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Instructors: Dr. Jochen Ecke
Event type:
online: Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.874.522
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: ELC 522
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
This class will be taught asynchronously.
Contents:
Narrative fiction offers us the opportunity to experience (or at least come close to experiencing) what in real life we never could or would. In a very real sense, fiction may therefore function as bodily, emotional, and intellectual simulation, testing out moral and societal boundaries, exploding them or subverting them. Small wonder, then, that British fiction has a long history of transgression and scandal. In this course, we will how different writers from different centuries and writing in different literary genres strained against and made use of societal boundaries and taboos. Our first text will be William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (1790-93), a so-called "illuminated" (=illustrated) text that scandalously inverts orthodox Christian lore and morality. Afterwards, we will look at early 19th century attitudes towards science, mortality and materialism in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), followed by a detour into late 19th-century aestheticism with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The second half of the 20th century - a period where transgressive fiction as a proper movement in literature begins - will be covered by JG Ballard's notorious novel Crash (1973) and Sarah Kane's play Blasted (1995).
Recommended reading list:
Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" will be made available in Moodle. Please buy the Norton edition of Frankenstein and the Fourth Estate edition of Ballard's Crash. Stay tuned for an announcement in Moodle as to how you can read Kane’s Blasted.
Digital teaching:
Our online platform will be Moodle/LMS (lms.uni-mainz.de). For writing feedback, we are going to use the free online feedback tool KAIZENA.
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