Medienkulturwissenschaft Kommentiertes Vorlesungsverzeichnis ...

Romanticism
Proseminar
Dr. Eva Ulrike Pirker: ulrike.pirker@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de
Di. 10:00 bis 12:00, KG I - HS 1231
ECTS: 2
INHALT
Romantic literature in Britain: an exploration of the Romantic movement's principal concerns
This course will explore diverse facets of Romantic literature in Britain: radical social critique,
revolutionary thought, private ‘eccentricities’, a fascination with ‘dark’ aspects (of history, of
nature, of the human soul), an interest in ‘ordinary’ lives, regionalism, poetic innovations (genre,
form, literary language etc.). We will read two novels and a selection of poems representing
different phases, influences and concerns of the Romantic movement. Please buy and read Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Short texts will be taken from the
Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2.
Voraussetzungen: Introduction to Literary Studies
Leistungsnachweis: Midterm and final exam
Literatur
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights; The Norton Anthology of English
Literature, vol. 2.
Social Politics, Work, and Idleness in British Literature, 1800-1940
Prose
Benjamin Kohlmann: benjamin.kohlmann@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de
Di. 8:30 bis 10:00, KG I - HS 1231
ECTS: 2
INHALT
The course examines ideologies of work and non-productivity during a period when these
discourses became central to literary culture, political economy, morality, legislation, technological
development, and physiology. Course discussions will cut across literary and non-literary debates.
They will cover Romantic celebrations of poetic idleness, the rise of Victorian workaholism, the
stigmatization of the “idle poor” (and “idle rich”), the depiction of strikes in fiction, Marxist
understandings of work and labour, aestheticist leisure at the fin-de-siècle, the enfranchisement
of the working class, the origins of the welfare state, unemployment in interwar fiction. Some
broader questions that will be addressed are: What constitutes meaningful work? How does work
differ from labour? Why and how, at particular times, has art been conceived of as a species of
work and/or idleness? To what degree are work and idleness private/collective (non-)activities?
Writers and movements to be discussed include: William Wordsworth, Henry Mayhew, Charles
Dickens, J.S. Mill, John Ruskin, William Morris, fin-de-siècle aestheticism, Joseph Conrad,
proletarian fiction. Twentieth-century theorists of work and idleness that will feature alongside
our historical readings are Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, André Gorz, Thomas Laqueur,
Moishe Postone, and Scott Cutler Shershow.
Voraussetzungen: Erfolgreiche Teilnahme an einem PS1.
Leistungsnachweis: Active participation; short oral presentation; final in-class exam.
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