Kursinformation

Mi 14-16

Wit, Elegance and Shit-Diving:

Alexander Pope

If you wanted to be a successful English poet in the eighteenth century, your best bet was to to things the way Alexander Pope did. Pope was not just a major poet of the period, he was so successful that his stype of writing came to define the mainstream. Learning about Pope (who started life as a disadvantaged outsider in several respects) will also give you a chance to learn about English literature and culture of the period in more general terms.

Pope´s poems cover an impressive range of topics including how to write literary texts, a very odd case of hair fetishism, gender roles, architecture and what to do with one’s money. He wrote absolutely ferocious satires; these include The Dunciad (which would be Das Deppen-Epos in German), a mock-heroic poem describing, among other things, the reign of the goddess of stupidity and the bizarre rituals practised by her followers – and yes, these actually include a shit-diving contest. His poems were regarded as models of elegance and formal accomplishment; at the same time, they can be full of fierce humour and bizarre surprises.

Requirements: Thorough preparation for each session, active participation. Also anything that might be required according to your Modulhandbuch / Studienordnung. As always: think, enjoy (!), annotate, and look things up if necessary.

Please buy the following edition: Alexander Pope (ed.: Pat Rogers), Major Works (Oxford World’s Classics, ISBN 978-0-19-953761-7). The first text to be discussed is The Rape of the Lock.

The seminar will be conducted entirely online and entirely in real time. We will meet via Zoom, each week of the semester at the time of the seminar. Please join the seminar´s Moodle room (“Wit, Elegance and Shit-Diving: Alexander Pope; password: PopeWS20-21); you will receive further information via Moodle. Make sure to use and check your official university e-mail addresses at all times. Do not use any other addresses, and do not have e-mails sent to your university address forwarded to other addresses. Our experience in the last semester has shown that that using non-university addresses / forwarding mails will lead to our messages bouncing back in very many cases.

Just in case your application is rejected by the LSF system: If you want to do this course because you are genuinely interested, you will be most welcome, no matter what LSF says. Please get in touch with claudia.hausmann@uni-due.de who will enrol you manually. The worst that might happen to you is that you cannot do a Leistungsnachweis if you lack the formal requirements.