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This seminar will give you an opportunity to get acquainted with a remarkable author and his remarkable works. John Donne (1572-1631) grew up as a Catholic (at a time when being a Catholic was illegal), became a law student, abandoned Catholicism, did an internship as a pirate, became a nobleman’s secretary, lost his job because of a secret marriage, spent some time in prison, tried to become an ambassador and eventually became, as dean of St. Paul’s cathedral, a high-ranking clergyman. He was also a poet – but his poems are not exactly what you would perhaps expect from a seventeenth-century clergyman. Much of his poetry is love poetry. Donne wrote in a way that was both experimental and daring. In particular, he liked to combine erotic and religious ideas and imagery. In his poems, we shall come across dreams and ecstasies, air and angels, apparitions and alchemy, broken hearts, an erotically active flea, several cases of witchcraft and, obviously, a falling star. In addition to his poems, we shall discuss several of his prose texts.
Please buy the following edition: John Donne (Ed.: A. J. Smith), The Complete English Poems (Penguin Classics). Additional material will be made available.
Requirements: regular attendance, reading the assigned texts, active participation, and written work according to your particular Studienordnung. As always: read, think, enjoy (!!), annotate (!) and look things up if necessary. The first texts to be discussed will be “The Flea”, “Twicknam Garden” and “The Funeral”. |
