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Love poetry speaks to us because it is about emotions that are familiar to all of us. Even love poems that are 400 years old or more can therefore have a very immediate and powerful appeal to modern readers. However, we must not forget that we are not the readers their authors had in mind. These poems are based on ideas and mentalities that go back to a remote and fascinating past. Any reading of them must involve an attempt at recovering as much of their cultural contexts as we can. In other words: this will involve an element of intellectual time travel. We will encounter texts that are entertaining, baffling, provocative and delightful, texts that will sometimes make us smile and roll our eyes in equal measure.
We are going to work on some of the great Elizabethan sonnet sequences (Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella; Samuel Daniel, To Delia, Michael Drayton, Idea; Edmund Spenser, Amoretti). We are going to look beyond the sonnet, takin in love poems / erotic poems by Donne, Herrick and Marvell.
The material to be worked on will be made available in a Moodle room. You will receive the password via e-mail. Requirements: thorough preparation for each session, active participation, and, if applicable, written work according to your particular Studienordnung. As always: think, enjoy (!), annotate, and look things up if necessary. Useful background knowledge of key cultural, historical and literary contexts of Renaissance love poetry can be found here: Christoph Heyl, Kleine Englische Literaturgeschichte. J.B. Metzler. ISBN-13: 978-3476045096.
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. |
