Teaching

Popular trans- and posthumanist fictions do not just inquire into the politics of what it means to be ‘human’, they also use sentimental tropes and scripts in the process. Our focus will be on contemporary TV (HBO’s Westworld [2016–20] and Channel 4’s Humans [2015–18]) and late 19th-century fiction, specifically H.G. Wells’ 1896 work of science fiction, The Island of Dr. Moreau. In addition, a conference-like section will look at scientific romances and gothic novels that were all published in 1897:  H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man; two vampire novels, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire, and Richard Marsh’s horror novel The Beetle: A Mystery. Students will focus on one of these textes respectively. In a final section, they will also have the opportunity to bring their own trans-/posthumanst fiction to class.

“Tears, idle, tears, I know not what they mean, / Tears from the depth of some divine despair / Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes”, Tennyson wrote in his pseudo-mediaeval long poem The Princess in 1847. Sentimentality, Carolyn Burdett has argued, defines Victorian culture and tone as much as the mills of the industrial north, the poverty of city slums, or the extension of the franchise. This seminar looks at representations of sadness and suffering, loss and nostalgia in British literature and culture of the 19th century, and the cultural and ideological work that they do. In addition to poetry such as Tennyson’s, we will look at Victorian melodrama, genre paintings, and social problem novels of the 1830s and ’40s – specifically those of Charles Dickens (famously celebrated – or denigrated – by Trollope as “Mr Popular Sentiment” in 1855).

Examensseminar Shakespeare (Summer 2022)

Wir werden in diesem Seminar ausgewählte Szenen aus Shakespeares Historien, Komödien, Tragödien und Romanzen analysieren. Außerdem werden wir uns mit Dichtungs- und Dramentraditionen sowie mit theater- und ideengeschichtlichen Kontexten beschäftigen. Die Veranstaltung richtet sich primär an diejenigen, die das Seminar als Teil des Hauptmoduls L-GYM Literature (mit 3 ECTS) absolvieren. Studierende, die das Thema für eine entsprechende Klausur im Staatsexamen (‘Körbchenthema’) vorbereiten wollen, werden nur dann aufgenommen, wenn genügend Kapazitäten vorhanden sind. Von allen Teilnehmenden wird eine mündliche Präsentation mit Thesenpapier erwartet. Eine Übersicht über den Verlauf des Seminars, eine Bibliographie mit Hilfsmitteln zum Selbststudium sowie weiteres Material werden rechtzeitig auf StudOn zugänglich gemacht.

Vorlesung “British Literature and Culture in the 19th Century” (Winter 2021-22)

The lecture course “British Literature and Culture in the 19th Century” is a wide-ranging exploration of 19th-century British literature and culture. We will revisit many of the canonical texts, genres and authors of the century and discuss their historical and cultural contexts, chart key academic debates in Victorian Studies and explore interdisciplinary links between cultural and literary theory. In each case, however, the perspective will be one of British Cultural Studies. We will consider how texts (and their authors) are embedded in larger social and political contexts and the cultural and ideological work that they do. Above all, we will look at cultural practices, not just texts. Rather than study play-texts in isolation, for example, the first lecture will consider what it meant to go to the theatre in the early 19th century, and how audiences engaged actively with plays. The other 12 lectures deal with popular exhibitions, including those of paintings; the production and consumption of Romantic poetry; the social politics of Romantic and Victorian novels and novelists (including Austen, Dickens, and Gaskell); different concepts of history and their ideological use (e.g. in Burke and Carlyle); a history of Victorian poetry focusing on gender; urbanization and representations of the City and the Victorian crowd; the politics of realism in detective fiction; Imperial Romances and fictions of domestic anarchy; and Britain’s Fin de Siècle. Two lectures will deal more specifically with cultural icons (Queen Victoria) and cultural myths (vampires).

Master Seminar “Victorian Culture” (Winter 2021-22)

The Master Seminar “Victorian Culture” focuses on theoretical debates, concepts, and terms, and it tutors students in the independent application on a core topics of modern Cultural Studies: Victorian Culture. The Victorian period is marked by enormous economic, political, social, technological, scientific, artistic and literary innovation and change. This makes it a rich period for research. We will explore the diverse facets of nineteenth-century British culture with a view to developing a historical framework and research methodology for advanced cultural studies. Accordingly, this seminar will explore the theoretical debates, concepts, and terms that pervade culturally informed readings of Victorian texts and allow us to understand central aspects of Victorian Culture and society. In this course, students are also required to give an oral presentation.

