2007-08 MM Romans à Clef -- Fictions with a Key

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  • Time: Thursdays 10-12 am


Course Description

In this seminar we will deal with texts that display a special variety of the relationship between 'fiction' and 'truth'. Instead of promising a 'higher truth' as a reward for the pains of interpreting stories that are not literally true, these stories promise a literal truth that is too dangerous or too scandalous to be stated directly and which will be disclosed to those who recognise actual people behind the fictional names. Our examples will range across three centuries and will include, in that order: Primary Colors, published anonymously in 1996 and made into a film in 1998 with John Travolta and Emma Thompson as the Stantons (i.e. Clintons); Delarivier Manley’s Secret Memoirs now knows as The New Atalantis (1709), a satirical collection of scandalous stories mainly about Whig politicians and aristocrats (as well as other people Manley did not like); and finally Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair (1870), written between the author’s two terms as prime minister, and ‘exposing’ the plots and stratagems of Roman Catholics in English high society.
We will use these texts in order to establish the main features of the ‘genre’ and of its historical development, we will get to know the historical backgrounds and cultural contexts for such fictions with a key, and we will also keep in contrastive focus the relationship of such texts to the public interest in fictions of a more conventional type.

  • Requirements for credits as a Master Module “English Literatures”:
  1. Regular attendance and active participation (you may miss up to two meetings, whatever the reasons).
  2. An oral contribution in the form of an ‘invitation to discussion’ that will help you decide on a topic for your subsequent term paper (you formulate research questions or propositions concerning a particular text and topic, and invite the seminar to discuss them).
  3. A term paper (generally dealing with one or several of the issues raised in your oral contribution; length ca. 20 pages; deadline March 1, 2008).
  • Requirements for candidates for the Staatsexamenklausur:
Write a short summary of one of the seminar meetings.
  • Texts:
Copies of Primary Colors have been ordered and are now available at the university bookshop. The New Atalantis is not in print. A master copy of the two volumes of the original 1709 edition has been placed in a folder at Wersig. Copies of Lothair are on order, too. If these prove difficult to procure, a mastercopy of the Oxford Clarendon Press edition (1975) will be made available at Wersig. More info in the second half of September.


25.10.2007

Introduction. Technicalities.

01.11.2007

John Travolta and Emma Thompson as Bill and Hilary Clinton? Primary Colors: The Movie

08.11.2007

1991. The Candidacy: The Clintons first primary election campaign in history, in fiction, in film

15.11.2007

Narration and judgment: the Stantons and their campaign staff. (Characters, Narrative techniques)

22.11.2007

[postponed.]

29.11.2007

1996, 1998. Scandals: Public debates and scandals about Bill Clinton, debates and scandals about the publication and the authorship of Primary Colors.

06.12.2007

The Scandals of the Mighty: English and European Politics in the New Atalantis, and the Scandals around its publication.

13.12.2007

Sorting out the key: Public and private scandals, gossip, and Manleys’s own story

20.12.2007

Narrative techniques: The frame narrative, its tradition and its relation to the individual stories.

10.01.2008

Lothair Sorting out the key. Political and religious constellations in Britain and Europe around 1870. Satirical portraits of contemporaries.

17.01.2008

Political situations, and religious and romantic complications in Lothair.

24.01.2008

The Ideology of Lothair. Ideas of Englishness and Narrative Peculiarities.

31.01.2008

Course Evaluation. – Final Discussion. Comparative perspectives from the early eighteenth to the late twentieth century

07.02.2008

Feedback on Course Evaluation. – Discussion of Term Paper Projects.

Topics

Texts

Reading Materials