Zusammenfassung Leseliste Englisch SS18 PDF

Preview

Summary

Zusammenfassung der wichtigsten Inhalte auf 22 Seiten von Novels, Drama, Poetry und Autobiographies der Leseliste zum SS2018, inklusive relevanten Informationen zu den Autoren und andere Besonderheiten von British, American und TAS! ...

Description

Leseliste 1. British Literary and Cultural Studies Renaissance: Drama: William Shakespeare, King Lear (1606) → King Lear was slightly mad; tragedy of fate vs. Character; focus on change: hero is changing throughout the play; mixture of tragic & comic elements topic: King gives heritage to daughters, they need to tell him how much they love him, Cordelia is sassy and says “Nothing” → a whole play about “Nothing!”, testing limits of language → denial (family bonds, hope, love etc.) → no happy ending, devastating, no hope left (Cordelia dies, Lear dies hoping she lives) → family dysfunction, senile old man who makes a series of bad political decissions family drama is universal and timeless; died of a broken heart? Pitted his daughters against each other, disowned one of them, and banished his right-hand man Kent for no good reason - transformation of his head and heart Ealrly Modern: Poerty: William Shakespeare, Sonnets 66, 116 (1609) 66 → a world-weary, desperate list of grievances of the state of the poet's society. The speaker criticizes three things: general unfairness of life, societal immorality, and oppressive government. Lines 2 and 3 illustrate the economic unfairness caused by one's station or nobility mood of Sonnet 66 does not change until the last line, when the speaker declares that the only thing keeping him alive is his lover 116 → love in ideal form, measure love but don't fully understand it; if he is mistaken, all his writings should be taken away wedding poem love might change, but defense of love (love is not times fool → transense time) all addressed to a man John Donne, „The Sun Rising“ (1633) → The speaker of the poem questions the sun's motives and yearns for the sun to go away so that he and his lover can stay in bed. Donne is tapping into human emotion in personifying the sun, and he is exhibiting how beings behave when they are in love with one another. The speaker in the poem believes that, for him and his lover, time is the enemy His lover is his whole world, and since the sun is shining on the bed composed of these two, then it is also shining on the entire world. → Johne Donne: wrote about heterosexual desires in a explicit, erotic way no restriction: sex combined with religion → desire for sex and for god → prime example of metaphysical poetry 17th and 18th Centuries: Novel: Daniel Defoes, Robinson Crusoe (1719) → first narrative novel in English → castaways life on island → commercial blockbuster; based on the true story of a real-life castaway named Alexander

Selkrik; Deals with big issues on the minds of people in 18th century England Themes: Self-reliance, civilization, progress, Christianity, nature 1) religion: spiritual awakening, atonement, conversion to Christianity. Starts as prodigal son 2) Philosophy: relationship to society, does a man exist in a state of nature 3) Middle-class: emerging class in 18th century England → middle-class values and beliefs 4) Commerce and Imperial Expansion: trade networks of England; Themes: Religion, Wealth, Society and Class, Man and the Natural World, Rules and Order, Family, Foreignness, Slavery → no time for feelings, arrogance + European attitude → Friday represent all people repressed by European colonists Drama: Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal (1777)

→ London 1776; high society where gossip runs rampant → comedy of manners → focuses on lives and flaws of upper-class people Lady Sneerwell: in love with Charles Surface; plots with Joseph to ruin relationship between Maria and Charles Charles Suface: young + rebellious, in love with Maria Joseph Surface: Charles' brother, in love with Maria Maria: in love with Charles Sir Peter Teazle: married to Lady Teazle → argue about money Lady Teazle: affair with Joseph Sir Oliver Surface: Charles + Joseph uncle; tricks them by disguising himself to find out if rumors about spending to much money are true → Gossip: rumors spread by unofficial and official channels rumor: Charles + Lady Teazle are having an affair → Marriage: troubled marriage (Teazles) → Gender: women play two main roles (not objects); daughters and love interests; Lady Téazle = power woman → Family: morality judged on the way you treat your family → politics: no laws that protect from false rumors → physical appearance: great importance → money; who is more moral: Charles or Joseph? Enlightenment/Romanticism: The Romantic period isn't just about love stories – it was a political and social movement as well as a literary one. The Romantics were reacting to an 18th century obsession with order, rationality, and scientific precision. Romantic writers felt that these Enlightenment-era thinkers missed the point about what it meant to be human. After all, they argued, you can't write an equation to define human nature. So the Romantic movement was partly a backlash against the rationalism of the 18th century Enlightenment.

