Byron was an international literary superstar of his time. Both his poetry and his life were unconventional, provocative and scandalous. He was regarded as “mad, bad and dangerous to know” – and this is precisely what fascinated people not just in Britain, but all over the continent and beyond.
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). In order to get an idea of the international impact of his works well beyond, 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).
Please buy the following editions: George Gordon Lord Byron (Ed.: Jerome J. McGann), Lord Byron. The Major Works (Oxford World’s Classics), ISBN: 978-0199537334.
Alexander Puschkin (translated by Rolf-Dietrich Keil), Jewgeni Onegin. Roman in Versen (Insel), ISBN: 9783458342243. Other translations of this text are also of interest.
Heinrich Heine (Ed.: Bernd Kortländer), Reisebilder (Reclam), ISBN: 9783150187302
Requirements: thorough preparation for each session, active participation plus anything that might be required according to your Modulhandbuch / Studienordnung. 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).
The seminar will be conducted entirely online and entirely in real time. We will meet online via Zoom, each week of the semester at the time of the seminar. Please join the seminar´s Moodle room (“The European Dimension of Romanticism: Byron, Heine, Pushkin, password: ByronHPWS20-21); you will receive further information via Moodle. Please make sure to use and check your official university e-mail addresses at all times. Do not use any other addresses, and do not have e-mails sent to your university address forwarded to other addresses. Our experience in the last semester has shown that using non-university addresses / forwarding mails will lead to our messages bouncing back in very many cases.
Just in case your application is rejected by the LSF system: If you want to do this course because you are genuinely interested, you will be most welcome, no matter what LSF says. Please get in touch with claudia.hausmann@uni-due.de who will enrol you manually. The worst that might happen to you is that you cannot do a Leistungsnachweis if you lack the formal requirements. |
