Lehrende/r: Dominik Wallerius
Veranstaltungsart: Seminar/Proseminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan: 05.874.123
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 45
Anmeldegruppe: BS/ELC 123
Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007. Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinie
Inhalt: In this course we will read three classic novels of the late Victorian period. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Robert Louise Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are first of all shocking and mysterious texts, which belong to the heterogenous genre of Gothic fiction. One of our goals in this class will accordingly be to analyse the texts in terms of the thrills and excitement they generate. More importantly, however, we will also ask how the novels represent the cultural anxieties of the Victorian mind at the end of the nineteenth century, a period often called the fin de siècle. We will therefore critically engage with the formal aspects of the texts themselves but also compare and contrast them with a wide variety of non-fictional texts expressing Victorian fears about such issues as the New Woman, the masses, physical and psychological degeneration and the divided self.
Empfohlene Literatur: Please order the Norton Critical Editions of all three texts: 978-0-393-92754-2 (Dorian Gray); 978-0-393-97465-2 (Jekyll and Hyde) and 978-0-393-97012-8 (Dracula). These editions contain various sources and additional material that we will use in class, so please do not buy any other than the Norton edition. If you would like to prepare for this course, or see whether the texts really interest you, I recommend either the entries in the Encyclopedia of the Novel or the “Penguin Classics Introductions” to each novel. Both are readily accessible online via the database Literature Online, which you can access from all computers on campus. If you have trouble finding these resources, don’t hesitate to contact me.
