Courses
Courses - Summer Term 2008
PD Dr. Cecile Sandten
Course Description
Content: In a globalised world, cultural encounter has become a central issue. Considering the importance of migration narratives in contemporary postcolonial literatures, this lecture will address questions of cultural encounters from a literary perspective from the early modern period to the present day. In particular, it will investigate the destructive nature of cultural encounters in the form of racism, the questionable concept of ethnic difference and the multiplicity and transitory nature of migrant identities as manifested in a selection of dramas, poems, novels and short stories. Students will learn to analyse literary renderings of cultural encounters, migration and exile and the transformation and fictionalising of intercultural experience by being made familiar with some of the most important theoretical issues in this field: These include cultural hybridity and mixed or fragmented ethnic identities. They will also
learn about the experience of living and writing in exile and the living with or living in between several languages, societies and cultures and the impact on the multiple identities of protagonists and the (often complex) aesthetic structures of literary works.
Objectives/Requirements: Students will be introduced to a variety of critical readings of key texts which they are required to read, such as William Shakespeare's plays The Tempest and Othello, Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart and Caryl Phillips' novel The Nature of Blood. A reader of shorter texts will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
PD Dr. Cecile Sandten
Course Description
In this seminar we will explore the importance of the metropolis as a political and cultural centre and as a social microcosm reflecting the state of its transcultural society due to its colonial past and its postcolonial effects. We will investigate the political, social, cultural and architectural history of a diverse range of metropolises (e.g. Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, New York), especially through the study of written, oral and visual representations (paintings, photographs, films, literary and academic texts/presentations). In an interdisciplinary mode which will be provided by theoretical texts from neighbouring disciplines such as gender studies, arts, music, film and sociology, we will get an in-depth knowledge of the complex issue of postcolonialism and the metropolis. A film programme, including e.g. Dirty Pretty Things (dir. Stephen Frears) will be on the agenda in order to supply us with additional information and interesting aspects for further study.
Prerequisites: Zwischenprüfung
Requirements for credits: Regular attendance and contributions, term paper and presentation or partner/group presentation, and a final paper (15-18 pages).
Required reading:
Mehta, Suketu (2005): Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. Headline.
Rushdie, Salman (2001): Fury: A Novel. London: Vintage.
Further recommended reading: A reader with seminal material on postcolonialism and the metropolis will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
PD Dr. Cecile Sandten
Course Description
The eighteen-forties in Britain were a time of rapid urban and economic expansion and change, great social hardship and increased social tension, which resulted in strikes, violent clashes and the emergence of "the first working-class party", the Chartists. The term "industrial novels" refers to a group of literary works (also known as "social-problem novels" or "Condition-of-England novels") written by middle-class writers concerned about both the treatment of the working class and also the threat of social instability it seemed to pose. In this seminar we will be looking at the social, economic and political history of the mid-century: the technological breakthroughs in production and distribution; social distress in the Northern English industrial towns; and issues like the rise of the trade union movement and Chartism. Our main concern, though, is literary. How did the "working-class problem" find expression in the two novels under discussion: Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1853), which was the "master's" excursion into the industrial North (his "Coketown" is based on Manchester and Preston), and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848), which was not just the most influential industrial novel of its time and still the best-known of the genre but also the first novel by an author who, as a vicar's wife, was familiar with poverty in Manchester. How do the writers' works stand up – aesthetically and ideologically – 150 years later?
During the industrial revolution, factories were established, and by the early nineteenth- century also Chemnitz had become an industrial centre, sometimes called "the Saxon Manchester". Thus, we will also make an excursion to the "Sächsische Industriemuseum" in order to become also sensually familiar with the particular time which is presented in the two novels. An excursion to Manchester taking place at the end of the seminar is planned.
Prerequisites: Zwischenprüfung
Requirements for credits: Regular attendance and contributions, term paper and presentation or partner/group presentation, and a final paper (15-18 pages).
Required reading:
Charles Dickens (1994 [1853]): Hard Times. London: Penguin Popular Classics.
Elizabeth Gaskell (1997 [1848]): Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life. London: Penguin Classics.
