Current Courses
Courses - Summer Term 2021
Prof. Dr. Cecile Sandten
Content
Storytelling is an ancient form of entertainment and education – from the epics by the Greek poet Homer, the medieval sagas of gods and heroes to orally transmitted folk tales in a broad range of countries. For more than 100 years cinema has been the continuation of this tradition – on celluloid. Therefore, an educational programme for children and young adults does not only include the studying of texts, but also films. Since 1996, the International Film Festival "Schlingel" has provided a great forum for this task. It offers young viewers the opportunity to watch films that would otherwise be unknown in German cinemas. The films, whose heroes are primarily children and young adults, tell exciting stories and convey profound messages that are both universal, and conversely, culturally specific. More than 150 short and feature films from a broad range of countries will be screened during this year’s festival week (10 – 17 October 2021). In addition, international guests (e.g. film directors, young actors) as well as international juries will be present throughout the festival.
Objectives
Since the Chair of English Literatures entered into a cooperation with the "Schlingel" film festival students of this seminar are encouraged to participate actively in support of the festival also at times outside the regular teaching period. Students will first be provided with theoretical texts as well as hands-on material with regard to film analysis techniques that will help deepen their understanding of films and support them in the creation of educational material for children. Secondly, participants will learn specific presentation, voice-over, interview and/or other techniques that are required for the active participation in the film festival.
Prerequisites
(In order to participate, students of Anglistik/Amerikanistik need to have completed the modules 2.3 and 2.4 English Literatures, successfully.)
Requirements for credits
Active participation in every session of the class is expected. Apart from presentations as part of partner or group work students will have to translate film subtitles from English into German for selected films and create short teaching materials for selected films (PL). The module 5.2 for the BA_AA_6-students will be completed with an oral exam of 30 minutes (one topic from the research colloquium and one from this seminar).
Set Texts/Required Reading
A Reader with seminal material will be provided.
Registration
Please register via e-mail (lisa.griesbach@phil.tu-chemnitz.de) with your name, semester, student ID and status (e.g. ERASMUS) by 1 April 2021.
Content:
From modernist examinations of the metropolis to the postmodernist devotion to the sociocultural construction of urban spaces, cultural and literary theories and practices of the last century have been committed to investigating “the urban condition”. The metropolitan imaginary has especially flourished in the genre of poetry, verse being perhaps more conducive to the fast-paced changes and permutations of city-life and the metropolitan’s palimpsestic spaces.
Objectives:
In this seminar, students will learn to investigate the ‘imaginative geography’ of cities as depicted in various poetries from around the globe. We will pay attention to the representation of place, space and cityscapes in poems on/from London, Mumbai, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, or Johannesburg. Our critical readings of the poems will be informed by comparative modes from the disciplines of sociology, urban theory, postcolonial studies, the visual arts, music, film and gender studies, and we will pay special attention to issues of intertextuality and interculturality. If the situation allows, an excursion to the smac (exhibition: "Die Stadt: Zwischen Skyline und Latrine") a literary city tour and other activities will round off our debates.
Prerequisites:
Masters students need to have successfully completed their BA in English.
Requirements for credits:
Regular attendance as well as reading and preparing the set texts for discussions is required and part of the Credit Points allocation. The format of this seminar will consist of oral presentations and discussions. Each student will give an oral report (approx. 20 minutes), chair a session or prepare questions for a discussion (PVL) and write a final term paper (15-18 pages) (PL) for the module exam; alternative assignment formats will be discussed during the semester. Students will be encouraged to also explore their own creative writing skills as part of the class assignment (PL) with a possible publication in our creative writing journal Turning Pages.
Set Texts/Required reading:
Barth, Adolf ([1988] 2005): London Poems. Reclam: Stuttgart (will be provided on OPAL).
Schunk, Ferdinand ([1991] 2006): New York Poems. Reclam: Stuttgart (will be provided on OPAL).
A reader with seminal material will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
Registration:
Please register via e-mail (lisa.griesbach@phil.tu-chemnitz.de) with your name, student-ID, study programme, course title and semester by 1 April 2021.
