17319

WiSe 23/24: PS-Surveying English Literatures: Reading English Poetry in Context, 1800-2000

Stephan Karschay

Kommentar

This seminar will introduce students to Anglophone (mainly British and Irish) poetry from the 19th century to the turn of the millennium. We will analyse and interpret a large number of poems in their historical-cultural context with the aim of honing our skills of critical reading and cultural contextualisation. Starting with texts from the Romantic period, we will move through Victorianism, the fin de siècle, twentieth-century modernism and postmodernism and finish with selected contemporary poets. Our special focus will be on the creative handling of the genres and forms that are dominant in Anglophone poetry across epochal boundaries (sonnet, ode, ballad, dramatic monologue, elegy, etc.). Thus, students will get to know a diverse range of texts and authors, which should create a solid basis for future engagements with poetic forms and literary periods. Students will perform close readings of individual poems, while always setting them in dialogue with a variety of other texts, so that our exemplary analyses are not constrained by a hermetic formalism, but rather offer a wide range of connections for further examination. Authors discussed in this class may include William Wordsworth, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley; Alfred Tennyson, Elisabeth Barrett Browning and her husband Robert; Christina Rossetti and her brother Dante Gabriel; Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson; Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot; Ezra Pound and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle); W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender; Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; Patience Agbabi, Simon Armitage, Benjamin Zephaniah, Carol Ann Duffy and others.

Voraussetzungen

Regelmäßige und aktive Teilnahme, Lektüre aller im Seminar diskutierten Texte, seminarbegleitende Studienleistungen (wie z.B. response paper, Präsentation, Expertengruppe), abschließende Seminararbeit. Die Seminarsprache ist Englisch.

Literaturhinweise (Alle Primärtexte werden über Blackboard zur Verfügung gestellt.)

Zur Anschaffung (sofern erhältlich): Arno Löffler & Eberhard Späth, Hrsg., English Poetry: Eine Anthologie für das Studium (Tübingen & Basel: A. Francke, 42003). [ISBN: 3-8252-2376-0]

Zur Einführung geeignet: Shira Wolowsky, The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Paul Poplawski, Hrsg., English Literature in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 22017).

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