Further recommended reading:
Friedrich Engels (1845): Die Lage der arbeitenden Klassen in England. Manchester; also available in Penguin translation as The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Louis Cazamian (1973): The Social Novel in England 1830-1850. London: Routledge.
PD Dr. Cecile Sandten
Course Description
The Forschungskolloquium/Examenskolloquium is open to students preparing for their final and for their intermediate exams. It is intended to give students the opportunity to present their research projects and to raise specific questions and/or difficulties at an early stage. Further, students are encouraged to engage in critical debates over approaches and topics with their peers. We will also revise general and specific topics required for intermediate and final exams, discuss reading lists, and take both oral and written mock exams.
Dr. Ines Detmers
Course Description
Content: Literally misreading one of Charles Dickens’s famous sayings, this course attempts to show that neither Jane Eyre, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, nor Jane Fairfax were “born to blush unseen.” On the contrary, each of those fictional characters is still very much ‘alive and kicking’. In order to put this assumption to a test, we are going to concentrate on the following ‘pairs’ of texts: Joan Aiken’s Jane Fairfax and Jane Austen’s Emma; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; and, last but not least, Emma Tennant’s Tess and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Cross-reading and analysing the pretexts parallely to the results of their creative transformations will enable us to cast a stereoscopic view on two equally productive phases of British novel-writing, namely the 19th and the 20th century. Thus, this course is going to offer comparative insights into two periods of literary history, focussing on, for example, the changing situation of women’s writing, or developments of aesthetic narrative conventions. Furthermore, in order to brush up and consolidate your knowledge about narratology and thus to provide you with the necessary analytical and methodological tools, we are going to read theoretical excerpts dealing with, for instance, (post)feminist and postcolonial approaches to narrative fiction, or concepts of intertextuality.
Prerequisites: In order to participate, students are requested to have successfully completed the lecture course “Introduction to the Study of Literature”. As this seminar will be conducted in English, students should have a sufficient knowledge of the language.
Requirements for credits: Students are required to give an oral presentation in class (20 mins) and write a seminar paper (10-12 pages) at the end of the term (deadline 1 October 2008).
Required reading: Please buy and read the above mentioned novels. Texts should all be available from internet bookshops.
Dr. Ines Detmers
Course Description
Content: Narrative fiction dealing with mystery or crime has well been published before the Victorian age. However, the first English detective would not appear until 1852. This course will introduce students to the history and development of crime and mystery fiction as popular literary genres of the time. Although the main focus will be on English texts, we shall begin by looking at two of Edgar A. Poe’s short stories, which have been widely celebrated for inaugurating a number of subgenres especially in detective fiction. Furthermore, we are going to read and analyse selected stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling’s heroic spy novel Kim and Robert Louis Stevenson’s mystery novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The course will also address issues pertaining to the historical context, such as the serialisation and circulation of crime fiction, the impact of changes to the legal system, or socio-political and economic changes generating a new middle-class readership.
Prerequisites: In order to participate, students are requested to have successfully completed the lecture course “Introduction to the Study of Literature”. As this seminar will be conducted in English, students should have a sufficient knowledge of the language.
Requirements for credits: Students are required to give an oral presentation in class (20 mins) and write a seminar paper (10-12 pages) at the end of the term (deadline 1 October 2008).
Required reading: A seminar reader will be provided at the beginning of the semester (first meeting), including several stories by Poe and Conan Doyle as well as a selection of critical essays. Please buy and read the above mentioned novels. Texts should all be available from internet bookshops.
Birte Heidemann, M.A.
Course Description
Content: “… I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories” – the protagonist of Hanif Kureishi’s first novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) expresses on what this seminar will focus: questions of being coloured in Britain, of cultural difference and identity, as well as of living between “East” and “West”. We will analyse a range of literary texts – novels, poetry and critical essays – as well as black British films in relation to migration and acculturation processes by also taking into account the effects of British colonialism as well as notions of postcoloniality. Furthermore, we will try to define the term ‘blackness’ by examining its gradually altering connotation from the beginnings of postwar black British history to today’s ‘multi-accentuality’ of ‘black’.
