Englisches Seminar - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Jane Barker, Love Intrigues; Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe;
Samuel Richardson, Pamela; Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews; Tobias Smollett,
Humphry Clinker; Jane Austen, Emma. Students will have to read Joseph Andrews in
full and shorter excerpts from the other texts.
Assessment/requirements: written end-of-term test.
050 658 Pankratz
Restoration Culture, 3 CP
2 st. di 14-16 HGB 10
The times between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the death of the last
Stuart ruler in 1714 saw many profound changes. Power gradually shifted from the
monarch to parliament; science and empiricism removed God from the centre of
things; money and wealth challenged heredity. The development towards what we
nowadays would consider a ‘modern’ state did not go smoothly, though. There is a to
and fro between old and new. Hence, the Restoration period is full of crises, conflicts
and paradoxes. Sometimes the people seem like our near contemporaries and
sometimes like quaint bewigged figures from a very distant time.
The lecture course aims at having a critical look at the familiar and to make the
quaint more accessible. By dealing with political and religious developments,
literature, music and fashion it intends to provide a multifaceted survey of Restoration
culture.
Assessment/requirements: written end-of-term test.
050 624 Weidle
Introduction to Shakespeare’s Tragedies, 3 CP
2 st. do 10-12 HGB 20
The lecture will give a short overview of Shakespeare’s tragedies: the early Titus
Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, the ‘Roman’ plays Julius Caesar, Antony and
Cleopatra and Coriolanus, and the so-called ‘great four’ Hamlet, Othello, King Lear
and Macbeth, plus the ‘afterthought’ Timon of Athens (Coleridge). Questions of
genre, ideology, cosmologies, dramaturgy and staging will be addressed as well as
the main themes and issues that are negotiated in the plays. Although the plot of