2007 BM1-C Introduction to Literature, Part 2

• Tu 14:00-16:00
• A10-1-121

This is a sub page of 2007 BM1 Introduction to Literature, Part 2

Session 1: A Poem (April 17, 2007)

Please join Course B in Hörsaal G (A07 0-030) offered by Anton Kirchhofer

Session 2: Poetry and Poetics (April 24, 2007)

Work to be done for this session - read:

• Sir Philip Sidney, "Not at first sight" from Astrophil and Stella
• William Percy, "Sonnet II" from Sonnets to the Fairest Coelia
• Christina Rossetti, "I wish I could remember" from A Pageant and Other Poems

Please read these texts in the text base Anton Kirchhofer provided - the copies offer the better editions.

Session 3: Poetry and Poetics: Speaking about Beautiful/Artful Language (May 8, 2007)

Group Reading: Hamlet (May 12, 2007)

Group reading of William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1603). Download the original text (or read the Arden edition). If you join us you can facilitate our planning by registering unter Current events#May 12, 2007: Hamlet.

Session 4: Hamlet Outline (May 15, 2007)

• Folio/ Quarto/ Octavon and Doudecimo Formats.
• The cultural status of Hamlet: What we knew before we read the play.
• How did our view change?
• Who is Who in Hamlet - on the blackboard: how people are related to each other.
• Story and Plot: One can summarize the events in a

• story (containing both: what happens on stage and what happened elsewhere - in the past or on occasions we do not move to)
• plot outline: Act by act, scene by scene

• Def. act and scene (empty stage between two scenes)
• We stepped into the first act and tried to take a look into the plays exposition.
• Advice: Write an Excerpt.

• start with date (put your excerpts into a file and order them chronologically - recycle them, use texts in different seminars, use excerpts as preparation before examinations)
• summarize the story in three or four sentences
• draw a tableau of the personal: who is related to whom by family ties, friendship, love...
• Go through the text. Give a summary of what happens in each scene. Note topics of interest - things you want to refer to at a later stage (i.e. in a seminar work you want to write or a discussion you might take part in...)
• Leave room for personal experiences: What surprised you? At what stage did you feel that the text was difficult to understand? What did you like, what did you hate? These personal notes are extremely interesting as soon as you work on a subject - you might see your views change, and you will otherwise remain unaware of these changes).

Session 5: Rhethorik (May 22, 2007)

We took a look at different fields of knowledge our modern discourse about literature encorporated - and we took a closer look at moments of speech:

• Poetics - the science of poetry, deals with versified productions. Prose is rather the field of rhetoric. Poetic works (of the classical tradition) can, however, contain sections in prose to create a difference between a low and the high style: prose is low (often the style of comedies or of the lower characters in tragedies), verse is high.
• Rhetoric: the art of preparing and delivering a speech.

• Monologue (if the session fails the teacher proceeds in a monologue instead of a dialogue - the class is still present but does not interact with the speaker).
• Speech: the speaker assumes the role of orator, he delivers the speech he prepared (or invents on the spot), he might be introduced and asked to deliver his speech, he might expect applause for his words. The speech has a design to move and to reach a certain point, it can have narrative sequences, argumentative passages, it is likely to have a conclusion).
• Soliloqui: the speaker is alone or thinks he is alone and speaks for himself.
• Aside: the speaker says in the middle of a dialogue things the others do not seem to hear - he might give insight into his thoughts, in a kind of murmur he feels the others will not hear, he might address the audience to speak about his plans in a direct interaction. Shakespeare works at times with extended asides, some of them have only been marked as asides in the 1950s.

We secondly did a close reading of Amleth's speech in Saxo Grammaticus' history:

• The original story Saxo Grammaticus, Amleth

We finally compared the two Hamlets with each other. Does Shakespeare's Hamlet pretend his madness? Is he actually growing mad? The next session should gather arguments (as provided by the text).

Session 6: Drama: Characters and Genre Aspects (May 29, 2007)

• Q1 and Q2/Folio esp.: The different places of Hamlet's "to be or not to be" monologue.
• Does Shakespeare's Hamlet pretend his madness? Is he actually growing mad? Arguments as given by the text.

Preparation: Note down passages which can support your arguments.

Session: We will take a look at moments of Interaction: Hamlet/Rosencrantz/Guildenstern, Hamlet/Mother

BM1 - Introduction to Literature - Assignment 2: Hamlet given.

Session 8: Fiction 1 (June 12, 2007)

• Nathaniel Hawthorne. "Young Goodman Brown (1835)." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. B. Fifth Edition. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. 2258-2267. (Source not noted on the pdf-scan. Please add source yourselves.)
• Katherine Mansfield. "The Voyage." The Garden Party and Other Stories. London: Constable and Company Ltd, 1922. 168-181.

Session 9: Fiction 2 (June 19, 2007)

The three texts we will discuss:

• Nathaniel Hawthorne. "Young Goodman Brown (1835)." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. B. Fifth Edition. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. 2258-2267. (Source not noted on the pdf-scan. Please add source yourselves.)
• Katherine Mansfield. "The Voyage." The Garden Party and Other Stories. London: Constable and Company Ltd, 1922. 168-181.
• Robert Coover. "Magic Poker." Pricksongs and Descants. Fictions (1969). New York: New American Library, 1970.

Questions will deal with the narrator's/author's position.

We spoke - in greater detail - about Robert Coover's story as it turned out to be the controversial one in the sample. Some of you liked the story for its vagueness most of you did not. Some felt the content was "disturbing", I tried to find out why.

A recapitulation proved difficult