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.