Archived Courses
Summer Term 2017
Prof. Dr. Cecile Sandten
Content:
The Research Colloquium is open to students who are preparing for their final oral and written exams. It is intended to give students a platform to present their projects and to raise questions and/or difficulties they may be facing at an early stage of their research. Further, students are encouraged to engage in critical discussions, and gain feedback from their peers concerning their research projects. We will also discuss a wide range of general topics and individual topics required for final exams.
Requirements for credits:
The format of this seminar consists of a close reading of texts, discussions and thesis presentations. Each student will present an oral report (approx. 15 minutes), chair a session or prepare questions for a discussion (PVL).
Set Texts/Required Reading:
A reader with seminal material will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
Registration:
There will be a list at the door of my office (Rh 39, room 214). Please register there.
4-tägiges Blockseminar
233 or 022
Content:
This course aims to provide support for post-graduate students who are developing their dissertation ideas and first draft outlines. The focus of this seminar will be on research in English Literature (including close readings of secondary theoretical texts and primary texts, but also the students’ own written work). Post-graduate candidates who engage in interdisciplinary approaches and topics beyond English Literature are most welcome to participate to enhance the group’s interdisciplinary awareness.
Objectives:
This seminar will also offer special supervision through individual counseling. Moreover, the seminar will support doctoral and post-doctoral candidates on a professional level, especially with regard to topics such as scholarly writing for publication, pedagogic issues of teaching at university level, as well as information on how to apply for positions in the job market. In addition, support to present their work at (international) conferences will be given, as well as information on careers and funding support for scholarship applications and opportunities for gaining key supplementary qualifications.
Prerequisites:
Participants must have completed a Magister, Master or Doctoral thesis graded at least 2,0.
Mandy Beck
Content
This seminar provides a brief overview of contemporary fiction from the 1970s to the 2010s, looking in particular at the historical, political and critical contexts of that fiction’s production and reception, and examining the various historical and cultural continuities and discontinuities across the period. Central to an understanding of contemporary literature are questions of technological progress, gender and sexuality, national identity, as well as aesthetic and political matters.
The consideration of a mixture of theoretical/critical material (Alan Sinfield, Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, and others) alongside novels, poems and short stories published from the 1970s onwards (J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, Sarah Hall, Sean Bonney, and others), seeks to bring light to the galvanizing themes and topics of each decade: the tension between realism and experimentalism, state and identity politics, Britishness, multiculturalism and history.
Objectives
This course encourages students to develop a critical understanding of the recent history of contemporary fiction and functions of literature, through the analysis of different literary and theoretical texts. In addition, students are made aware of issues represented in post-modern fiction, such as historical constructs, social myths, experimental and subversive strategies.
Prerequisites
In order to participate, students of Anglistik/Amerikanistik need to have completed the lecture course “Introduction to the Study of Literatures in English” successfully.
Requirements for Credit:
Close readings of primary, theoretical as well as secondary texts, discussions and oral presentations. Each student will do an oral presentation (approx. 15 minutes), chair a session or prepare questions for discussion (PVL) and write a substantial seminar paper (12-15 pages) (PL).
Set Texts
Ballard, J.G. ([1974] 2014). Concrete Island. London: Fourth Estate.
Carter, Angela. ([1984] 2006). Nights at the Circus. London: Vintage.
Barnes, Julian. ([1998] 2012). England, England. London: Vintage.
A Reader with seminal material will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
Registration
There will be a list on the door of my office (Rh 39, room 213). Please register there.
Content:
Storytelling is an ancient form of entertainment and education – from the epics by the Greek poet Homer, the medieval sagas of gods and heroes to orally transmitted folk tales in a broad range of countries. For more than 100 years cinema has been the continuation of this tradition – on celluloid. Therefore, an educational programme for children and young adults does not only include the studying of texts, but also films. Since 1996, the International Film Festival "Schlingel" has provided a great forum for this task. It offers young viewers the opportunity to watch films that would otherwise be unknown in German cinemas. The films, whose heroes are primarily children and young adults, tell exciting stories and convey profound messages that are both universal, and conversely, culturally specific. More than 130 films from a broad range of countries will be screened during the festival week. In addition, international guests (e.g. film directors, young actors) as well as an international jury will be present throughout the festival.
