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This seminar will be provide a useful and entertaining introduction to two the lives and works of two extraordinary eighteenth-century Londoners. Samuel Johnson was both an author and a critic, a kind of eighteenth-century Reich-Ranicki. He was brilliant, opinionated, eccentric, entertaining and a bit scary. Johnson became famous for many things, including his poetry, his journalism and his huge (and hugely important) dictionary of the English language. James Boswell was a young Scotsman who went to London to have a good time and to become famous. He attached himself to Johnson and gathered a huge amount of material for a biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson, a landmark in the history of this genre which indeed made its author very well known. Johnson hated Scotland; however, Boswell persuaded him to join him in a tour to his home country. They both published their travel journals (Boswell: A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Johnson: A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland). It was only in the 1920s that another major text by Boswell was discovered, a very intimate diary which is one of the most vivid and intimate accounts of a person’s life in eighteenth-century London. This was one of the most surprising and exciting finds in the history of English literature. So all in all we have two slightly eccentric, larger-than-life characters who between themselves produced what many regard as the most important dictionary, the most important biography and one of the most important diaries in the English language.
A Reader will be available from the copy-shop Reckhammerweg from early September.
Formal requirements: regular attendance, reading and preparing the assigned texts, active participation, Hausarbeit. Please read and prepare the first 50 pages of the reader before the first week of the new semester – so think, annotate, look things up if necessary and, above all, enjoy! |
