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Lehrende/r: Dr. Klaus Schmidt
Veranstaltungsart:
Seminar/Übung
Anzeige im Stundenplan:
06.008.0036
Semesterwochenstunden:
2
Credits:
6,0
Unterrichtssprache:
Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl:
- | 30
Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie zzgl. Bevorzugung höherer Fachsemester
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
Über die Senatsrichtlinie hinaus werden bei der Platzvergabe für diese Veranstaltung Studierende höherer Fachsemester bevorzugt berücksichtigt.
Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:
Preliminary Discussion / Introduction: All questions relating to organization will be answered in the first session of this seminar (Oct. 21, 2021).
Procedure and Requirements: Students who take this course as an Übung (3 ECTS) give an oral presentation (including handout); those who take it as a seminar (6 ECTS) also submit a written paper (in addition to giving an oral presentation and preparing a handout). Your papers should average 12–15 pages of text plus outline and bibliography, and should be written in English. The papers must be submitted, at the latest, on March 15, 2022. For the form of your paper, please check “A Guide to Writing Term Papers” on our new home page (Studiensprachen/Englisch/Ressourcen/Amerikanistik) and, for reasons of simplicity, the 7th (2009), not the 8th (2016) or 9th (2021), edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (see Lehrbuchsammlung). Your handout (1–2 pages) is supposed to summarize the most important points of your oral report. Your oral report should average 20 minutes.
Inhalt:
Netflix’s most successful miniseries of all times, The Queen’s Gambit (created by Scott Frank and Allan Scott, 2020) has not only triggered a worldwide boom in chess but also led to the rediscovery of Walter Tevis's eponymous novel (1983) and the commissioning of a German translation (Das Damengambit, translated by Gerhard Meier, 2021). In this seminar, we will employ the interdisciplinary potential of adaptation studies to look at the above-mentioned versions from multiple angles. After familiarizing ourselves with the historical, political, and cultural background (the 1950s and 60s, the Cold War, rebellion against social conformity, etc.), the world of competitive chess and its representation in fiction, movies, and documentaries, as well as The Queen’s Gambit’s literary and (auto)biographical contexts (including the importance of initiation and addiction stories in American letters, the author’s life and oeuvre, and the protagonist’s real-life models and counterparts), we will read, watch, and analyze Tevis’s original novel, Frank and Scott’s critically acclaimed miniseries, and Meier’s recently completed translation. Special emphasis will be placed on the interplay between coming-of-age narrative, orphan and substance abuse drama, wunderkind story, and professional chess as a microcosmic stage for criticizing contemporary gender politics. Depending on the number of participants, we might also have the chance to examine other remarkable uses of the chess motif in international literature, film, and diverse fields of knowledge. Since the phenomenon we study is both new and pop cultural, much of what we will be doing is pioneering work.
Empfohlene Literatur:
Compulsory Reading:
– Walter Tevis, The Queen’s Gambit (1983).
Please buy a paperback edition of Tevis’s novel. If you order online, the average cost is 10 euros (see, e.g., amazon.de). Do not purchase a “Kindle” edition (because you will need page numbers for parenthetical documentation). The German translation, Das Damengambit (2021, Diogenes), is only available as a hardcover (list price: 24 euros).
The Queen’s Gambit should be read before the first day of class.
Indispensable secondary sources will be made accessible in the ILIAS seminar folder once the semester starts.
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