Seminar: AM Englische Literatur: Ghosts - Details

Seminar: AM Englische Literatur: Ghosts - Details

Close message box
You are not logged into Stud.IP.

General information

Course name Seminar: AM Englische Literatur: Ghosts
Semester WiSe 2025/26
Current number of participants 32
Home institute Englische Literatur und Kultur
Courses type Seminar in category Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
Next date Monday, 19.01.2026 10:15 - 11:45, Room: Seminarraum 2 [AKStr.35] (Angl.)
Participants LAS, LAG, LA Fö
Pre-requisites erfolgreich abgeschlossenes Basismodul Literaturwissenschaft
Learning organisation Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Ancient Mariner”, ed. J.C.C. Mays. in Nineteenth Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 186 ff. (please download from our university library website)
Dickens, Charles. “A Christmas Carol: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas” Cambridge University Press. (please download from our university library website)
Wilde, Oscar. The Canterville Ghost, The Happy Prince, and Other Stories. Penguin Classics. 2010.
Garner, Alan. Treacle Walker. Fourth Estate. 2022.
Performance record Referat, mündliche Prüfung
Lehrsprache(n) Deutsch; Englisch
Studiengänge (für) Lehramt
SWS 2
ECTS points 5

Module assignments

Comment/Description

Ghost stories have been firmly embedded in English literature for centuries. In our seminar we will discuss the representation of the supernatural, haunting (in all its historical diversity) various genres and literary periods of English literature. We will begin with Banquo's ghost in Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606?) and consider the potential of a dramatic representation of the immaterial on an Elizabethan stage. Coleridge's long narrative poem "The Ancient Mariner" (1797-98) will next give us the opportunity to see Romanticism complicate the narrator of ghostly tales as well as represent the ultimate refusal of the supernatural to be comprehended. The interlacing of natural and supernatural, the combination of terror and fascination, and the rejection of closure evident in this text are all features of the ghostly tale which have shaped further writings of the supernatural to this day. We will next (hopefully just in time for Christmas) meet with the most famous English ghost story ever: Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol".
While using a quintessentially Victorian text in its moral focus on social reform, industrial-era poverty, and the redemptive power of individual conscience, Dickens reconfigures the supernatural from gothic terror into a vehicle for ethical introspection and social critique, embodying the period's interest in both spiritualism and reform. Globally, the story has become a cultural success story, widely adapted and translated, embedding Victorian moral values into international conceptions of Christmas. A very different ghost will be encountered in Oscar Wilde's novella "The Canterville Ghost" (1887). Culture clashes, tradition vs. modernity, saccharine Victorian moralism and scathing satire combine in a unique text which made the supernatural humane as well as ridiculous, and went on to a global cultural success quite comparable to that of Dickens.
Alan Garner’s short but very complex novel Treacle Walker (2021), our final text, engages the supernatural as a liminal presence that disturbs linear time and identity, aligning closely with Derrida's hauntological aesthetics. The novel's blending of dream, myth, and waking death/life evoke a past that persistently intrudes upon the present. Meaning in this novel emerges through uncanny resonances rather than by textual coherence.