|
Instructors: Dr. Nele Sawallisch
Event type:
Proseminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.866.122
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 45
Registration group: AS 122
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
- Introduction to American Studies/Literary Studies (115)
- Culture Studies I (optional)
- Willingness to perform a lot of reading and willingness to participate actively in class
Contents:
This class will introduce students to major genres of colonial American literature in English from the arrival of Columbus to Independence. We will cover such diverse bodies of texts as early travel reports about the New World, first accounts of the initial British settlement efforts, personal narratives and diaries, religious and political writings, early American poetry, captivity narratives, and more. We will be concerned with the formal and aesthetic features of these genres as much as we will ask how they respond to the larger historical conditions in which they emerged and how they laid the foundations of key notions in American cultural history.
Course Objectives:
Study Skills
- perform critical thinking and literary analysis
- know how to differentiate between an argumentative thesis and a descriptive statement
- know how to formulate a research thesis for a term paper
- be able to write a proseminar paper
- be able to perform independent research
Content Skills
- be able to identify key genres, representative texts, and authors of colonial America
- contextualize texts in colonial American historical, religious, political events
- identify, compare, critically reflect on ideological agendas
Recommended reading list:
Students must have access to: Baym, Nina, gen.ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 7th or 8th ed. Vol. A. New York: Norton.
Additional information:
Further readings will be provided on ILIAS.
|
