Zwierlein, Anne-Julia

This seminar addresses students of the MA British Studies programme
preparing or completing their final theses but is also open to those writing
theses for a 'Staatsexamen' degree. Students will have the opportunity to
present their work-in-progress and receive feedback from faculty and fellow
students. Feedback will include theoretical approaches, writing techniques and
the most important writing stages, such as finding and defining your topic,
researching the material, structuring and presenting your arguments. Doctoral
candidates and advanced researchers will be invited to present their ongoing
projects and share their experiences.

PLEASE NOTE: the Regensburg-Passau
Colloquium in British Literature and Culture (16-17 May 2024) is an integral
part of the programme. More information in class.

Requirements: BLK-M31: active participation, transcript of one of the sessions /
lectures (due date: Monday, 9 September 2024); BLK-M35: active
participation, oral presentation of work-in-progress (‘conference style’).

This
course focuses on John Milton, writer of the famous epic about the fall of
humankind, Paradise Lost (1667). We will examine his prolific output and
interventions in the debates of his time as both poet and politician, as
staunch republican and ardent freethinking religious believer. We will start
out by reading the shorter poems and his masque Comus (1634), moving on
to Milton’s political prose and epics Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise
Regained (1671). As Milton also wrote the first early modern justification
of divorce, we will be concerned with his representation of gender relations
throughout his writings. His famous pamphlet defending the liberty of the
press, Areopagitica (1644), will prompt some investigations of early
modern censorship. Along with Nigel Smith, David Norbrook, Sharon Achinstein
and other Milton scholars who have investigated Milton’s role in the definition
and propagation of the seventeenth-century English Republic – the Commonwealth
–, we will inquire into his concept of ‘liberty’ (see Quentin Skinner), also in
the context of early modern colonialism and the beginnings of systematic slave
trade. These readings will be supplemented by some attention to Milton’s
younger colleague, Andrew Marvell. Milton’s successor to the post of Secretary
of Foreign Languages under Oliver Cromwell, Marvell also shares with Milton a
deep interest in the expanding horizons of an increasingly maritime and
colonialist nation. The course finishes by examining Margaret Cavendish’s
poetry and her proto-novel The Blazing World (1666), as an example of
the Duchess’s royalist stance and fantasies of female rulership. Marvell’s
political and playful, ‘metaphysical’, poetry together with Cavendish’s
fantastic utopian scenarios offer striking examples of what intricate ‘ways of
worldmaking’ (Nelson Goodman) were open to mid- to late-seventeenth-century
writers. - Please note: There is a substantial reading load for this
course. It is imperative that students start reading the set texts before
the term starts.

Requirements: active
participation, an oral presentation, and a term paper (c. 15-20 pages; due date:
Monday, 9 September 2024).

Texts: John
Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1997);
John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (London:
Longman, 1998); The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (London:
Longman, 2003); Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World, in: An
Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman (Oxford: OUP,
1991). Some additional materials will be provided via GRIPS.

PS 1: Early Modern Literary Couples [Di 10-12; PT
1.0.2]                                        Zwierlein

A
significant number of early modern literary narrative poems, fiction and plays
are structured around a central couple (and sometimes a love triangle). Starting
with the absent presence of the poetic ‘love interest’ and its Petrarchan
antecedents, this seminar reinvestigates some of the relevant texts and
fictional couples, with a view to early modern political and cultural
developments, shifting gender relations and contested social hierarchies. We
will inquire into notions of male friendship, conventions of homosociality,
traditional wife-taming plots, functions of cross-dressing, and the mechanisms
of the marriage market, while not neglecting structural and stylistic devices
such as doubling and mirroring, intertextual referencing, and the uses of
rhetoric and staging techniques for the performance gendered identities. The
literary couple might seem the stuff of comedy, but we will also look at
examples in tragedy and epic. Our texts are: Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella (1582); Christopher
Marlowe, Hero and Leander (1598);
William Shakespeare, Sonnets (1609), Venus and Adonis (1592-93), The Taming of the Shrew (1593), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/96), Much Ado about Nothing (1598/99), Romeo and Juliet (1597), Othello (1603/04); Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621); John
Milton, Paradise Lost (1667); Aphra
Behn, Oroonoko (1688). - Please
note: There is a substantial reading load for this course. It is imperative
that students start reading the set texts before the term starts.

Requirements: active
participation, an oral presentation, and a term paper (c. 10-12 pages; due date:
Monday, 9 September 2024).

Texts:
Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander
(1598), in Christopher Marlowe: The
Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel, rev. ed. (London:
Penguin, 2007). For the Shakespeare plays and poems, I recommend buying either
the Arden series editions, or a complete works edition such as William Shakespeare: The Complete Works,
ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford University Press). John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), ed. Alastair
Fowler, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1998); Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688), in Aphra Behn: Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd
(London: Penguin, 1992). Some additional materials will be provided via GRIPS.

The
diverse nations and cultures of the Indian subcontinent figure prominently in
literary works by British, Indian and Pakistani authors that form the core
reading for this class: Rudyard Kipling, Kim
(1901); E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
(1924); Paul Scott, Staying On
(1977); Salman Rushdie, Midnight's
Children (1981); Arundhati Roy, The
God of Small Things (1997); Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (2005); Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (2006); Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower (2011); Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others (2014). We will discuss the transition from
colonial to postcolonial times as traced by our selected texts, the themes of
cultural contact and transfer, the notion of hybridity, and questions of the
local and the global, the province and the metropolis. We will attend to these
works’ multi-layered constructions of time and space: Spanning the globe from
India/Pakistan/Kashmir to European or US-American locations, they also often
reach back to precolonial times or forward to the present age of globalized
capitalism and its large cityscapes. At the – shifting – centres of these texts
are the fates of individuals, families, and entire cultures. Discussing
concepts of postcolonial humour, we will also be concerned with the notion of a
'postcolonial nostalgia' or 'postcolonial melancholia' (Paul Gilroy).- Please note: There is a substantial reading
load for this course. It is imperative that students start reading the set
texts before the term starts.

Requirements: active
participation, an oral presentation, and a term paper (c. 15-20 pages; due date:
Monday, 9 September 2024).

Texts: Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Edward Said
(London: Penguin, 1987); E.M. Forster, A
Passage to India, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Penguin, 1989); Paul
Scott, Staying On (London: Arrow,
1997); Salman Rushdie, Midnight's
Children (London: Picador, 1982); Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (London: Flamingo, 1997); Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (New York: Random
House, 2005); Kiran Desai, The
Inheritance of Loss (London: Penguin, 2006); Aravind
Adiga, Last Man in Tower (London:
Atlantic Books, 2011). Some additional materials will be provided via GRIPS.