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Instructors: Dr. Wolfgang Funk
Event type:
online: Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.874.313
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
8,0
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: ELC 313
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
This course will deal with the, presumably, most English of all poetic form, the sonnet, and arguably the most English of all writers, William Shakespeare. We will first investigate the sonnet’s origins (Petrarch will play an important part here) and trace its introduction into English literature and culture in the early 16th century by courtly poets like Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. After acquainting ourselves with the formal specificities, thematic codes and contextual situations that characterise the sonnet, we will then turn to Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence and discover how ‘the Bard’ exploits the sonnet’s productive tension between formal restraint and poetic creativity to explore topics such as, unsurprisingly, love, but also immortality, human sexuality, faith, nature or the role of art.
As preparation for this course, students are invited to read as many sonnets as possible (by Shakespeare or otherwise); possible starting points for this are:
http://sonnets.org/
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/
Required Purchase:
Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The Arden Shakespeare. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Methuen Drama: 2010.
Highly Recommended Background Reading:
Boland, Eavan, and Edward Hirsch, eds. The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology. New York: Norton, 2010.
Other Recommended Background Reading:
Cousins, Anthony D., ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet. Cambridge: CUP, 2011.
Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London: Routledge, 2005.
Spiller, Michael. The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1992.
Wolosky, Shira. The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem. Oxford: OUP, 2008.
A preliminary semester plan as well as additional background texts and other helpful material (hopefully including an electronic Semesterapparat) will be made available via LMS either in advance or in the course of the semester. Expect the LMS page for the course to be up and running by early April.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS SEMINAR WILL BE A ‘KOMPAKTKURS’, MEANING THERE WILL BE 6 FRIDAY SESSIONS FROM 14-18.
THE DATES ARE:
Fr, 16 April
Fr, 23 April
Fr, 21 May
Fr, 11 June
Fr, 18 June
Fr, 2 July
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