Objectives:
Since the Chair of English Literatures has entered into a cooperation with the "Schlingel" Film Festival this year (25.09. – 01.10.2017), students of this seminar will be required to participate actively in support of the festival also at times outside the regular teaching period. You will first be provided with hands-on material with regard to film analysis techniques that will help you to deepen your understanding of films and support you in the creation of educational material for children. Secondly, you will learn specific presentation, voice-over, interview and/or other techniques that are required for the active participation in the film festival.
Prerequisites:
Students must have completed the first seminar pertaining to the MA-Modul 4, "Cultural Encounters".
Requirements for credits:
The format of this seminar will consist of oral presentations and discussions. Each student will give an oral presentation (approx. 15 minutes), and chair a session or prepare questions for discussion (PVL). For the PL students will be engaged in hands-on activities during the Schlingel Film Festival (e.g. support and participate in the Festival, translate films, write and present film reviews, introduce films to the audience, chair Q&A sessions, provide / speak the voice-over text, or write festival reports).
Set Texts/Required Reading:
A Reader with seminal material will be provided.
Registration
There will be a list on the door of my office (Rh 39, room 213). Please register there.
Dr. Eike Kronshage
Content:
This course provides an accessible introduction to the theories and methods in literary studies. After having found out what methods and theories actually are and what they are good for, we will engage in critical discussions about some of the most influential theoretical and methodological approaches in our field. We will ask ourselves how we understand texts (hermeneutics); how texts exist in the world (Marxism; Cultural Materialism), and what their social function is (sociological theory). We will examine the function of authors, texts, and readers (psychoanalysis; New Criticism; Distant Reading; Reader Response Theory), before we ask if these functions can be fulfilled at all (structuralism, post-structuralism). Questions of power and its influence on text production and reception will complete our discussion (discourse analysis, postcolonial theory, gender theory).
We will exercise our new theoretical and methodological toolbox by analyzing William Shakespeare’s Hamlet from different perspectives.
Objectives:
This seminar is challenging, yes. But once you’re through with it, you will find it incredibly valuable for your future studies (of literature, language, and culture), and, believe it or not, for your life. It will enable you to see things from more than just the handful of perspectives you have hitherto experienced. It might not always have in store for you the answers you desire, but it will certainly encourage you to ask challenging questions (that’s also why Hamlet is the best play to study in this context).
Prerequisites:
Successful completion of “Introduction to the Study of Literatures in English” (does not apply to visiting students). You must be willing to study a complex theoretical text every week (of approximately 20-30 pages each, which means a high reading load for this seminar!). The advantage of this procedure is that you will become acquainted with a great variety of theories and methods; the disadvantage that you must be mentally flexible enough to engage in a new thematic discussion from week to week. In addition, all students must study Hamlet.
Requirements for credits:
Active participation and regular attendance is expected; a 20-minute oral presentation (PVL) and a term paper (PL).
Set Texts/Required Reading:
A reader with seminal material will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
In addition, please obtain the Arden Third edition (no other!) of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (ISBN: 978-1904271338).
Tutorial:
The course will be accompanied by a 90-minute weekly tutorial. Attendance is strongly recommended. Time and venue will be announced at the first meeting.
Registration
By e-mail: eike.kronshage@phil.tu-chemnitz.de. Required information: Name, semester, and status (e.g. ERASMUS).
Content:
2017 commemorates 200 years since the death of Jane Austen. The public generally tends to think of her as the witty spinster who wrote romantic novels for women (an image that the "Austen industry" attempts to keep alive). But the twentieth century witnessed a great shift in the critical reception of Austen's work. W.H. Auden confessed in a poem that "she shocks me" and that "Beside her, Joyce seems innocent as grass." He, like many others before and after him, described his feelings of unease considering "An English spinster of the middle class / Describ[ing] the amorous effects of ‘brass’, / Reveal[ing] so frankly and with such sobriety / The economic basis of society." This course seeks to investigate the image of Jane Austen as a radical critic of capitalist society, and to discuss whether her ideas about Regency society still speak to a twenty-first-century readership in any way. In other words, we intend to go beyond the romantic period drama, as which Austen’s fiction is often labelled (and marketed). We will be reading three novels: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Northanger Abbey.
