Teaching SS 03

Introductory Seminar
"Mapping Regions: Landscapes and Mindscapes"

Wed 10-12, Unterrichtsraum (ab 19.3.)

In an increasingly globalized world many late 20th century authors have (re)discovered the importance of the experience of a familiar space to which they regularly return in their poems and fiction and which helps them to gain and project a sense of identity. This inclination continues a long tradition particularly prominent in Romantic literature but apparently a constant in the recognition of poetic / literary vocations.
The course will deal with diverse poems and short fiction in which 19th and 20th century British, U.S.American and Canadian writers (explicitly or implicitly) explore their roots or formative experiences in a rural or urban environment. It will also consider the borderlines they were inclined to draw round the spaces / places crucial for " inspiration".
Among the poetic texts to be analyzed will be poems by some English Romantic poets and the Confederation Poets in Canada (C. G. D. Roberts, Bliss Carman and A. Lampman), by Robert Frost in New England and by Fugitive Poets (like J. C. Ransom and Allen Tate) in the American South. Fictional texts to be analysed will include representative texts by Canadian writers, e. g. M. Laurence (from Manitoba), J. Hodgins (from British Columbia), M. Richler (from Montreal), A. Munro and M. Atwood (from Ontario) and U.S. American authors like E. Welty (from Miss.), C. McCullers (from Georgia) and T. Wolfe (from North Carolina).
The course will consider a North American play with a strong regional dimension. The Introductory Seminar is also intended to broaden the reading experience and the familiarity of students with various analytical tools for a fruitful approach to a variety of texts, which will be provided in the form of a reader.

Cultural and Regional Studies
Nation and Region: Bilingualism, Multiculturalism and Question(s) of Identity

Visiting Prof. Ramon Hathorn and Prof. Dr. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz
Fri, 12-14, Unterrichtsraum. Professor Hathorn will take over in late April and teach until early June. He will teach: Tue 8.30-10, Fri 12-14:15, Unterrichtsraum

The course, in the tradition of the French " civilisation" model, will touch on the highlights of significant periods of Canada' s relatively brief history: the French colonial period of " la Nouvelle-France" ; its conquest by England in 1760; the slow and tempestuous movement to Confederation (1867); the two world wars; Quebec' s separatist movement of the 1960s and the contemporary period, characterized by massive immigration and the Americanisation of Canadian culture and commerce. Other topics will include the importance of immigration in Canada' s evolution, raising the question from French colonial times to the present of national identity and belonging in a new land and, often, in a new language; also, the evolving nature of nationalism in both English and French Canada. Particular attention will be paid to language problems and linguistic legislation at both the provinces and federal levels. A brief introduction to the two " national" and radically different literary traditions will be made, focusing on the contribution of writers to the varying notions of cultural " belonging" , deriving in part from Federal policies of Bilingualism and Multiculturalism. The discussion of various (legal, political etc.) documents and of literary texts by representatives of the two founding nations will be supplemented by the examination of texts reflecting in particular the contribution of immigrants from continental Europe.
We shall examine facets of the extraordinary flowering in the last two decades of multicultural writing in both English and French. A brief introduction to oral and written aboriginal literatures (Native, Métis and Inuit) will be followed by reference to representative writers from various cultural traditions and backgrounds (e.g. East Indian, Caribbean, Latin America and Italian).
Authors writing in English will include Thomson Highway (Cree), M.G.Vassanji (Kenya/Tanzania), Dionne Brand (Trinidad), Joy Kogawa (Japanese), Wayson Chong (Chinese) and Nino Ricci. Authors writing in French: Jovette Marchessault (Aboriginal), Dany Laferrière (Haiti), Ying Chen (China), Sergio Kokis (Brazil) and Marco Micone (Italy).
Lectures will be given in English. French texts will be discussed in translation, though reference to the original French may occasionally be used.

Literary Seminar
Realism and Modernism in 20th-Century Canadian Fiction

SE Tue 16-18, Room 5 (ab 4.3.)

