This seminar will give you an opportunity to get acquainted with a remarkable author and his remarkable works. John Donne (1572-1631) grew up as a Catholic, became a law student, abandoned Catholicism, did an internship as a pirate, became a nobleman’s secretary, lost his job because of a secret marriage, spent some time in prison, tried to become an ambassador and eventually became, as dean of St. Paul’s cathedral, a high-ranking clergyman. He was also a poet. However his poems are not exactly what you would perhaps expect from a seventeenth-century clergyman. Donne wrote in a way that was both experimental and daring. In particular, he liked to combine erotic and religious ideas and imagery. In his poems, we shall come across dreams and ecstasies, air and angels, apparitions and alchemy, broken hearts, an erotically active flea, several cases of witchcraft and, obviously, a falling star.
Please
buy the following edition: John Donne (Ed.: A. J. Smith), The Complete English Poems (Penguin Classics), ISBN: 9780140422092. Additional material will be made available online. Due to the Corona situation, the entire seminar will be conducted online.
Requirements: Thorough preparation for each session, active participation plus anything that might be required according to your Modulhandbuch/Studienordnung. As always: read, think, enjoy (!!), annotate (!) and look things up if necessary. The first texts to be discussed will be “The Flea”, “Twicknam Garden” and “The Funeral”.
- Lehrende(r): Christoph Heyl