Peotry: Thomas Gray, „Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard“ (1751) → Gray’s thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742; an elegy in name but not in form; it employs a style similar to that of contemporary odes, but it embodies a meditation on death, and remembrance after death. The poem argues that the remembrance can be good and bad, and the narrator finds comfort in pondering the lives of the obscure rustics buried in the churchyard Gray's life was surrounded by loss and death, Gray felt that the poem was unimportant William Blake, „The Tyger“ (1794) → The poem is often interpreted to deal with issues of inspiration, poetry, mystical knowledge, God, and the sublime (big, mysterious, powerful, and sometimes scary) no narrative movement in "The Tyger": nobody really does anything other than the speaker questioning "the Tyger." → God = artist who made the tiger (Blake saw it in forests) Tyger: dark and fearsome thing, what does it stand for? William Wordsworth, „I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud“ (1807) → inspiration for the poem came from a walk Wordsworth took with his sister Dorothy around Glencoyn Bay, revisits the familiar subjects of nature and memory looking back at moment, shift in mind to present → vision of daffodils; inward eye, image brings him joy plot is extremely simple, speaker is metaphorically compared to a natural object, a cloud daffodils are continually personified as human beings → rich in visual imagery John Keats, „La Belle Dame Sans Merci“ (1820) → is a ballad, a medieval genre revived by the romantic poets. → ballad = narrative poem → tells story the poem isn't explicit about why the knight is dying. It's left partly to our imagination. this poem is about the dangers of obsession, in general: drug addiction, romantic or erotic obsession La belle dame sans Merci, the beautiful lady without pity, is a femme fatale, a circle-like figure who attracts lovers only to destroy them by her supernatural powers → spell? → not first person to suffer; knight saw men of power who fell under this mysterious spell → cyclical structures Samuel Taylor Coleridge, „The Rime of the Ancient Mariner“ (1798) → A lyrical ballad is a poem that combines two different genres: story-telling (a ballad) and intense expressions of subjective and emotional experience (a lyric) →Three guys are on the way to a wedding celebration when an old sailor (the Mariner) stops one of them at the door Shooting down a albatross; crew dying; bird just a bird? Albatross a symbol for Jesus albatross around his neck like cross; religious backstory? Symbols: Weather, Moon, Starts, sun, Albatross, Colors, The religious and the Supernatural, 2 Settings, George Gordon, Lord Byron, „Don Juan“ (Canto I) (1819-1824) Plot: grows up a spoiled child, dad dies, mum hires many tutors to make him the greatest child ever; puberty hits him, doesn't understand what his body wants, because mum sheltered him from sexual education. Don Juan, grows up with two spoiling and flawed

parents, who shield him from all knowledge of sex. This plan backfires when Don hits puberty and starts feeling urges he never felt before. These urges take him into the arms of a married woman named Julia. But Julia's husband finds out about the affair and Don Juan has to leave Spain - The rest of the book tells us about all the wacky and sexy adventures he has afterward Byron was one of the first poets, though, who believed in the power of the individual. He didn't buy into the idea that society should give us all our rules to live by and he doesn't want you to buy into it either. And throughout history, mockery and satire has been a pretty great way to talk to people who take themselves and the world way too seriously. - When the first two cantos were published anonymously in 1819, the poem was criticized for its "immoral content", but it was also immensely popular. → satiric symbols: Mermaids, Kissing, Ghost: The Black Friar, Cannibalism, Victorian Age: Victorian literature is literature, mainly written in English, during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) (the Victorian era). It was preceded by Romanticism and followed by the Edwardian era (1901–1910). While in the preceding Romantic period poetry had been the dominant genre, it was the novel that was most important in the Victorian period. Charles Dickens (1812–1870) dominated the first part of Victoria's reign. Robert Browning (1812–89) and Alfred Tennyson (1809–92) were Victorian England's most famous poets. The Victorian era was an important time for the development of science and the Victorians had a mission to describe and classify the entire natural world. Much of this writing does not rise to the level of being regarded as literature but one book in particular, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, remains famous. The theory of evolution contained within the work challenged many of the ideas the Victorians had about themselves and their place in the world. Victorian writers are laced with earnestness, no satires, Oscar Wilde making fun of it. Earnest meant to be a good, thoughtful, moral, self-improving person, true ladies and gentlemen. Industry booming, British Empire expanding repressed desire Novels: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) → published under a male pseudonym; not an autobiography!! → Or is it? Fictionalized autobiography not in facts, but in circumstances → death of struggling and suffering → Jane: pale and sickly looking but full of passion and fire - contains elements of social criticism, with a strong sense of Christian morality at its core - considered by many to be ahead of its time because of Jane's individualistic character and how the novel approaches the topics of class, sexuality, religion, and feminism. - first-person narrative from the perspective of the title character - setting is somewhere in the north of England, late in the reign of George III (1760–1820). - five distinct stages: 1) Jane's childhood at Gateshead Hall → emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins 2) her education at Lowood School → gains friends and role models but suffers privations