Master English Studies: Intensive Seminar (Winter 2021-22)

B.A. English and American Studies: Thematisches Kombimodul Textuality (with M. Klotz) (Winter 2021-22)

‘Text’ and ‘textuality’ are central concepts in both Linguistics and Cultural Studies. The analysis of ‘texts’ is the objective of both disciplines. But what is a ‘text’? This seminar aims to find out whether Linguistics and Cultural Studies share the same assumptions about what constitutes ‘texts’, and why (not) – and how they attempt to make sense of them (approaches, methods, and terminology). Joint texts used in both parts of this seminar will be William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as well as Ted Lewis’ Get Carter. You should have read these texts before classes begin in mid-October.

• William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
• Ted Lewis, Get Carter. New York: Syndicate Books. 2014.

Melodrama has had many lives. As a theatrical genre in the 19th century, it dominated the popular European stages. In film, it surfaced as historical costume drama in the UK in the 1940s (“Gainsborough melodramas”) and in Douglas Sirk’s domestic Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s, but it also inflected British Social Problem and New-Wave films and hardboiled-detective fictions, and was arguably a defining feature in shaping Nicolas Cage’s career in action films in the 1990s. Melodrama may have owed much of its success to the fact that it continues to question and transcend traditional generic categories. As a modality, it traverses genres and media and works at sensitive cultural and aesthetic boundaries (Gledhill). As a mode of expression, both artistic and political, it is a crucial feature of modernity. This seminar will look at the various incarnations of melodrama in the 19th and 20th century, with a focus on plays and films.

HS Early Modern and Postmodern Affective Cultures: Staging/Filming Shakespeare (Summer 2021)

This seminar will look at the affective and emotional impact of Shakespeare’s plays on early-modern and on contemporary audiences. The plays have affected audiences in a bodily sense (from laughter to tears), evoked feelings and enlisted emotions, and we will consider such affects, feelings and emotions in their respective cultural contexts. Our focus will then be on the political and ideological purposes they may serve. In the process, we will consider both early-modern stagings of plays, including Richard II, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, 1 Henry VI and The Winter’s Tale, and contemporary film adaptations.

 HS Conspiracy Theories (Winter 2020-21)

We will look at various conspiracy theories since the late 18th century – but not in terms of whether they are ‘true’ or ‘false’. Rather, we will enquire into the cultural work that they do (how they affect culture and society?) and approach them with symptomal readings (i.e. consider them as symptoms of more fundamental anxieties, fears or desires). Topics include late 18th-/early 19th-century writings on the French Revolution, Shakespeare conspiracies, Paranoia Movies since the 1970s, British TV (the BBC’s Edge of Darkness, a key television series of the 1980s) plus some contemporary conspiracy theories. This course will be online.

HS Britons: Forging and Sentimentalizing the Nation (Summer 2019)

Taking our cue from Linda Colley’s classic study Britons(1992), we will explore how Wales, Scotland and England joined together and forged a new ‘British’ identity which now coexists uneasily with more localized identities, but specifically with ‘Englishness’. This imagined community of ‘Britons’ involves, in the late 18th century, revised constructions of ‘national identity’ and what is considered the ‚national character‘ of the people. According to Harold Perkin, “[b]etween 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical” (The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880). This shift still informs current stereotypes (such as ‘stiff upper lip’, ‘gentlemanly behavior’, but perhaps also football hooliganism). We will explore representations of such identity positions in texts ranging from Shakespeare’sHenry V to James Bond films. We will also consider perceived challenges to dominant ‘national characteristics’, such as a ‘sentimentalization’ of British public life (e.g. in reaction to Princess Diana’s death and her funeral in September 1997) – but also the sentimental strain that runs through British life. It can be traced in ‚Victorian Sentimentalities‘ (e.g. in Dickens), sentimental representations of Queen Victoria, sentimental men in novels of the late 19th century and the sentimentalism of Bollywood in Britain. It also informs forms of social organization in Britain – including concepts of ‘class’ (we will look at Ealing films of the 1950s and the British New Wave and gritty ‘social realism’ of the 1960s and ’70s) and of ‘family’ (ranging from representations of working-class families to the one that resides in Windsor).

