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This seminar will give you an opportunity to get acquainted with Byron’s outrageously witty (and sometimes simply outrageous) narrative verse (especially Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage). With his trademark Byronic heroes and his own self-fashioning as a romantic author, Byron rose to fame and a certain degree of notoriety in many European countries. In order to get an idea of the impact of his works well beyond Britain, our close reading of texts by Byron will be combined with a comparative approach, taking in both German and Russian texts (Heinrich Heine, Das Buch Le Grand and Englische Fragmente; Alexander Pushkin, Jewgenij Onegin, which, for reasons of practicality, will be read in German translation).
Requirements: regular attendance, reading the assigned texts, active participation, and a seminar paper (“Seminararbeit”). As always: read, think, enjoy (!!), annotate (!) and look things up if necessary. The first text to be discussed is Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto 1).
Please buy the following editions: George Gordon Lord Byron (Ed.: Jerome J. McGann), Lord Byron. The Major Works (Oxford World’s Classics).
Alexander Puschkin (translated by Rolf-Dietrich Keil), Jewgeni Onegin. Roman in Versen (Insel). Other translations of this text are also of interest.
Heinrich Heine (Ed.: Bernd Kortländer), Reisebilder (Reclam). |
