The class will only start in the second week of the semester - on Wednesday, 27th Oktober 2021
What do we do, when we read literary texts? As readers and as literary critics, i.e. as professional readers of 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 (by for example Billy Collins, Henry James, Alan Bennett) – 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 authorship (e.g. Barthes’ “Death of the Author”; Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy”) and readership (e.g. Wolfgang Iser, Zadie Smith). Thus we will reflect on and clarify our own assumptions about what we think we do when we write, read, critically work with, and by no means least – when we teach literary texts.
Please get your own copy of Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader (first published in 2007). Your local bookstore can order it for you. Furthermore, Cornelsen and Reclam have come up with student editions, too (and teaching material...). It is regarded as appropriate for pupils from grade 10 onwards.
Further literary and theoretical texts will be provided in the course of the seminar. |
