gb - Englisches Seminar - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Seminare
050 632 Klawitter
The First World War in Poetry, Fiction and Autobiography, 4 CP
2 st. do 14-16 GB 6/137 Nord
The First World War (1914-1918) was one of the great traumas of the twentieth
century. The horrific experience of trench warfare elicited a great number of literary
texts which were to exert a strong influence on the formation of collective memories.
This is particularly true of Britain, where the ‘Great War’ still informs the official
culture of war commemoration and indeed plays a considerable part in the
reaffirmation of national identity.
The seminar focusses on the early literary engagement with the war, namely the
poetry produced by the so-called ‘War Poets’, but also narrative fiction and memoirs
which were written in the decade after the war. We will begin our discussions with
Edmund Blunden’s memoirs Undertones of War (1928) and Robert Graves’s
autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929), which are regarded as classic accounts
of the Western Front. At least five sessions of the seminar will be devoted to the
reading of war poetry. This will include Charles Hamilton Sorley’s “All the Hills and
Vales Along”, Siegfried Sassoon’s “They”, Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”
and Isaac Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches”. These poems as well as a
number of short stories dealing with the experience of war will be made available as
a reader at the beginning of term. While acknowledging the documentary dimension
of all these texts, our investigation will be primarily geared towards a consideration of
the expressive potential of each genre and its wider function within the cultural
representation of war.
Participants should purchase the Penguin editions of Undertones of War and
Goodbye to All That.
Requirement: research paper or written test.
050 633 Niederhoff
Doubles, 4 CP
2 st. fr 14-16 GABF 04/614 Süd
The subject of this seminar is a key element in 19th-century fiction: the motif of the
double, or doppelgänger. We will analyse and compare two novels and three short
stories, in all of which the motif plays an important part: R.L. Stevenson, Dr Jekyll