What do we do, when we read literary texts? What are we looking for when we interpret a poem, a scene from a play, a short story? What do authors – dead or alive – have to do with our reading of their texts? Do literary works take on lives of their own? What does reading literary texts do to us as readers?
We will discuss these questions on the basis of our reading of a variety of texts – literary and theoretical. In this seminar, we will read meta-poetic texts – poems and short fiction – that deal with (fictional) authors and readers, and reflect on their own nature as literary artefacts. We will combine the analysis of these literary texts with the reading of theoretical positions on questions of author- (e.g. Barthes’ “Death of the Author”; Wimsatt and Beardsley on “The Intentional Fallacy”) and readership (e.g. Iser). Thus we will reflect on and clarify our own assumptions about what we think we do when we write, read, and teach literary texts.
Literary and theoretical texts will be provided on moodle at the beginning of the semester. |
