MLU
Seminar: Anglistik Literaturwissenschaft: Literarische Gattungen und Gattungstheorien I und II; Vertiefungsmodul: Amerikanistik Literatur II - Details
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General information

Course name Seminar: Anglistik Literaturwissenschaft: Literarische Gattungen und Gattungstheorien I und II; Vertiefungsmodul: Amerikanistik Literatur II
Subtitle "Make it New!": Modernist Poetry
Course number ANG.03927/8.01,04629.02,03220.02
Semester WS 2016/17
Current number of participants 5
Home institute Amerikanistik / Literaturwissenschaft
Courses type Seminar in category Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
First date Wednesday, 12.10.2016 10:00 - 12:00, Room: (Adam-Kuckhoff-Str. 35, Beratungsraum E.05)
Studiengänge (für) ANG. 03927.01 und ANG.03928.01; MA Angloamerikanische Literatur, Sprache und Kultur 120 LP; MA Englische Sprache und Literatur 45/75 LP;
ANG.03220.02: LAG, LAS, LAF;
ANG.04630.02: LAS, LAG, LAF ab WS 2012/13 und MA ab WS 2015/16
SWS 2
ECTS points 5

Rooms and times

No room preference
Wednesday: 10:00 - 12:00, weekly(14x)
Saturday, 03.12.2016 09:00 - 12:00
(Adam-Kuckhoff-Str. 35, Beratungsraum E.05)
Wednesday: 10:00 - 12:00, weekly (1x)

Module assignments

Comment/Description

In the much-admired study on modern culture, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982), Marshall Berman defines modernity as the experience of incessant metamorphosis: “To be modern,” he states, “is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air” (345). Berman draws a dialectical relationship between the unfolding modernization (“progress”) of a primarily urban environment and the development of modernist art and thought. He claims that the greatest accomplishment of modernist artists was to make the vital interplay between opposing values such as permanence and perpetual change visible in their experimental work.
In this course, we will first familiarize ourselves with the terms “modern,” “modernism,” and “modernity” as well as with Berman’s theoretical model before we explore an astonishing variety of innovative and highly experimental poetry and reflect on the relationship between the modernist era and the form of modernist poetry. Why do modern poems look like they do? What kinds of language experiments did the poets conduct? Our journey into American modernist poetry will cover some of the major authors and movements (e.g., the Imagists – Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and H.D., Gertrude Stein, and African American poets of the Harlem Renaissance), but also poets who have been neglected in recent criticism (e.g., e. e. cummings and Vachel Lindsay).

Required texts:
Course material will be made available on StudIP.