The seminar is intended to discuss several novels and collections of stories which illustrate significant stages in the development of a remarkably rich narrative tradition in Canadian literature. We shall begin by studying the building of the foundations of the realistic Canadian novel in the works of two pioneers of a national fiction based in the urban sphere, Morley Callaghan and Hugh MacLennan. The analysis of their recurrent themes and technical achievements [esp. in M. Callaghan’ s More Joy in Heaven (1937) and H. MacLennan’ s Two Solitudes (1945) or The Watch That Ends the Night (1959)] will be complemented by a study of narrative art in urban and small town fiction by Canadian women writers who employ realism for ulterior effects (cf. the gothic or parodic effects in Margaret Atwood’ s Lady Oracle), and for the presentation of miraculous insights and the experience of creative acts (cf. stories by Alice Munro).

Anglophone Literature of Travel and the Construction of Identities

VO Thu 15-17, Unterrichtsraum (ab 13.3.), anrechenbar als K525, K531

The great popularity of travel literature in the last few decades and changes in the prevalent understanding of "literature" have shifted scholarly attention to the diverse body of texts related to the phenomenon of a journey to distant places. While the dramatically increased mobility of the public and mass tourism have fostered the inclination to read factual or fictionalized reports, new trends in ethnology and anthropology as well as the development of Imagology as an important field in Literary and Cultural Studies have made travel writing a very significant aspect of current work in our discipline. This lecture course for advanced students is intended to examine significant developments in cultural habits and ways of constructing one’ s own collective identity and that of "the other" in a wide range of anglophone texts from Humanism until the early 20 th century. We shall consider classic British examples of European and exotic travel from the 16 th to the 19 th centuries (e. g. excerpts from Thomas Nashe’ s The Unfortunate Traveler; Jonathan Swift’ s Gulliver’ s Travels, and Laurence Sterne’ s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy) and discuss the mindset and intentions of the authors of these and other narratives, which show the constitutive elements of travel writing and reveal the mechanisms at work in the real or fictitious experience of foreign countries ("ethnocentrism" or the appeal of the "exotic other" ). The other major focus in the lecture course will be the development of American travel writing from early journals of "domestic" journeys (e. g., Sarah Kemble Knight, The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York, or William Byrd [from The History of the Dividing Line], and William Bartram, Travels Through North and South Carolina) to documents of "adventures" (e. g., R. H. Dana’ s Two Years Before the Mast and Herman Melville’ s Typee). The lecture course will also include discussions of selected travel sketches by the two most prominent American practitioners of the varied genre of travel writing, Mark Twain (The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad), and Henry James (from Transatlantic Sketches and The American Scene).

DiplomandInnenseminar
Nation and Region in Canadian Culture and the Transatlantic Heritage

Mon 16-18, Room 5 (ab 10.3.)

This course, which is intended as a preparation for an interdisciplinary field trip to eastern Canada (which is an integral part of this course) in Sept. 2003, in which several symposia and workshops will be jointly organized with colleagues and graduate students at various Canadian universities from Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal to major schools in the Maritime provinces, will discuss the emergence of a sense of national and of regional identity in Canada since Confederation, but especially in the 20th century. The discussion of various (legal, political etc.) documents and of literary texts by representatives of the two founding nations (esp. from eastern Canada) will be supplemented by the examination of texts reflecting in particular the contribution of immigrants from continental Europe, whose arrival and settlement in various parts of Canada affected the process of nation-building and the construction of a collective identity.
The course will, among others, include a consideration of ethnic fiction by Mordecai Richler, R. Wiebe or J. Kulyk Keefer, mirroring the heritage of Jewish, Mennonite or Polish/Ukrainian settlers, and by Austrian and German emigrés and refugees (like Henry Kreisel or Carl Weiselberger). Books which have recently fictionalized the contribution of central European settlers to Canadian culture (cf. H. MacLennan’ s Voices in Time, Jane Urquhart’ s The Stone Carvers) will also be studied.

Impressum