Teaching SS 04

Introductory Seminar:
"Portraits of Artists as Adolescents in North American Texts"

Wednesday 10 am, 304 / K225, Unterrichtsraum

This introductory seminar will deal with various poems and short fiction presenting prospective or fledgeling artists, whose keen sensitivity qualifies them for observation and a creative response to new experiences and moments of joy or pain.
The examples to be studied will be taken from a wide range of texts. They will include short fiction by North American authors such as Eudora Welty, Carson MacCullers, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence. A reader containing most of the texts to be jointly analyzed will be provided.

"Satire in Anglophone Literatures"

VO, Thursday 3 pm, 325 and K 525, Unterrichtsraum

In this course several verse and prose satires from British and North American literatures will be considered. Participants will be encouraged to report on the socio-cultural contexts of the flowering of the genre of verse satire in the Restoration Period and in the Augustan Age, and to identify the butts of satire and the major satirical devices used by prominent authors like John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. The course will also introduce prose satires by Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and will trace the adaptation of satirical strategies in colonial and early federal America. (e. g., in poems by the Connecticut Wits and the prose satire Modern Chivalry by Hugh Henry Brackenridge).
Attention will also be paid to the achievements of the leading American humorist and satirist Mark Twain, from whose short fiction, travel writings and 'inverted utopia' A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court instructive and entertaining passages will be chosen for discussion. A reader containing relevant excerpts will be provided; paperback editions of Gulliver's Travels and of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court will be available at a bookstore.

Literary Seminar:
Canadian Narratives Since World War II
(Fiction by M. Ondaatje and Jane Urquhart)

SE: Tuesday 4 pm, Seminar Room 5

The focus in this seminar will be on the presentation of multi-ethnic reality in Canada in historical fiction by Michael Ondaatje and Jane Urquhart. The seminar will put Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and Urquhart's The Stone Carvers in the context of the fictional achievements of these authors and will relate these novels to the growing awareness of the ethnic contribution in multicultural Canada. The seminar will also consider the significance of historical metafiction as a particularly productive variant of narrative art in Canada.

Specialized Seminar for M.A. and Ph. D. Candidates

Monday 4pm, Seminar Room 5

This course is intended to serve as a forum for students working on a diploma thesis or a doctoral dissertation. Participants will be expected to report on work in progress and to deal with the methodological and technical aspects of their research.
It is anticipated that presentations will include talks on various aspects of the culture of the American South and of Canada, as well as discussion of travel literature and issues related to imagological concerns.

Impressum