Courses - Winter Term 2012

Pavan Malreddy

Content:
Who owns English language today? And what makes it so dominant and successful? Are there special rhetorical devices/ strategies that enable English to reach across a wide spectrum of languages and cultures? This lecture course will provide an accessible introduction to these fundamentals questions, and English literary studies in general. Based on Ansgar and Vera Nünning’s Introduction to the Study of English and American Literature, texts of different genres (i.e. poetry, drama, narrative fiction) and periods (17th to 20th Century) will be introduced from an engaging perspective.
Objectives:
Students will learn the diverse contexts in which English literature(s) were produced. This includes the methods, genres, and the literary figures themselves who became instrumental to the success and succession of English literature. In-class discussion and short assignments will provide a platform for students to sharpen their skills to read, interpret and critically analyse texts. The lecture will be accompanied by a weekly tutorial (details will be announced at the beginning of the course).
Requirements for credits/Type of module exam:
Apart from active participation, regular attendance is strongly recommended. Students are required to take a 90-minute written exam (PL) at the end of the semester for the successful completion of the course. The tutorial for the lecture “Introduction to the Study of Literatures in English” is obligatory. Time and room will be announced.
Required textbooks:
Ansgar and Vera Nünning, Introduction to the Study of English and American Literature. Klett. (neueste Auflage) (Reihe: Uni-Wissen Anglistik / Amerikanistik).
A reader with seminal material will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
Registration:
There will be a list at the door of my office (Rh 39, Zi. 215). Please register there.

Pavan Malreddy

Content:
In social and cultural theory, ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ are perhaps the most theorized, debated and contested ideas. It is often argued that nationalism is a failed political project because all nations are either imagined or constructed along the cognitive and subjective perceptions of previously uninscribed, undemarcated spaces, places, cultures, and languages. In postcolonial studies, cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and universalism have superseded the ideals of home and nation, and attachments to locality. This course draws attention to a latent surge of nationalism in the newfound genre of what I would call the ‘nationalogues’. A ‘nationalogue’ is a semi-biographical text that combines life history, travel writing, and memoirs with those of ‘national narratives’. Through a selection of scholarly work on autobiography, travelogues, and life-writing, this course encourages students to think independently, and build theories and concepts based on their own judgments and sensibilities.
Objectives:
Students will gain insights into classical, modernist and postmodernist theories of nationalism. Students will learn the conceptual distinctions between autobiography, travelogues, and life-writing. Various tenants of postcolonial theories will familiarize students to advanced literary theories (major vs. minor literature), and prepare them for future graduate studies.
Prerequisites:
Masters students need to have successfully completed their BA in English.
Requirements for credits:
Apart from active participation, regular attendance is strongly recommended. For the successful completion of the course students are required to give an oral presentation (PVL) and an oral exam (PL).
Set Texts:
Giridharadas, Anand. India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking. New York: Henry Holt, 2011.
Khoo Thwe, Pascal. From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey. London: Harper Collins, 2002.

Pavan Malreddy

Content:
Michael Foucault’s rendition of biopolitics as the politics of life – the disciplinary mechanisms (schools, hospitals, etc.) that take control of our lifestyles, habits, and choices – has unleashed a paradigmatic shift in the way power is understood in modern societies. In contemporary global politics, however, guns, bullets, suicide bombs, bulldozers, drones, and dead bodies have become a common sight; from the civil unrest in Egypt to the armed resistance in Banda Aceh, death has become a prime choice of weapon for every stakeholder in the conflict. Achille Mbmebe has conceptualized this shift from biopolitics to the politics of death as the “necropolitics” of the imperial war machinery. But in what ways can literature represent this nebulous transition from biopolitics to necropolitics? Through a selection of stories, films, novels, travel narratives, and theoretical texts, the course draws upon the experiences of a variety of armed uprisings in the 21st century from Nepal to Peru, and to the Philippines.
Objectives:
Students will become familiar with an array of concepts in social theory: biopolitics, necropolitics, and other non-normative theories of “terrorism”. Furthermore, students will gain insights into the European conception of the “sublime”, one that is conceived to guard from the violence and terror “inherent” to the non-European Other, one that is also part and parcel of a culture directly responsible for the (legacies of) colonial violence.
Prerequisites:
Masters students need to have successfully completed their BA in English.
Requirements for credits:
Apart from active participation, regular attendance is strongly recommended. For the successful completion of the course students are required to give an oral presentation (PVL) and hand in a term paper (PL).
Set Texts:
Fesperman, Dan. The Warlord’s Son. London: Transworld, 2004.
Khadra, Yasmina. The Attack. London: Vintage, 2007.
A reader with seminal material will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
Registration:
There will be a list at the door of my office (Rh 39, Zi. 215). Please register there.

Birte Heidemann

Content/Purpose:
This lecture course provides an overview of literary history in Great Britain. It covers literary movements such as Romanticism, Victorianism, Edwardianism, Modernism, Postmodernism, and Postcolonialism. The lecture course will focus on selected texts that represent each historical period and the literary movement associated with it. In addition, the course will introduce students to the governing principles of English literature that shaped its literary heritage and history.
Objectives:
Students will have familiarised with the key figures of the literary movements, including their historical and cultural contexts. As such, the lectures will move beyond mere factual introductions in order to both contextualise and characterise the socio-political predicaments of the respective literary figures and genres.
Prerequisites:
None
Requirements for credits/Type of module exam:
Apart from active participation, regular attendance is strongly recommended. For the successful completion of this course there will be a 90-minute written exam at the end of the semester: PL Modul 2.3 and PVL Modul 2.4.
Required Textbook:
Poplawski, Paul (ed.) (2007): English Literature in Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
A reader with seminal material will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
Registration:
Students do not need to register. Please attend the first meeting of the lecture course.

Birte Heidemann

Content:
In the postcolonial field, there is a marked tendency to rewrite the English literary ‘canon’ from the viewpoint of the ‘oppressed’ and the ‘marginalised’ in an overt political gesture to repudiate the dominance exerted by the coloniser’s language. As part of this literary tradition, postcolonial rewrites both reproduce and resist the ‘canonical’ precedence in terms of its formal and fabulist aesthetics. For the most part, postcolonial rewrites subvert political representations by positively enabling the ‘minority’ characters in the canonical texts that are often portrayed as docile, weak and even inferior. This course will provide an accessible introduction to the English literary canon and its rewrites through the examples of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.
Objectives:
In this seminar, students will be introduced to an array of theoretical approaches to (re)reading canonical texts and their postcolonial counterparts: intertextuality, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, among others. The two texts selected for this seminar will familiarise students to the political agency of the rewrites.
Prerequisites:
Masters students need to have successfully completed their BA in English.
Requirements for Credit:
30
Apart from active participation, regular attendance is strongly recommended. For the successful completion of the course students are required to give an oral presentation (PVL) and hand in a term paper (PL).
Registration:
There will be a list at the door of my office (Rh 39, Zi. 213). Please register there.
Set Texts:
Brontë, Charlotte (2006 [1847]): Jane Eyre. London: Penguin.
Rhys, Jean (2000 [1966]): Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin.

A reader with critical essays will be provided at the beginning of the semester.