gb - Englisches Seminar - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

. Theaterwissenschaftler
Teilnahmeschein (2 CP): Ergebnisprotokoll einer Sitzung
Teilnahmeschein (3 CP): Kurzreferat oder Kurzklausur
Leistungsnachweis (4CP): schriftliche Hausarbeit oder Abschlussklausur
050 635 West
Cognitive Stylistics, 4 CP
2 st. di 10-12 GB 03/46
Cognitive stylistics is, or claims to be, a new approach to literature, one that
combines the insights of linguistics and cognitive science to further our
understanding of “what happens to (or in the mind of) an Interpreter” when
confronted by a literary text. We will discuss concepts such as categorisation,
attention, metaphor, polysemy, and assess their relevance to an account of literary
experience.
Requirements: a 2,000-word essay.
050 638 Puschmann-Nalenz
“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman”. The Female Writer as Motif in
Contemporary Fiction, 4 CP
_________________________________________________________
2 st. fr 10-12 GB 5/37 Nord
The seminar deals with two novels from the era of postmodernism which are then
contrasted with a novel from the 1960s. In all three of them the figure of the female
writer is essential, thereby reflecting James Joyce’s early novel “Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man”. Female identity and self-fashioning are a central topic as well as
the creation of a fictional reality by writing. Role-models, questioning of social
conventions and ethical values, a preoccupation with history and, above all, the
meaning of writing literary texts are some of the themes characterizing especially the
novels by Atwood and McEwan, while Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel deals
with the youth in America of a gifted college student. Since Plath spent most of her
life in England she is frequently anthologized among British authors; Canadian
Margaret Atwood belongs to the “Postcolonial” writers in English.
The course requires extensive reading, which has to be started before the beginning
of the semester!