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Seminar: Birds in American Literature - Vertiefungsmodul - Details
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Veranstaltungsname Seminar: Birds in American Literature - Vertiefungsmodul
Veranstaltungsnummer ANG.04629.02
Semester WiSe 2023/24
Aktuelle Anzahl der Teilnehmenden 15
erwartete Teilnehmendenanzahl 25
Heimat-Einrichtung Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Veranstaltungstyp Seminar in der Kategorie Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
Erster Termin Dienstag, 17.10.2023 10:15 - 11:45, Ort: Seminarraum 3 [AKStr.35] (Angl.)
Studiengänge (für) ANG.04629.02 für LA Gym, Sek Englisch (2012+2015)/ LA Förder (Sekundar) Englisch (2012+2015) / MA Engl. Spr. u Lit 45/75 LP (2015) / MA Angloam. Lit., Spr u Kult. 120 LP (2015)
SWS 2

Modulzuordnungen

Kommentar/Beschreibung

Birds and their ‘songs’ play an instrumental role in the American imagination. Unlike any other animal sounds, bird calls and bird ‘melodies’ have inspired American writers and thinkers to correlate birds and “bird sonics” with the human voice, human experiences, and (poetic) creativity. Perhaps the most prominent example in American literature is Walt Whitman’s poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” in which the first-person speaker responds to the act of listening to a mockingbird’s song by “translating” it (“Listen’d to keep, to sing, now translating the notes,” 390) into a verbal “aria” (391) that creates a call-and-response duet of sorrow sung by “the he-bird” (388) and the reminiscing, aged romantic hero, culminating in the birth of the poet (“My own songs awaked from that hour,” 393).

Our course will explore bird writings from the early colonial period to the present. The starting point of our journey across the vast literary territory will be the anthology American Birds: A Literary Companion (2020), which is a collection of prose and poetry ranging from Native American songs, early American travel writings, and essays to poetry and excerpts from novels. We will encounter the writings by a diverse group of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore and Rachel Carson, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Linda Hogan and Louise Erdrich, Cornelius Eady, and Jonathan Franzen. Our course will also include forays (workshops) into research areas that are not covered by the book and contemporary criticism (e.g., 19th century magazine culture, 20th century advertisements, and graphic novels/cartoons).

I encourage you to read the 2010 novel Freedom by Franzen since we will only have time to read one or two chapters from the critically acclaimed book toward the end of our course – I have added the novel to the list of required texts but it is not an ‘absolute’ requirement.

Required texts:

Franzen, Jonathan. Freedom. Fourth Estate, 2022.
Rubenfeld, Andrew, and Terry Tempest Williams, editors. American Birds: A Literary Companion. The Library of America, 2020.

Additional course material will be made available on the ILIAS platform.