Englisches Seminar - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Übungen
050 686 Schunck
Reading Poetry, 3 CP
2 st. mo 10-12 GABF 04/614 Süd
This course is intended to offer intensive practice in text analysis, above all in the
organization and production of essays based on the interpretations. The poems
selected for discussion are representative of major periods and genres (sonnet, ode,
elegy etc.) in British and American poetry. Participants will be given numerous
opportunities to submit essays for correction.
050 687 West
The Concept of Time in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 3 CP
2 st. do 8.30-10 GB 6/137 Nord
Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets are a long meditation on the nature of time: what time is,
what effects it has, how its effects can be resisted. Indeed, the sonnets were written
at a time when there was an acute interest in the concept of time, an interest
manifested, for example, in Spenser’s contemporaneous sonnet sequence Amoretti,
and it is no coincidence that the sonnet “vogue” of which Shakespeare was a part
should have begun (in 1580) at precisely the same time that the first watch appeared
in Britain – the sonnet form, after all, has a finite duration of approximately one
minute. In the class, we shall be analyzing some of the key sonnets in
Shakespeare’s sequence, and relating the view of time manifested in the sonnets to
the views of time then prevalent.
Requirements: A final essay.