gb - Englisches Seminar - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Assessment/requirements: Übung: active participation and extended exposition;
Seminar: active participation, shorter in-class exposition and term paper
(wissenschaftliche Hausarbeit).
Übungen
050 643 Klawitter
Touring Britain through Contemporary Poetry, 3 CP
2 st. mi 14-16 GB 03/42
As any casual browsing through poetry collections published by British poets over the
last four decades reveals, there are plenty of poems that focus on places in Britain,
cities and towns, rivers, landscapes, sights. As Seamus Heaney points out in his
lecture “The Sense of Place” (1977), such poetry goes beyond the mere visual and is
imbued with rich historical associations and serves purposes of cultural identification.
In our discussions of place poems by contemporary British poets (including Alice
Oswald’s much-acclaimed long poem on the River Dart in Devon) we will ask how
poets read and make us see places, what descriptive and evocative techniques they
employ and what senses/uses of place can be identified. To enhance our understanding
of the representation of space in poetry, we will draw on categories that
have already been developed in narrative theory. Considering expressive purposes,
we will also ask in how far these are informed by recent changes in our habits of
experiencing, moving and dwelling in places. Towards the end of our class we will try
to devise a typology of place poetry. A reader will be provided on Blackboard.
Assessment/requirements: presentation in class or interpretative 5-page essay.
050 644 Fröhlich
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Novels, 3 CP
2 st. fr 10-12 GB 02/160
Terry Pratchett is one of Britain’s bestselling contemporary writers, and was officially
knighted for his services to literature in 2009. His successful Discworld novels contain
references to and parodies on not only the fantasy genre, but on many other aspects
of literature and culture, too, making them interesting and entertaining for a wide