Besides Kureishi’s above-mentioned novel, we will read Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996) and Alex Wheatle’s Brixton Rock (1999) as well as a selection of black British poetry. Essays of critics such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and Homi Bhabha will supplement our discussions. In addition to the literary texts, we will watch Kureishi’s first film (directed by Stephen Frears) My Beautiful Laundrette (1984), Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (1994) (based on Syal’s screenplay) and Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002).
Requirements for credits: Regular attendance, active participation in class, short oral presentation and substantial term paper.
Primary literature:
Kureishi, Hanif (1999 [1990]): The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber & Faber.
Kureishi, Hanif (2000 [1986]): My Beautiful Laundrette. London: Faber & Faber.
Syal, Meera (2004 [1996]): Anita and Me. London: Harper Perennial.
Wheatle, Alex (2007 [1999]): Brixton Rock. London: Black Amber Books.
Suggested secondary reading: A bibliography with relevant secondary texts will be made available in the first session of the course.
Birte Heidemann, M.A.
Course Description
Content: The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and the destruction of IRA weapons in Summer 2005 have raised hopes that the Northern Ireland conflict may be in the process of passing into history, even though cross-communal violence keeps flaring up at regular intervals.
This course will focus on Northern Ireland during the time of the ‘Troubles’, between the late 1960s and the mid 1990s. However, we will also look at the historical background to this convoluted conflict and at the developments after 1998. Although we will take into account the changing political system of Northern Ireland, paramilitaries and terrorism, diverging national aspirations, cultural and religious divisions and the impact of its colonial past as England’s first and last colony, the main focus will be on the literary responses to the ‘Troubles’. To get an impression of the variety of literary reactions, we will read Bernard MacLaverty’s novel Cal (1983), Deirdre Madden’s novel One by One in the Darkness (1996), Colin Bateman’s so-called “Troubles thriller” Divorcing Jack (1995) and Robert McLiam Wilson’s novel Eureka Street (1996).
In addition to the novels we will engage ourselves with two films which focus on the ‘Troubles’, namely Bloody Sunday (2003) by Paul Greengrass and Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005).
Prerequisites: In order to participate, students of Anglistik/Amerikanistik need to have completed the lecture course “Introduction to the Study of Literature” successfully. Please present the Schein in the first session of the course.
Requirements for credit: Regular attendance, active participation in class, short oral presentation and substantial term paper.
Primary literature:
Bateman, Colin (1995): Divorcing Jack. New York: Arcade Publishing.
MacLaverty, Bernard: Cal (1995 [1983]). London: W. W. Norton & Company.
Madden, Deirdre (1996): One by One in the Darkness. London: Faber and Faber.
Mulholland, Marc (2002): Northern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Wilson, Robert McLiam (1998 [1996]): Eureka Street. London: Vintage.
Suggested secondary reading: A bibliography with relevant secondary texts will be made available in the first session of the course.
Dr. Hans-Joachim Hermes
Course Description
Content/Objectives: In this Proseminar, we will study Shakespeare’s romantic comedy Twelfth Night, or What You Will, which was first performed in the limits of 1600 to 1602 in London. Subjects of interest will be Shakespeare’s sources, plot overview, topics, analysis of major characters, symbols and motifs. Among the topics and motifs will be those of mistaken identity, intrigue and social ambition. Special attention will be paid to Shakespeare’s language (imagery!) and his use of song and music.
The play is a true specimen of late Elizabethan comedy. A Dresden production is being performed in the Staatsschauspiel. The students will get a chance to see the performance and may talk to members of the performing cast. Special term-papers are invited on the Dresden production.
Required reading: Text in any scholarly English edition.
Recommended: Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night, English edition. Penguin Popular Classics. ISBN-10: 0140621261 - Supplier: Universitas
Prerequisites: Einführungskurs “Introduction to the Study of Literature”.
Requirements for credit: Regular attendance, 1 oral presentation, term paper.
Queries? Mail hermes@phil.tu-chemnitz.de
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