Content
Refugee Tales, edited by David Herd and Anna Pincus, convey a critique of the inhuman side of asylum seeking, refugeeism and indefinite detention, including the aesthetic terms. The critical tone of the tales' voices, told either by well-known writers after their interviews and conversations with refugees, detainees and asylees, or by the refugees and detainees themselves, is even more remarkable in the context in which they have been written: the tales go against the grain of the dominant discourse of flight, refugeeism and asylum seeking, as they employ a form of telling, walking and writing back to a centre that has ruthlessly enforced its boundaries. Thus, the tales enact a means of political intervention against the inhuman and unjust practice of indefinite detention in Great Britain.
Objectives
Since the Refugee Tales project was inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in this seminar, students will first read a few tales from Chaucer's tales to get engaged in the stories ideas: story-telling, pilgrimage, kaleidoscopic view on society. In a second step they will then embark on the three collections of Refugee Tales and read selected tales. Accordingly, students will address issues such as transnational migration, mobility, and the pre-flight and flight experiences of asylum seekers, detainees and refugees. In doing so, they will explore in which ways the experiences of adults and (un)accompanied minors – including a range of traumatic situations in their country of origin, the death or persecution of family members, war, forced recruitment and personal persecution – are depicted in these textual narratives. In addition to the close readings of texts, students will gain insights into various theories on citizenship, legal issues, and social and political approaches to asylum, refugeeism, as well as indefinite detention. Furthermore, they will learn the conceptual distinctions between literary genres such as the short story, life-writing and epic poem. If the situation allows, we will go for solidarity walks and tell tales.
Requirements for credits
Active participation in every session of the class is expected. A presentation or partner or group presentation of 20 minutes (PVL) as well as a final term paper (15-18 pages) are required for the module exam.
Set Texts/Required Reading
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales. Transl. into modern English by Nevill Coghill. London: Penguin 2003.
Herd, David and Anna Pincus. Eds. Refugee Tales. Manchester: Comma Press, 2016.
Herd, David and Anna Pincus. Eds. Refugee Tales II. Manchester: Comma Press, 2017.
Herd, David and Anna Pincus. Eds. Refugee Tales III. Manchester: Comma Press, 2019.
A reader with seminal material will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
Registration
By e-mail: lisa.griesbach@phil.tu-chemnitz.de. Required information: seminar title, name, semester, student ID, and status (e.g. ERASMUS) by 1 April 2021.
Content
The Research Colloquium is open to students who are preparing for their final oral and written exams. It is intended to give students a platform to present their projects and to raise questions and/or difficulties they may be facing at an early stage of their research. Further, students are encouraged to engage in critical discussions, and gain feedback from their peers concerning their research projects. We will also discuss a wide range of general topics and individual topics required for final exams.
Requirements for credits
The format of this seminar consists of a close reading of texts, of discussions and thesis presentations. Each student will present an oral report (approx. 15 minutes) (PVL).
Set Texts/Required Reading
A reader with seminal material will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
Registration
Please register via e-mail (lisa.griesbach@phil.tu-chemnitz.de) with your name, semester, student ID and status (e.g. ERASMUS) by 1 April 2021.
Content:
This course aims to provide support for post-graduate students who are developing their dissertation ideas and first draft outlines. The focus of this seminar will be on research in English Literature (including close readings of secondary theoretical texts and primary texts, but also the students’ own written work). Post-graduate candidates who engage in interdisciplinary approaches and topics beyond English Literature are most welcome to participate to enhance the group’s interdisciplinary awareness. Objectives:
This seminar will also offer special supervision through individual counseling. Moreover, the seminar will support doctoral and post-doctoral candidates on a professional level, especially with regard to topics such as scholarly writing for publication, pedagogic issues of teaching at university level, as well as information on how to apply for positions in the job market. In addition, support to present their work at (international) conferences will be given, as well as information on careers and funding support for scholarship applications and opportunities for gaining key supplementary qualifications (in cooperation with the Forschungsakademie TUC).
Prerequisites:
Participants must have completed a Magister or Master thesis graded at least 2,0.
