SEMINAR TOPICS

TEACHING:

Teaching will consist of nine two-hour seminars in term 1. The first hour will usually involve a (partially interactive) lecture and the second hour will involve seminar-style group discussions and student presentations.

The weekly breakdown of topics and textual foci is as follows:

Week 1: Lecture: Introduction: Enlightenment and its Others

Key texts: excerpts from Stuart Hall, 'The Spectacle of the 'Other', in Hall, ed., Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Sage 1997), Paul du Gay et al., ed., Identity: a Reader (Sage 2000), Simon Malpas and Paul Wake, eds., The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory (Routledge 2006), Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit (Suhrkamp, 1979), Sigrid Lange, Ob die Weiber Menschen sind. Geschlechterdebatten um 1800 (Reclam Leipzig, 1992), Edward Said, Orientalism (Penguin, 2003).

Week 2: Lecture: Enlightened Cosmopolitanism? G.E. Lessing and Nathan der Weise.

Seminar: Nathan der Weise part I

Key text: Lessing’s Nathan der Weise

Plotting the play!

Week 3: Seminar: Nathan (Part II).

Lecture: Representing the Other in Poetry by Schiller

Key text: Handout of Schiller’s lyrical poetry

Week 4: Seminar: The Feminine Other in Schiller’s poetry

Week 5: Lecture: Romantic Encounters? Selves and Others in Novalis

Seminar: Novalis and Heinrich von Ofterdingen

Week 6: Reading Week: No sessions

Week 7: Lecture: Christians, Muslims and Otherness: E.T.A Hoffmann, Das Sanctus

Seminar: Hoffmann’s Das Sanctus.

Week 8: Lecture: Man – Woman – Black – White: Discourses of Alterity in Romanticism

Lecture: Heinrich von Kleist and Caroline Auguste Fischer: Writing and Identity

 Week 9: Seminar: Kleist’s Die Verlobung in St Domingo

Seminar: Fischer’s William der Neger

 Week 10: Lecture: Inscribing Boundaries: Gender, Jews and Gentiles in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

Seminar: Droste’s Judenbuche