics in the United States. It was a time when modernist poets such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, H.D., Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore broke with their predecessors to create the premises for literary innovation. "Make it new," Pound decreed. How new modern poetry really is, what legacy it carried over from the past and which innovations it bestowed upon everything that followed will be discussed in this seminar.
James Joyce: Ulysses (Seminar)
Dozent/in: Emer O'Sullivan
Termin:
wöchentlich | Mittwoch | 10:15 - 11:45 | 01.04.2009 - 01.07.2009 | C 16.223 Seminarraum
Inhalt: James Joyce"s novel Ulysses (1922) is generally regarded as one of the most influential literary works of the twentieth century. An account of a single day in the life of the Irish capital Dublin, it is a modern reworking of Homer"s Odyssey which synthesizes realism and symbolism and offers a dazzling range of masterfully handled prose styles and narrative devices. It is also a grandly comic work. In this seminar we will exercise close reading skills, proceeding episode by episode, in order to understand the formal properties of the book. We will explore it from a variety of theoretical perspectives and situate it within its Irish and European (literary) context. You should read Homer's The Odyssey (in English or German) and at least start reading Ulysses during the term break (see "Sonstige Hinweise" for recommended edition).
Literary Nonsense: from Edward Lear to Monty Python (Seminar)
Dozent/in: Emer O'Sullivan
Inhalt: Nonsense verse is a centuries-old form that delights in the incongruous or implausible, and in playing with language itself. While it is to be found in most literatures, it is particularly associated with English literature since elevated to a literary form in the 19th century by Edward Lear (1812-1888), the 'laureate of nonsense' who, with his limericks, nonsense alphabets, geography, natural history, botany etc. defined the whole repertoire. In this seminar we will address definitions and typologies of nonsense and examine Lear's work and that of his contemporaries and successors - amongst them Lewis Carroll, Hilaire Belloc, Flann O'Brien and the modern masters of nonsense, Monty Python - tracing the development of nonsense from the 19th century to the present.