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Lehrende/r: Dr. Wolfgang Funk
Veranstaltungsart:
Lehrveranstaltung
Anzeige im Stundenplan:
05.874.901
Semesterwochenstunden:
2
Unterrichtssprache:
Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl:
- | 8
Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:
Date:
May 24–30, 2020
Teachers:
Prof. Dr. Tobias Döring (LMU München, Institut für Englische Philologie)
Dr. Wolfgang Funk (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Department of English and Linguistics)
Dr. Irmtraud Huber (LMU München, Institut für Englische Philologie)
Local Partner:
Dr. Emma Sdegno (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Dipartimento di Studi Europei)
Participants:
20 students from Munich and Mainz, residential on San Servolo (plus a number of local Venice and VIU students)
Inhalt:
For the British and Americans in the 19th century, Venice was in many senses an imaginary city, even when they actually came to visit. The Venetian republic had come to an end and the city quickly became a monument to loss and absence. With the rising tourist trade of the 19th century, Venice turned into a museum of itself. Having lost its own political agency, Venice offered a screen for the fears and desires of its visitors. These visitors themselves soon inscribed themselves into the imaginary cityscape. Early in the century, Lord Byron in particular, but Percy Bysshe Shelley, too, not only wrote about Venice, but became themselves subjects and inspiration for later literary engagements with the city. Some decades later, John Ruskin’s life-long obsession with the city would begin to assert its immense influence on British perceptions of the city. This research seminar will sample literary engagements with the city throughout the 19th century, beginning with the Romantics and ending with Henry James, covering different text genres (poetry, narrative prose, travel writing, art criticism). With a strong research component, the seminar aims to broaden its perspective beyond the well-known and influential core texts, by identifying and addressing more marginalised text material. The aim of the seminar is to open up the breadth of different literary encounters of the city as well as to trace and highlight similarities and recurrent imagery.
Empfohlene Literatur:
In preparation to the trip to Venice, in a number of sessions, students will be familiarised with tools of online text research, aiming at building up a corpus of texts concerned with Venice beyond the material programmed. This material will be the basis both for the on-site group work, and for further individual research. The seminar discussion during the stay in Venice will begin with the work of Byron (“Beppo”) and Shelley (“Julian and Maddalo”) and turn next to Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. Travel writing by Henry James (Italian Hours) and Charles Dickens (Pictures from Italy) which will be discussed next clearly show the influence of the earlier writers and also serve to address more directly issues around the touristic gaze which dominates the foreign perspective on the city. With Robert Browning’s “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and Vernon Lee’s “A Wicked Voice”, we will turn next to two texts which associate Venice with a music that is decidedly ghostly, picking up themes of evanescence, performance and haunting which are latent in the previous texts. In a final session on Henry James’ The Aspern Papers we will pick up again all of the previous issues. Alluding to both Byron and Shelley in its fictionalised version of a famous Romantic poet who is the ghostly presence at the centre of the plot of James’ novel, The Aspern Papers conveniently circles back to and reassesses the Romantic writers and their Venetian heritage with which the seminar set out. In independent group work students will additionally explore relations to Venice of heretofore more marginalised writers, such as Samuel Rodgers, John Addington Symonds, Michael Field and Ann Radcliffe, or other writers which might emerge as relevant from the preparatory research, and relate them to the influential texts discussed in the seminar. Their textual research and on-site explorations will provide material for a digital literary map of Venice as well as become the basis of a fully developed written seminar paper.
Zusätzliche Informationen:
Aims:
Transdisciplinary research, historical contextualisation and transcultural understanding of Venice as setting and theme in 19th-century English cultural imaginary, with a particular emphasis on the role of different genres (poetry, art criticism, travel writing, narrative prose). Acquisition of digital research skills and visualisation techniques (digital mapping).
Methods:
Group work, individual research, oral presentations; seminar discussions, on-site explorations, urban field excursions, media analysis, full-text database research, digital mapping.
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