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Instructors: Dr. Sonja Georgi
Event type:
Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.866.410
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
8,0
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: AS 410
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
When talking about early twentieth century American literature, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway are frequently mentioned as the major writers of this period. Having been most creative between the 20s and 40s, these two are said to have influenced generations of writers since. The literary period of which Hemingway and Faulkner are both “spokesmen” is modernism. However, as we will see when analyzing and interpreting key texts, especially the quite contrary style of the two artists has been influential on postmodernist fiction as well.
As the two writers seem at first glance to have not much more in common than being both white American males and recipients of the Nobel Prize (Faulkner received it in 1950 and Hemingway in 1954), many scholars like to treat Hemingway and Faulkner as writers neatly opposed to each other and they distinguish between Hemingway’s personal realism and Faulkner’s symbolic realism, calling the former a representative of the “Lost Generation” and the latter as a representative of the “Southern Renaissance.”
We will start this seminar with the analysis of selected and well-known short stories of Hemingway and Faulkner and contextualize both within literary modernism. We will then move on to reading longer texts (A Farewell to Arms/The Wild Palms/The Bear) with an eye on postmodern elements and an intertextual dialog between the two.
Participation in this class will include the mandatory cooperation with our writing fellow. The fellow will give each student a written feedback on two written assignments during the semester (structure and outline of the text, argumentation, linguistic and formal criteria, tips for revision) and will offer individual meetings to talk about your writing. In this way, you will be able to reflect on writing strategies and problems to develop strategies to deal with upcoming writing assignments.
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