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Seminar: Herman Melville and the Sea - Aufbaumodul Amerikanistik Literatur I - Details
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Veranstaltungsname Seminar: Herman Melville and the Sea - Aufbaumodul Amerikanistik Literatur I
Veranstaltungsnummer siehe "sonstiges"!
Semester WS 2019/20
Aktuelle Anzahl der Teilnehmenden 14
Heimat-Einrichtung Amerikanistik / Literaturwissenschaft
Veranstaltungstyp Seminar in der Kategorie Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
Erster Termin Mittwoch, 16.10.2019 18:00 - 20:00, Ort: Seminarraum 3 [AKStr.35] (Angl.)
Studiengänge (für) LAG, LAS
BA Anglistik und Amerikanistik 60/90 LP
SWS 2
Sonstiges ANG.03202.02 [Aufbaumodul] Amerikanische Literatur LA Gym, LA Sek
ANG.05280.03 Aufbaumodul: Amerikanische Literatur LA Gym, LA Sek ab WS 2012/13
ANG.04628.03 Aufbaumodul Amerikanistik Literatur I BA Anglistik und Amerikanistik 60/90 LP
ANG.06158.01 Aufbaumodul: Amerikanistik Literatur I BA Anglistik und Amerikanistik 60/90 LP
(ab WS 2015/16)
ECTS-Punkte 5

Modulzuordnungen

Kommentar/Beschreibung

In chapter XXIV of his best-known work Moby-Dick, Melville has its first-person narrator Ishmael vehemently defend the pursuit of whaling, concluding with the words “if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” Literary creativity and imagination are here explicitly interrelated with whaling, and, even more so, evaluated as superior to the best formal education. Being exposed to the forces of nature, earning a living but at the same time seeking adventure motivated Melville to go to the sea himself. Far from being mere tales of adventure on the sea, these texts also avail themselves to a multiplicity of questions: genre-related, cultural-ecological, epistemological, and intercultural questions – to name just a few. On the occasion of Melville’s bicentennial, in this course we will discuss a variety of Melville’s prose texts and poems set on the sea in relation to the socio-political environment in which they were created. This course enables students to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of these texts, recurring themes and motifs, their narrative structure, and their symbolic composition.

Primary Texts:
- Typee (1846)
- Moby-Dick (1851) (Norton Critical Edition)
- Billy Budd (1924)

A list of shorter texts from The Piazza Tales, John Marr and Other Sailors, with Some Sea-Pieces, and Timoleon and Other Ventures in Minor Verse will be available at the beginning of the semester.