|
|
“Sick Books”: Viruses, bacteria and other intimate things in modern English and German literature- Dozent/in
- Dr. Robert Craig
- Angaben
- Seminar/Proseminar
Rein Online
2 SWS, Aufbaumodul. An-/Abmeldung über FlexNow: 10.02.2021 (10:00 Uhr) bis 16.04.2021 (23:59 Uhr); An-/Abmeldung zur Prüfung über FlexNow: 01.06.2021 (10:00 Uhr) bis 02.07.2021 (23:59 Uhr).
Zeit: Di 16:15 - 17:45, Online-Meeting
- Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches
- Teilnahmevoraussetzungen/Conditions of participation
B.A. Anglistik/Amerikanistik: Abgeschlossenes Basismodul Britische und Amerikanische Kulturwissenschaft
Lehrämter (neu): GYM Abgeschlossenes Basismodul Landeskunde/Kulturwissenschaft
Modulzugehörigkeit/Module applicability
B.A. Anglistik/Amerikanistik: Aufbaumodul Britische und Amerikanische Kultur: Seminar Britische Kultur (6 ECTS)
B.A. Anglistik/Amerikanistik: Ergänzungsmodul (ab WS 2014/15; je nach Belegung des Faches 6, 4 oder 3 ECTS)
Lehrämter (neu): GYM Aufbaumodul; GYM Wahlpflichtmodul (Kombination mit Russisch) Kulturwissenschaft: Seminar Britische Kultur (5 ECTS)
Erasmus and other visiting students: Seminar (6 ECTS)
The module will be examined by a short (20-minute) presentation, and a term paper (word limit: 4,000 words). Further information on the term paper can be obtained from this address: http://www.uni-bamberg.de/britcult/leistungen/studium/.
- Inhalt
- “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Susan’s Sontag’s metaphor opens her celebrated essay of 1978, Illness as Metaphor. The unavoidability of figurative language – despite Sontag’s critique of it – speaks to our difficulty in grasping bodily experiences simultaneously both alien and deeply intimate. But it also shows how the limit states of illness can illuminate the shapes of our “normal” lives. In a trenchant meditation of 1926, ‘On Being Ill’, Virginia Woolf had argued that instead of simply ‘shutting off’ our engagement with the world, illness can sharpen it, making us see things we couldn’t in happier and healthier times.
As we look for our own ways of speaking and writing about the worst pandemic since the Spanish Influenza of 1918-19, now is a good moment to travel more than a century back in time to see how past individuals and generations thought (and fought) their way through their own infectious and contagious illnesses; and to think about how we're doing it in retrospect. The aim of this seminar is to do that – and to consider the ways in which sicknesses may serve as the metaphors, even the scapegoats, for broader obsessions and ailments. With Sontag and Woolf in mind, we’ll turn to examine a selection of twentieth-century narratives of sickness. We'll start with American author Katherine Ann Porter’s short story collection, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), whose title novella offers a delirious, almost hallucinatory account of the ravages of the Spanish influenza. This will be set alongside an astonishingly relevant contemporary take on that pandemic, Emma Donoghue's The Pull of the Stars (2020), which was released to great critical acclaim in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. Finally, we'll devote a series of sessions to that great German novel of illness, Der Zauberberg (1924), which remains one of the greatest modernist portrayals of tuberculosis and its sanatorium treatment as a means of thinking about the ailing body of pre-war European cultural and intellectual life.
We shall discuss the English-language works in English, and the German-language works in German.
- Empfohlene Literatur
- I. Primärliteratur:
Please be absolutely sure to buy the books in the exact editions stated, as we’ll be referring to particular page numbers in our class discussions. Please aim to read Sontag's Illness as Metaphor before the start of the semester; and on account of its length, please buy (and start reading) Der Zauberberg as soon as you can.
Emma Donoghue, The Pull of the Stars (London: Picador, 2020).
Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1991).
Katherine Ann Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider: The Selected Stories of Katherine Ann Porter, ed. Sarah Churchwell (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2011).
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor & Aids and its Metaphors (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2009).
Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘On Being Ill’, will be made available in PDF-format on the VC.
II. Sekundärliteratur:
Andreas Blödorn and Friedhelm Marx (eds.), Thomas Mann Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2015).
Peter Fifield, Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Elizabeth Outka, Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and its Metaphors (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2009).
A variety of further texts will be made available on the Virtual Campus, as well as in the seminar Semesterapparat (in the TB 4). Texts will be uploaded in the course of the semester, shortly before the relevant seminar session is due to take place. Please note that you alone are responsible for knowing and keeping track of information made available to you in printed documents and on the Virtual Campus. Needless to say that your active and regular participation is expected. Absences will be excused when they result from circumstances beyond students’ control (illness, family emergency, religious holiday).
- Englischsprachige Informationen:
- Title:
- “Sick Books”: Viruses, bacteria and other intimate things in modern English and German literature
- Institution: Lehrstuhl für Britische Kultur
Hinweis für Web-Redakteure:
Wenn Sie auf Ihren Webseiten einen Link zu dieser Lehrveranstaltung setzen möchten, verwenden Sie bitte einen der folgenden Links:Link zur eigenständigen Verwendung Link zur Verwendung in Typo3
|
 |
|
|
UnivIS ist ein Produkt der Config eG, Buckenhof |
|
|