Seminar in der Kategorie Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
Erster Termin
Dienstag, 03.04.2018 18:15 - 19:45, Ort: (Adam-Kuckhoff-Str. 35, SR 3)
Voraussetzungen
Students who have successfully passed their "Introduction to Literary Studies" (Basismodul Einführung in die englische und amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft) are welcome to this course that focuses on Germany and the Germans as portrayed in short fiction and travel writing by American authors in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Lernorganisation
All students taking this class must have a copy of each piece we are reading (check StudIP). Not having the relevant material with you is unacceptable. In order for students to pick up skills necessary in academia, we will spend some time on how to do research and presentations as well as on how to write papers. The university library (OPAC, MLA-IB and other databases) will be a topic as will be the Internet as a research tool (JStor, Google Scholar etc.). In addition, there will be an introduction to CITAVI and how to use that bibliographical tool. The MLA style sheet (7th ed., 2009) is our model for all written work. (Please, do NOT use MLA 8th ed., 2016.) How to write essays the way American colleges expect them to be written will also be discussed.
Leistungsnachweis
Requirements
Students will need to pass quizzes on selected readings if they want credit for this seminar. Quizzes are tests checking on whether students have read the short fiction and require no background reading. Students are expected not to miss more than three sessions and participate actively in discussions. Also, students must present in class as part of a group on the travel writings and on a short story they may choose. The reports should be no longer than 5 mins., the presentations should be limited to 15-20 mins. (plus 5-10 mins. discussion) on a topic to be arranged with the lecturer. Each student must present a handout (Thesenpapier) that is sent to the lecturer a week before the presentation is due. A copy of the reviewed handout must be available to all students on the day of presentation. Reading assignments (secondary literature) will be given on a weekly basis. Studying in groups is encouraged.
At the end of the semester BA students will have to write an essay/Hausarbeit (ca. 12-14 pages) whereas students planning to be teachers will have to take an oral exam of 30 mins. (probably in July). The BA essays are due at the end of September.
In the first weeks of our seminar we will explore a collection of travel writings that focuses on depicting the Rhine as a favorite destination of Americans in the 19th century. Thomas Jefferson, Washington Irving, James F. Cooper, Catharina M. Sedgwick, Bayard Taylor, Herman Melville, Harrier Beecher Stowe, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Louisa May Alcott, Helen Hunt Jackson, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, W. E. B. DuBois, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe are among the authors whose travel notes and reflections we will study. Many of these are rather short and can be explored in study groups with brief reports on this type of tourist writing. Mark Twain's essay "The Awful German Language" will conclude the first part of the seminar.
In May we will start reading short fiction of the 19th and 20th centuries. Among the stories we will be studying are Washington Irving, "The Adventures of the German Student" (1824), Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" (1837), Henry James's "Pandora" (1884), Robert McAlmon, "The Lodging House" (1925), William Carlos Williams's "The Venus" (1935), Thomas Wolfe's "Dark in the Forest, Strange as Time" (1934) and "One Big Fool" (1936), Kay Boyle's "Frankfurt in Our Blood" (1949), Jean Stafford's "The Echo and the Nemesis" (1950), Kurt Vonnegut's "D.P." (1953) and "Der Arme Dolmetscher" (1955), Bernard Malamud's "The German Refugee" (1963), Walter Abish's "The English Garden" (1975), Joyce Carol Oates, "Ich Bin Ein Berliner" (1982) and her "Our Wall" (1982). Two critics and their glimpses of Germany will be read at the end of the seminar, Alfred Kazin's "Gastprofessor für Amerikanistik" (1952) and Stanley Kauffmann's "Germany: Remembrance of Things Past" (1990).
Those stories published before the 1920s can probably be found on the Internet if students google them adding "full text" to their search. I am planning to make all stories available on StudIP by the beginning of the semester. As the material is quite heterogeneous students will have to do a lot of research themselves. A convenient study that may be helpful is by Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, and it is available in German (1998) and in English (2007).
LITERATURE
Did you know that as a student at MLU you are entitled to a free version of Citavi or EndNote? Citavi and EndNote manage your sources and, among many other things, produce bibliographies in MLA style with a click of your mouse. Check details at <bibliothek.uni-halle.de/benutz/litverwalt/>.
I. Primary Works
TRAVEL WRITING
Ortseifen Karl, Winfried Herget, and Holger Lamm, eds. "Picturesque in the Highest Degree . . . " – Americans on the Rhine: A Selection of Travel Accounts. 2nd ed. Tübingen : Narr Francke Attempto, 2015. [1st ed. Tübingen: Narr, 1993.] Print.
SHORT FICTION
A list of all the stories to be discussed this semester and their sources will be presented at the beginning of the semester.
II. Secondary Works on the Image of Germany in American Literature (and Beyond)
Barclay, David E., and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt, eds. Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America since 1776. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print. Publications of the German Historical Institute.
Boyer, James D. "Conversion in Germany: The Redirection of Thomas Wolfe's Late Fiction." Lives Out of Letters: Essays on American Literary Biography and Documentation in honor of Robert N. Hudspeth. Ed. Robert D. Habich. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh. Dickinson UP, 2004. 189-201. Print.
Diller, Hans-Jürgen et al. Anglistik & Englischunterricht 29-30 (1986) [Special Issue: "Images of Germany."] Print.
Dougherty, Stephen. "'A Decaying City Near the Rhine': Nation, Race, and Horror in 'Ligeia'. Sycamore: A Journal of American Culture 1.1 (Spring 1997): ??.
Fischer, Heinz-Dietrich. Germany through American Eyes: Pulitzer Prize Winning Reports. Berlin: LIT, 2010. Print. Pulitzer Prize panorama 1.