Objectives:
The seminar will use the theoretical and methodological approaches you have learned so far to critically investigate a set of highly canonical (and enjoyable) texts. Revisiting both methods of narratological and formal analysis from your “Introduction” lecture, and critical approaches from your “Theories and Methods” seminar, this course serves as an excellent preparation for your BA Thesis.
Requirements for credits:
Students must read all three novels and participate in classroom discussions. The seminar concludes with a public presentation of your research results to the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft Chemnitz e.V. in an entertaining form (as “Alternative Prüfungsform”, see Prüfungsordnung §5). This will be a public event, to which you may invite your friends and family. It is supposed to teach you how to present in front of a larger audience, and how to impart your academic knowledge to the non-academic public (perhaps the hardest task of all for university students, but certainly one of the most important ones). The tutorial (see below) will help you to organize and prepare the presentation.
Set Texts/Required Reading:
Please obtain the novels in the (inexpensive) editions mentioned below. No other editions allowed!
Jane Austen: Emma (Penguin)
Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey (Oxford World’s Classics)
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice (Penguin)
A reader with seminal material will be provided at the beginning of the semester.
Tutorial:
The course will be accompanied by a 90-minute weekly tutorial. Attendance is strongly recommended. Time and venue will be announced at the first meeting.
Registration
By e-mail: eike.kronshage@phil.tu-chemnitz.de. Required information: Your name, semester, and status (e.g. ERASMUS).
Blockseminar
Content:
In an essay, Francis Bacon used the oxymoron “wild justice” to describe the nature of revenge. According to Bacon, revenge was just and justified, on the one hand, and “wild” and disproportional, on the other; its relation to prevailing law was always problematic, as was its moral status. Arguably, these formal ambiguities contributed to the genre’s popularity in early modern plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, enabling playwrights to explore the constellation of revenger, revenged, and object of revenge, in order to negotiate questions of power, of agency, of personal determination, of individual psychology and many others. At the same time, the process of revenge enabled theater companies to entertain their audiences with a display of gory violence. Furthermore, the extant revenge tragedies are saturated with an economic imagery – of settled account, of payback and repayment, of retributive justice.
This seminar intends to investigate the questions raised above. We will focus in particular on the economic basis of four early modern revenge tragedies by approaching them from different theoretical angles (sociological theory, postcolonial theory, genre theory; see “Objectives” section below). We will also consider whether these once so popular plays have re-entered public consciousness in recent times (for instance through the films by Quentin Tarantino, most of which are centered around the topic of revenge) – and if so, why.
Organization:
The first meeting of this block seminar takes place on Monday, 3 April 2017, 3.30-5.00 in 3/B012. We will start a Doodle to schedule four meetings during the semester, one for each play (see below).
Objectives:
You will become acquainted with four highly canonical texts. For the analysis of these texts, you will need to polish up your knowledge of methodological and theoretical approaches from your previous studies, especially those of genre theory (Aristotle, Sidney), sociological theory (Bourdieu, Veblen), postcolonial theory (Bhabha, Spivak), gender theory (Butler, Mulvey), deconstruction (Derrida), and intermediality (Rajewsky).
Requirements for credits:
You must study all four plays and participate in classroom discussions. You must be willing to read additional critical (and highly complex!) texts. PVL: Oral presentation (25 min). PL: Term paper (15-20 pages).
Set Texts/Required Reading:
Please obtain the following editions (no other editions allowed)
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (Arden Early Modern Drama; ISBN: 978-1904271604)
William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Arden Shakespeare Third; ISBN: 978-1904271338)
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta (Oxford World’s Classics; ISBN: 978-0199537068)
John Webster, The White Devil (Oxford World’s Classics; ISBN: 978-0199539284)
Registration
By e-mail: eike.kronshage@phil.tu-chemnitz.de. Required information: Your name, semester, and status (e.g. ERASMUS). Participation of BA students willing to engage with the difficult texts mentioned above is generally possible (after consultation with me).