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Originally founded in 1889 by students of Cambridge University and relaunched in 1979, Granta magazine quickly became and continues to be one of Britain’s leading magazines for new (prose) writing in English. More particularly, it concentrates on fictional and non-fictional prose writing in English in the realist vein (including some prose in translation and photography), giving each issue a specific thematic focus. Although it does not belong to a particular school or political side, Granta explicitly postulates a “belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real” (http://www.granta.com/About). Not only has it featured as its contributors the ‘great names’ of British, European, and American prose, among them – to name but a few — Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Gabriel Garcia Marque, Jeanette Winterson, and William Boyd, but Granta has also been highly influential in establishing and promoting authors by publishing each decade its famous Best of Young British Novelists, thereby displaying a remarkable sense of new trends and authors.In this module, we will attempt to analyse and discuss a wide range of Granta’s prose writings, following its thematic headers. We will also investigate how Granta has helped to establish literary trends and to ‘make’ authors by studying its self-proclaimed policy and aesthetic credo, choice of authors, and thematic issues, and by linking it to other institutions regulating the contemporary field of literary production such as the Man Booker Prize.The Lektürekurs will offer additional opportunity for following individual contemporary authors’ careers and writings in the context of Granta. A reader will be available at the beginning of term from the copy shop in the Georgenstr. Note: This seminar is open also to students of the ‘alten Studiengänge’ as a Hauptseminar. |