Dr. Eike Kronshage
Content
In 1930, English economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in his Treatise on Money that “We were just in a financial position to afford Shakespeare when he presented himself.” Affording Shakespeare points to the dependence of art from the economy. This seminar will expand this notion to present a broader view of the interdependence of art and economy. We will study five early modern plays to explore how art depended on the economy, and how the economy was equally dependent on art – art in general, and dramatic art in particular, which helped to perform economic tenets as well as their consequences on stage.
The selected plays cover a wide range of writers and genres in late-Elizabethan and Jacobean England (1598-1641). In addition, we will be studying a small selection of mercantilist treatises from the same period and compare their approaches to the emergent mercantile economy to those of the plays in question.
Objectives
Students will learn how to analyze early modern drama. They will also gain a deeper insight into Elizabethan and Jacobean drama by studying five (mostly canonical) comedies and tragedies. In addition, we will learn more about the complex relationship between literature and economics. Three central theoretical frameworks will guide our work with the texts: New Historicism/Cultural Materialism, Marxism, New Economic Criticism.
Prerequisites:
Students must have successfully completed the Introduction to the Study of Literatures in English and the Kernmodul 2.3 English Literatures and Cultures I (does not apply to visiting students).
Requirements for Credit:
PVL: Oral presentation (30 minutes)
PL: Term paper (10-12 pages)
Set Texts/Required Reading:
A reader with additional material will be provided at the beginning of the seminar.
Please use the ISBN numbers to make sure you obtain the correct editions of the plays listed below. It is very important that we all use the same editions!
- William Shakespeare/Thomas Middleton: Timon of Athens à 9781903436974
- William Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice à 9781903436813
- Thomas Middleton/Thomas Dekker: The Roaring Girl à 9780199540105
- John Webster: The Duchess of Malfi à 9781904271512
- Richard Brome: A Jovial Crew à (available online at https://www.dhi.ac.uk/brome/)
Registration:
Please register via e-mail (eike.kronshage@phil.tu-chemnitz.de) with your name, study programme and semester by 1 April 2021.
Content
This course provides an accessible introduction to the theories and methods in literary studies and its four pillars: author, text, reader, and context. We will engage in critical investigations of five influential theoretical approaches in our field: Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Gender and Queer Theory, New Criticism and Formalism, and Postcolonial Studies. For each of these five areas, there will be a discussion of a seminal theoretical text in the first week, followed by a hands-on session in the second week, in which we will use the theoretical/methodological framework to analyze a given literary text (a poem or a short story).
In addition, the seminar will provide students with useful tools and methods to analyze literary texts (literary semantics, semiotics, rhetoric, corpus analysis, narratology and many others).
N.B.: High reading load!
Objectives
Like all scientists, scholars of literature need methods in order to engage with their objects of study (i.e. literary texts). The methods and theories presented in this seminar will enable students to study literature from different perspectives and with greater precision than before. In other words, we will put the “Wissenschaft” into “Literaturwissenschaft”.
Prerequisites
Successful completion of the lecture Introduction to the Study of Literatures in English. You are required to carefully study alternately a complex theoretical text and a short literary text (a poem, a collection of poems, a short story) from week to week, which results in a high reading load.
Requirements for credits
Active participation in every session of the class is expected (there will be regular inclass
reading tests).
PVL: Oral presentation (20 minutes) (see Studienordnung, p. 1349) or similar form of presentation. Students also must pass all in-class reading tests (B_AA__2 only).
PL B_AA__2/ERASMUS: Term paper (10-12 pages) (see Studienordnung, p. 1349)
PL SELAEn6, B_Pä__4: Final exam (Klausur).
Set texts
A reader with seminal material will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
Tutorial
The seminar will be accompanied by a weekly tutorial. Time and venue will be announced at the first meeting.
Registration
Please register via e-mail (eike.kronshage@phil.tu-chemnitz.de) with your name, semester, student ID and status (e.g. ERASMUS) by 1 April 2021.
