Termine im WS 2012/13 - Englisches Seminar - Ruhr-Universität ...

050 641 Goth
Staging Lives: Biographical Plays in Postmodern Drama, 4 CP
2 st. mi 12-14 GB 6/137 Nord
This course discusses how postmodern drama stages the lives of famous scientists,
politicians, and poets. We will focus on three critically acclaimed plays: Michael
Frayn's Copenhagen (1998), which deals with an ill-fated meeting between physicists
Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941, and brings into focus
quantum physics, the atomic bomb, and wartime politics; Frayn's Democracy (2003),
which analyses the Guillaume affair in the early 1970s, when Chancellor Willy Brandt
resigned after his personal assistant Günter Guillaume was revealed to be a spy from
the GDR; and Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love (1997), which focuses on the
life of the homosexual poet and classical philologist A.E. Housman against the
backdrop of the late-Victorian period. The seminar will contextualise these plays in
recent dramatic developments, and explore themes like history (subjective/objective;
personal/public), memory (personal/collective), and the viability of historical
representation in theatre and drama. The course is also aimed at familiarising
students with the terminology and methodology of drama analysis.
Required editions:
Michael Frayn, Plays 4: Copenhagen; Democracy; Afterlife. London: Methuen, 2010.
Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love. London: Faber and Faber, 1997.
Credit requirements:
Seminar (4 CP): active participation and a 10-page paper;
Übung (3 CP): active participation and a 5-page paper.
050 642 Klawitter
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, 4 CP
2 st. do 10-12 GABF 04/613 Süd
Charles Dickens’s 500-page novel Great Expectations (1860-61) is not only one of
his most popular works of narrative fiction, it is also today regarded by literary critics
as his best composed.
In our seminar we will discuss this Bildungsroman in terms of generic conventions,
thematic concerns, narrative techniques and the unique mingling of such literary
modes as tragedy/pathos and comedy. Particular attention will be given to the
generation of psychological insight as well as the promotion of certain values and
their relation to preoccupations in Victorian society.