Winter Semester 2025/26
Lecture - Realism in the English Novel from Defoe to Joyce
The lecture will be recorded; videocasts will be made available in Moodle.
Realism is a controversial concept. Some theorists argue that it is philosophically naive and politically suspect. Others claim that it is inescapable in discussing works of fiction. I will respond to this dilemma by first giving an introduction to the concept and explaining the criteria that have been used to define it. I will then approach the subject historically, beginning with Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), who is generally considered the founding father of realism. I will conclude with James Joyce, whose novel Ulysses (1922) can be seen as the culmination of realism as well as a bold move beyond it. Along the way, I will look at a number of 18th- and 19th-century writers who contributed to the realist tradition in different ways, including Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Mary Ann Evans (better known as George Eliot), and George Moore. Finally, I will revisit the concept of realism, review the arguments against it and discuss whether it can still be used in a responsible manner.
Requirements for credit points: short quizzes after each lecture; final written or oral exam. For this, students will have to read one novel and excerpts from the other novels.
Übung - How to Do Things with Poems
Many people think that analysing poems is a mysterious gift that you are either born or – more likely – not born with. This course builds on the assumption that analysing poems is a skill that can be learnt, like swimming, playing the piano or speaking a foreign language. We will focus on different aspects such as genre, syntax, metre and metaphor to work our way into the complex structures of form and meaning in a selection of mostly canonical poems. We will also try our hand at the so-called “production-oriented” method, i.e. the rewriting of a poem as a parody or the filling in of blanks, which is also used in German schools and should therefore be interesting to students who want to be teachers.
Required texts: the poems and some other texts will be provided in Moodle.
Requirements: active participation in class and a short paper (ca. 2500 words); the paper will consist in a close reading of a poem and a proposal for a production-oriented approach to the poem related to the reading.
Seminar - Alice Munro
Alice Munro, the only Canadian to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature to date, was devoted to one genre: "I think the most attractive kind of writing of all is just the single story", she writes. "It satisfies me the way nothing else does." It also satisfies her readers; they cherish Munro's short stories for their laconic and poignant evocation of alienation and suffering, in particular that of female characters. In the seminar, we will analyse and discuss a representative selection from Munro’s fourteen collections. Students will have a chance to gain an in-depth under¬standing of a major contemporary writer, to hone their skills in the close reading of well-crafted narrative prose, and to brush up their knowledge of the relevant critical vocabulary. We will also deal with an event that has cast a shadow over Munro’s reputation. After her death in 2024, one of her daughters revealed that she was abused by Munro’s second husband and that her mother stood by this man rather than by her child when she learnt about the abuse years later. Whether abuse is a topic that informs Munro’s later fiction is one of the questions to be discussed.
Required text: Munro, Alice. Selected Stories 1968-1994. Vintage Classics, 2021. (ISBN: 9781784876883)
Requirements: for an Übung (3 CP), a short paper based on one of the seminar sessions; for a seminar (5 CP), a research paper on a text or texts not discussed in class.
Seminar - Perfoming Cleopatra
The Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII (69-30 BC) is a fascinating historical figure, who has also become a powerful myth: the archetypal femme fatale, who had Roman generals lying at her feet. In this seminar, we will analyse three plays that have responded and contributed to this myth: William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (ca. 1607), John Dryden’s All for Love, or, The World Well Lost (1677) and Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1899). As a postscript to the three plays, we will analyse Ted Hughes’s brilliant poem “Cleopatra to the Asp”.
Required texts: Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra, edited by John Wilders. Routledge, 1995. (ISBN: 9780415011020); Dryden, John. All for Love, edited by N.J. Andrews. Bloomsbury/New Mermaids, 2011. (ISBN: 9780713671056); Shaw’s play, Hughes’s poem and other texts will be provided in Moodle.
Requirements: for an Übung (3 CP), a short paper based on one of the seminar sessions; for a seminar (5 CP), a longer paper based on independent research.