Winter Semester 2024/25
Lecture
Theory of Drama
Online recordings, with additional Zoom meetings (voluntary)
How can we distinguish drama from narrative? What exactly is the exposition? What are the “three unities”? How does a scene differ from an act? Are dramatic plots like knots (Aristotle) or like pyramids (Gustav Freytag)? How does dramatic irony differ from other kinds of irony? In answering questions such as these, the lecture pursues a double aim: (1) to provide students with a good grasp of the relevant critical terminology; (2) to show that this terminology is useful in the analysis of plays and in the description of historical developments. The following plays will be dealt with in some detail: W. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice; Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan; Thornton Wilder, Our Town; Terence Rattigan, The Browning Version. Students who wish to prepare for the lecture should get started on The Merchant of Venice. Students interested in theory should read Aristotle’s Poetics or Manfred Pfister’s Das Drama. Bachelor students may consider taking the lecture in combination with the seminar “History Plays”. The lecture will be delivered online as a video podcast, which students can listen to when it fits into their timetable. Zoom meetings for questions will be offered.
Required reading: students will have to read the plays listed above; no particular editions are required.
Assessment: oral or written exam.
BA-Seminar
History Plays
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” (L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953). In this seminar, we will discuss three plays that are set in this “foreign country”: William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599), Brian Friel’s Making History (1988) and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998). In our discussion of these plays, we will analyse how they reinterpret the historical record, which forms and techniques they use and what the exploration of the past means for the present. We will also attempt to answer the question whether there are structural features that distinguish history plays from other dramatic genres. An additional focus will be on “metahistory”, i.e. on the way the plays do not merely reconstruct the past but also reflect upon the problems inherent in such reconstructions. This is said to be a feature of late twentieth-century history plays but perhaps it is also present in Julius Caesar.
Required Texts: William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd edition, 1998; ISBN 9781903436219); Brian Friel, Making History (Faber and Faber, 1989; ISBN 9780571154777); Michael Frayn, Copenhagen (Anchor Books, 2000; ISBN 9780385720793)
Assessment: short writing assignments for the Übung (3 CP); short writing assignments plus paper for the seminar (4 CP).
MA/M.Ed.-Seminars
George Eliot: Middlemarch and Other Writings
The aim of this seminar is to give students a chance to read and discuss George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872), which was memorably described by Virginia Woolf as “the magnificent book which for all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people”. We will warm up for the study Middlemarch by reading “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton”, a tale from Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), the book that made Eliot famous. Moreover, we will read a selection of her essays to familiarise ourselves with the ideas that underlie her novels, in particular her emphasis on realism.
Required text: Middlemarch (Oxford World’s Classic, 2019; ISBN 9780198815518); the other texts will be provided via Moodle.
Assessment: short paper for Übung (3 CP); research paper for seminar (5 CP).
Basismodul
Introduction to Literary Studies