Seminar: Aufbaumodul Englische Literatur: Introducing Australian Literature - Details

Seminar: Aufbaumodul Englische Literatur: Introducing Australian Literature - Details

Allgemeine Informationen

Veranstaltungsname Seminar: Aufbaumodul Englische Literatur: Introducing Australian Literature
Veranstaltungsnummer ANG.03573.05
Semester SoSe 2026
Aktuelle Anzahl der Teilnehmenden 18
maximale Teilnehmendenzahl 35
Heimateinrichtung Englische Literatur und Kultur
Beteiligte Einrichtungen Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Veranstaltungstyp Seminar in der Kategorie Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
Erster Termin Donnerstag, 09.04.26, 08:15 - 09:45 Uhr Seminarraum 2 [AKStr.35] (Angl.)
Teilnehmende LAG, LAS wahlobl.
Voraussetzungen successfully passed Introduction to Literary Studies (English or American Literature)
(exception: Erasmus students)
Lernorganisation Please obtain the following editions for your course reading - in a paper version!
Morgan, Kenneth. A Very Short Introduction to Australia. Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-19-958993-7.
Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang. Faber & Faber, n.d. ISBN 978-0-571-27015-6.
The ballads, Lawson's and Baynton's short stories, indigenous poetry, and the Purcell play that we will be discussing are available for download in the Stud-IP.
Mackellar's poem is available online in an authoritative edition here: https://www.dorotheamackellar.com.au/my-country/
Leistungsnachweis # announced single-choice tests on primary text knowledge (pass: 5/10 P)
# oral presentation with academic handout
# individual oral exam (30 mins) at the end of term
Lehrsprache(n) Englisch
Studiengänge (für) LAG, LAS
SWS 2
Sonstiges Please do not attend this course if you are not prepared to read the course material and participate actively and regularly in discussion!
ECTS-Punkte 5

Modulzuordnungen

Kommentar/Beschreibung

This seminar offers a chronological and thematic introduction to Australian literature in English, from the nation’s colonial past to today. Beginning with the anonymous convict ballad “Moreton Bay” and the bushranger ballad “The Wild Colonial Boy/Bold Jack Donahue”, we will examine how place and identity have been negotiated from the start across radically diverging perspectives. These foundational ballads helped establish the topos of convictism and larrikinism, flying in the face of music hall ballads such as “Botany Bay” (1885). Henry Lawson's short story "The Drover's Wife" (1892) then introduces our seminar to the mythologised figure of the isolated selector woman, a touchstone of Australian realism, before Barbara Baynton's darker, unsettling response in "The Chosen Vessel" (1902) challenges this bush romance, which Dorothy Mackellar’s poem “My Country/Core of my Heart” (1908) yet again twists into an idealisation of adversity. We will contextualise our discussion with a look at Russell Drysdale’s 1945 painting “The Drover’s Wife”. From there, we will encounter Joseph Furphy's novel “Such is Life” (1903) through a representative extract that establishes the topos of lost children in a very distinctly Australian narrative voice. We will also consider shortly a famous (indeed equally iconic) representation of this topos in Peter Weir’s movie “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975). Moving deeper into the twentieth century, Oodgeroo Noonuccal's poem "No More Boomerang" (1964) brings an Indigenous voice and questions the colonial and capitalist legacy of Australia through political verse. We next turn to Peter Carey's postmodern historical novel “True History of the Kelly Gang” (2000), which reworks the bushranger myth through a first-person narrative that testifies to the ongoing cultural fascination with Ned Kelly - which we will contextualise with Kelly’s original Jerildery letter, the Ned Kelly series painted by Sidney Nolan in 1946-47 and in the most recent Ned Kelly movie of 2003. The course concludes with Leah Purcell's contemporary short play “The Drover's Wife” (2016) and the movie “The Drover’s Wife: Legend of Molly Johnson” (2021), both Feminist appropriations of Lawson's story that dramatize questions of race, patriarchal violence, and survival. Taken together, these texts — spanning ballad, epistolary, short story, novel, poetry, and stage drama — demonstrate both the diversity of Australian literary forms and the persistence of still-contested topoi: colonial violence, landscape, gender, lost children, indigenous resistance, and contested identities.

Anmelderegeln

Diese Veranstaltung gehört zum Anmeldeset "Beschränkte Teilnehmendenanzahl: Aufbaumodul Englische Literatur: Introducing Australian Literature".
Folgende Regeln gelten für die Anmeldung:
  • Es wird eine festgelegte Anzahl von Plätzen in den Veranstaltungen verteilt.
    Die Plätze werden in der Reihenfolge der Anmeldung vergeben.
  • Die Anmeldung ist möglich von 23.03.2026, 00:00 bis 26.04.2026, 23:59.