HS It’s the End of the World… Post-Apocalyptic Fictions of the 19th and 20th Century (Winter 2018-19)

This seminar looks at post-apocalyptic fictions of the 19th and 20th century – their formal structure, textual strategies, and the contemporary topics they discuss and the desires and anxieties they address. Novels will include Mary Shelley, The Last Man(1826); Richard Jefferies, After London: Or, Wild England(1885); John Wyndham, The Day of The Triffids (1951); Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954); and, for good measure, Stephen King, The Stand (1978; we will discuss the long version first released in 1990). We will also consider film and TV-adaptations of I Am Legend and The Day of the Triffids.

HS Shakespearean Monarch(ie)s (Summer 2018)

This course looks at representations of monarchs and monarchies in some of Shakespeare’s best-known plays. We will study prominent historical and political readings of the plays, and of Shakespeare’s presumed politics (did the author (have to) serve Tudor interests – or was he perhaps a Republican?) We will also consider Shakespeare’s use of royal spectacles, such as masques or pageantry, in which monarchs are allegorised in ways that imply intellect, control or power (Stephen Orgel) – and those moments in the plays when royal power comes to an end. The plays we will study in detail are Cymbeline, Richard II, King Learand Henry V. Other plays will be discussed in passing.

HS 19th-Century Plays (Winter 2017-18)

This seminar looks at popular Romantic and Victorian plays. We will consider melodramas (including one by George Bernard Shaw) and other popular Victorian theatricals, plays of the sensational 1860s and the fin de siècle. Some of the plays are difficult to obtain and will be provided.

HS Popular Adventures at the Turn of the Century (Summer 2017)

This seminar explores two popular kinds of fiction of the fin de siècle, the (masculinist) colonial adventure romance and New Woman prose fiction. One conventionally pits a culturally dominant male protagonist against the powerful vestiges of an earlier human history, and the other a professional woman against equally powerful, restrictive social conventions and ideological beliefs – often the very same that sustain the cultural dominance of the male hero of adventure romances. Despite such differences, however, both kinds of fiction are intricately connected. As popular ‘sub-genres’, they developed in relation to each other (they revolve around each other as ‘twin stars’ do, according to L. M. Richardson). They also share many common features: New Woman fiction adopts themes, tropes and modes of story telling from colonial adventure romance, and the latter adopts domestic discourses to represent imperial practices. In this seminar, we will study how both, adventure romance and the New Woman fiction, represent and negotiate similar late-Victorian cultural debates about gender, empire, (d)evolution and much more – and how they differ and diverge in their politics.The seminar will be accompanied by an interdisciplinary lecture series on current issues in gender studies (participation is optional) organized by the recently established FAU Center for Studies in Gender, Difference and Diversity.

HS The City in 19th Century Popular Culture (Winter 2016-17)

What hopes, desires, anxieties – and fears? – were produced by living in a Victorian city? We will look at 19th-century representations of urban life in selected plays, short stories, newspaper articles and in a serialized romance. In the process, we will study some of the popular Victorian myths connected with urbanization and new forms of sociability (and, to some extent, 20th-century myths of the Victorian Age). We will also look at 19th-century concepts of realism, discourses of power, gender roles, and the forms and shapes of popular culture in the 19th century (specifically in the context of new media forms such as mass-circulated newspapers, popular magazines, early tabloids).

HS Shakespeare’s Heroes (Summer 2016)

HS Anarchy in the UK (Summer 2015)

HS Shakespearean Theatricals (Winter 2014-15)

HS Shakespeare: History and Politics (Summer 2014)

HS Late Victorian Adventure Fictions (Summer 2013)

HS Shakespeare: The Last Plays (Summer 2012)

HS Revenge Tragedies (Winter 2011-12)

HS Murder and the Victorian City (Summer 2011)

HS Shakespeare and Politics (Winter 2010-11)

HS Shakespeare, The History Plays (Summer 2010)

HS Violent Vision of Britain (Summer 2010)

HS Shakespeare: The Major Plays (Best Bits Only) (Winter 2009-10)

HS The Sonnet, incl. Shakespeare (Summer 2009)

HS Ideology (Winter 2008-09)

HS King Lear(s) (Summer 2008)

HS Shakespeare through the Ages (Winter 2007-08)

HS Melodramatic Tactics: Stage/Screen (Summer 2006)