Dr. Mandy Beck
Content
“Genre” is a collective term for a sort of texts that have specific characteristics in common with regard to form, content, style, or even function. Apart from the major genres of poetry, narrative texts and drama, there are numerous subgenres (e.g. sonnets, short stories, comedies, etc.) or in-between genres (e.g. epic, dramatic monologue, novel in verse, dialogue novel, closet drama, etc.), but also other variations that escape clear-cut categories, because they challenge or reflect on generic conventions. The ambiguities of certain literary texts, especially from the twentieth century, are furthermore indicated by categories such as “metatheatre” (Lionel Abel) and “metafiction” (Linda Hutcheon), or self-reflexive literature in form of the “anti-novel”, the “anti-play” and experimental poetry. Therefore, this seminar deals with literary genres beyond the conventional classifications, in order to discuss the wide scope of literature's reinvention in the twentieth century.
In addition to a survey of the main genres and their core features, we will focus on texts that deviate from them, as Samuel Beckett's shorter plays Act Without Words I & II, What Where, Angela Carter's novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, or poetry by Edwin Morgan, Stevie Smith and others. These readings will be enhanced by relevant theoretical texts on different genres, narratology, postmodern writings, experimentalism, gender and more.
Objectives
This seminar seeks to re-evaluate the reliability of generic features of literary texts for a categorisation and analysis, thereby making students aware of the texts' playful engagement with common expectations towards genres. On top of that, various issues will be explored on the basis of theoretical/critical material, such as self-reflexiveness, experimental and subversive strategies.
Prerequisites
In order to participate, students of English and American Studies need to have completed the
modules 2.3 and 2.4 English Literatures successfully.
Requirements for Credit
Close readings of primary, theoretical as well as secondary texts, discussions and oral presentations. For the PVL, each student can either do an oral presentation (approx. 20 minutes) or complete a written task (1500-2000 words).
The module 5.2 will be completed with an oral exam of 30 minutes (one topic from this seminar and one topic from the research colloquium).
Set Texts
Please obtain the following book and use the ISBN number to make sure it is the
correct edition:
Carter, Angela (2011 [1972]): The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. London: Penguin. ISBN: 978-0141192390
In addition, a reader with texts for readings in class will be available at
Copyshop Dietze (Reichenhainer Str. 55).
Registration:
Please register via e-mail (mandy.beck@phil.tu-chemnitz.de) with your name, study programme and semester by 1 April 2021.
Content
Romantic writing in the period of 1780-1835 is widely understood as a violent reaction against eighteenth-century Enlightenment, political revolutions in France and America, consumerism and the Industrial Revolution. Up until the rise of feminist criticism in the late twentieth century, the critical consensus mentioned primarily six male poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron) who formed this literary and artistic movement called ‘Romanticism’. In contrast to this, the seminar offers an overview of Romantic women poets who have influenced this period with an aesthetic of ‘Romanticism’ that differs from their male peers. The fact that their writing was extremely popular and important, also for latter generations of women writers, accounts for the diversity of poems and poetic styles. Therefore, several women poets (including their work and personal living conditions) over the course of over 50 years will be discussed in the seminar. Among them are Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, L.E.L., Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and others.
Objectives
This course will discuss central concepts that are essential for an understanding of Romanticism, such as sensibility and the Gothic in the context of women writers. The stress on emotion and poetic manifestations of emotional responses to, for example, the natural world (i.e. sensibility) must not necessarily be understood as a female gendered property, but plays an important role among women poets of this period for various reasons. In addition, the seminar will make students aware of different poetic forms that women writers have adopted and reconstituted for their own purposes, such as the sonnet, elegy, song and ode.
Prerequisites
In order to participate, students of Anglistik/Amerikanistik need to have completed the lecture course “Introduction to the Study of Literatures in English” successfully (does not apply to visiting students).
Requirements for Credit
Close readings of primary, theoretical as well as secondary texts, discussions and oral presentations. For the PVL, each student can either do an oral presentation (approx. 20 minutes) or complete a written task (1500-2000 words), and write a substantial seminar paper (10-12 pages) for the PL.
Set Texts
A reader with texts will be available at the Copyshop Dietze (Reichenhainer Str. 55).
Registration:
Please register via e-mail (mandy.beck@phil.tu-chemnitz.de) with your name, study programme and semester by 1 April 2021.