Freese, Peter, ed. Germany and German Thought in American Literature and Cultural Criticism: Proceedings of the German-American conference in Paderborn, May 16 - 19, 1990. Essen: Verl. Die Blaue Eule, 1990. Print. Arbeiten zur Amerikanistik 6.
Kimball, Marie G. "Thomas Jefferson's Rhine Journey." American-German Review 13 (October 1946): 4-7.
Lubrich, Oliver. Reisen ins Reich: Ausländische Autoren berichten aus Deutschland. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2004. Print.
Meyer, Martin. Nachkriegsdeutschland im Spiegel amerikanischer Romane der Besatzungszeit: (1945 - 1955). Tübingen: Narr, 1994. Print. Buchreihe zu den Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 9.
Ortseifen, Karl. "From the Hudson to the Rhine: American Views of the Rhine in the Nineteenth Century." Images of Central Europe in Travelogues and Fiction by North American Writers. Ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1995. 68-76.
Parker, Joshua. Tales of Berlin in American Literature Up to the 21st Century. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Print.
Reuther, Thomas. Die ambivalente Normalisierung: Deutschlanddiskurs und Deutschlandbilder in den USA, 1941-1955. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2000. Print. Transatlantische historische Studien 11.
Stapf, Kurt H., Wolfgang Stroebe, and Klaus Jonas. Amerikaner über Deutschland und die Deutschen: Urteile und Vorurteile. Opladen: Westdt. Verl., 1986. Print.
Trommler, Frank, ed. Amerika und die Deutschen: Bestandsaufnahme einer 300jährigen Geschichte. Opladen: Westdt. Verl., 1986. Print.
Trommler, Frank, et al. The Many Faces of Germany: Transformations in the Study of German Culture and History : Festschrift for Frank Trommler. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004. Print.
Van Schaack, Eric. "The Coming of the Hun! American Fears of a German Invasion, 1918." Journal of American Culture 28.3 (2005): 284-292.
Voss, Dirk Karl. "National Stereotypes about Germans in American Travel Writings, 1815-1914." Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 61, no. 9 (March 2001): 3740.
Weigelt, Klaus, and Willi P. Adams, eds. Das Deutschland- und Amerikabild : Beiträge zum gegenseitigen Verständnis beider Völker. Forschungsbericht. Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, 50. Melle: Knoth, 1986. Print.
Withey, Lynne. Grand Tours and Cooks’ Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750-1915. New York: W. Morrow, 1997. Print.
Zacharasiewicz, Waldemar. Das Deutschlandbild in der amerikanischen Literatur. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998. Print.
Zacharasiewicz, Waldemar. Images of Germany in American literature. Iowa City, Iowa: Univ. of Iowa Press, 2007. Print
Zacharasiewicz, Waldemar, ed. Images of Central Europe in Travelogues and Fiction by North American Writers. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1995. Print.
Zacharasiewicz, Waldemar. "Waltzing in the German Paris: American Encounters with Musical Vienna." Transatlantic Encounters: Studies in European-American Relations. Hg. Udo J. Hebel and Karl Ortseifen. Trier: WVT, 1995. 176-192. Print.
III. Secondary Works on the American Short Story
Ahrends, Günter. Die amerikanische Kurzgeschichte. 5. Aufl. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008. Print. [11980]
Basseler, Michael, and Ansgar Nünning, eds. A History of the American Short Story: Genres – Developments – Model Interpretations. Trier: WVT, 2011. Print. WVT-Handbücher zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Studium, 14.
Bendixen, Alfred, and James Nagel, eds. A Companion to the American Short Story. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Print. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture.
Bungert, Hans, Hg. Die amerikanische Short Story: Theorie und Entwicklung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972. Print. Wege der Forschung, 256.
Elliot, Emory, gen. ed. Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. Print.
Engler, Bernd, und Kurt Müller, Hg. Metzler Lexikon Amerikanischer Autoren. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000. Print.
Gelfant, Blanche H., ed. The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. Print.
Hanke, Michael, Hg. Interpretationen: Amerikanische Short Stories des 20. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998. Print. Universal-Bibliothek 17506.
Kimbel, Bobby Ellen, and William E. Grant, eds. American Short-Story Writers Before 1880. Detroit, MI: Gale, 1988. Print.
Kimbel, Bobby Ellen, and William E. Grant, eds. American Short-Story Writers, 1880-1910. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1989. Print.
Klaus Lubbers, Hg. Die Englische und amerikanische Kurzgeschichte. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990. Print.
Luscher, Robert M. "The American Short-Story Cycle: Out from the Novel's Shadow." A Companion to the American Novel. Ed. Alfred Bendixen. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2015. 357-372. Print.
Marcus, Greil, and Werner Sollors, eds. A New Literary History of America. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2009. Print.
Murbe, Hans Joachim. "The American Image of Germany Set Forth in Nineteenth-Century Travel Books." Dissertation Abstracts 25 (1964): 1197-1198.
Nagel, James. The American Short Story Handbook. New York: Wiley & Sons, 2015. Print. Blackwell Literature Handbooks.
Peter Freese, Horst Groene, und Liesel Hermes, Hg. Die Short Story im Englischunterricht der Sekundarstufe II: Theorie und Praxis. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1979. Print. Informationen zur Sprach und Literaturdidaktik. 23.
Scofield, Martin. The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.
Tallack, Douglas. The Nineteenth-Century American Short Story: Language, Form, and Ideology. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Werlock, Abby H. P., and James P. Werlock, eds. The Facts on File Companion to the American Short Story. 2nd ed. New York NY: Facts On File, 2010. Print.
Zapf, Hubert, Hg. Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte. 3. Aufl. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010. Print.
