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Marvell’s poems are both a delight and a challenge. They are full of surprises, of daring conceits and chains of associations. In this, they sometimes appear to be extremely modern. Yet at the same time, there are all sorts of allusions to other texts, the visual arts and a wide range of other cultural phenomena of his period. Prepare for an enjoyable seventeenth-century intellectual roller-coaster ride which will certainly broaden your knowledge of the early modern world of ideas. In the course of our close readings of selected poems, we will come across unfortunate lovers, lascivious nuns, living lamps, coy mistresses, Oliver Cromwell, noisy giant grasshoppers, vegetable eunuchs (yes we will, whatever they may turn out to be), huge Caribbean sea-monsters, John Milton and, of course, melons (to stumble on).
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 texts to be discussed will be “To His Coy Mistress”, “The Garden” and “Upon Appleton House”.
Please buy the following edition: Andrew Marvell (Ed.: E. Story Donno, with an introduction by Jonathan Bate), The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics). |