and oppression 3) her time as governess at Thornfield Hall → falls in love with her mysterious employer, Edward Rochester 4) her time with the Rivers family → her earnest but cold clergyman cousin, St. John Rivers, proposes to her 5) her reunion with, and marriage to, her beloved Rochester, his wife died in fire - novel provides perspectives on a number of important social issues and ideas Bertha = Reflection of Rochesters past (she not right fit for him, locking away his past) Bertha = warning to Jane; her fate if she doesn't please him Bertha = Jane's alter ego; dark mirror; Bertha and Jane not traditional house wife; when Jane locked in red room she goes crazy too (Bertha destroys Jane's veil) Jane: between servant and lady Gothic: mysterious house + romantic: love Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854) → moral fable → realist novel, satire, dystopia ignore imagination and stick to facts → children raised on the principles of economic theory → messes them up major conflict: Louisa struggles to reconcile the fact driven self-interest of her upbringing with the warmth of feelings she sees in Sissay and in herself Sissay joins Gradgrinds household, Louisa marries Josiah Bounderby to satisfy her father; (hot) Harthouse tries to seduce Louisa → confused → leaves Bounderby → Thomas Gradgrind, Louisa Gradgrind (facts,old) , Josiah Bounderby(industrialist, untrustworthy), Stephen Blackpool - mechanization of human beings, opposition between fact and fancy; importance of feminity; motifs: childhood, clocks and time, mismatched marriages robotic characters; Thomas gives his children to Bounderby; Stephen (worker) not rating on the work union; Stephen = only decent guy, dies; Tom is the Bounderby's bank robber → Coketown: dirty air represents moral filth of manufacturing town Mr Bounderby = 19th industrialism, Mr Gradgrind = utilitarianism Drama: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) → comedy, 3 acts; pokes fun of the entire social structure during Victorian period marriage was about protecting your resources and keeping socially unacceptable impulses; couples get together because of social and economic fitness/not true love; Characters: Jack, Algernon, Cecily, Gwendolen, Lady Augusta Bracknell Symbols: Food, The Dandy, Inversion, Lies and Deceit, Marriage, Gender, Love, Folly Poetry: Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott” (1832) → narrative poem (tells a story) Lady lives on an island/river is in a box/tower, leaves it in a boat, dies; tower=captivity has a curse on her; curse=society/patriarchy; Lady weaves a piece of cloth that shows images that she sees from her window in mirror =art? Leaving art? Death = death of creative self? → captures the conflict between an artist’s desire for social involvement and his/her doubts about whether such a commitment is viable for someone dedicated to art

Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” (1842) → poem falls in problematic in-between age (Romanticism and Modernism) leads to format experiments, harsh-sounding language and realism; → inspiration: duke Alfonso II of Ferrara (psychopath) and young wife Lucrezia, who died in suspicious circumstances in 1561 → Which aspect of the poem dominates: the horror of the Duchess’s fate, or the beauty of the language and the powerful dramatic development? → death of Romanticism´? Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese (XLIII) (1850) Dominated by her possessive father, Elizabeth spent most of her time alone in an upstairs room. She was a frail, sick woman who needed opium and laudanum in an effort to cure her pain. Her only consolation was poetry and at this she was very successful. When Robert Browning read her work he was so impressed he wrote asking to meet her. The two eventually fell in love and decided to secretly elope to Italy in 1846, despite the father's resistance and anger. He ended up disinheriting his daughter. → How do I love thee? „My little Portuguese = nickname from her husband sonnets = personal declaration of love to her husband Robert Browning different types of love she feels; references of grief, bitterness and loss of innocence gives a more realistic edge; And, in the final line, if God grants it, she'll carry on loving her husband even more after she dies. sonnet = Italian little song Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866) - This is another dramatic monologue. The scene is his death, and the audience is Proserpine, the pagan goddess of the underworld - The poem is addressed to the goddess Proserpina, the Roman equivalent of Persephone, but laments the rise of Christianity for displacing the pagan goddess and her pantheon - Julian is dying in the poem, so he prays to Proserpina, Queen of the Dead. He feels like the last pagan. - Proserpine (Persephone) was the daughter of Jupiter (Zeus) and Ceres (Demeter), goddess of harvests - He will not bow to Christ; will worship old gods. - Talks to Proserpina. Even the Christian God can’t overcome death. - In his note, Swinburne acknowledges that he is here using the phrase of the Greek philosopher Epictetus: "You are a little soul, carrying around a corpse." → positive expression to his rebellion against conventional Christianity Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market” (1862) → two sisters and one of whom gets sick after eating bad goblin fruit, and is healed because of her sister's bravery female heroism and sisterhood allegory about bad markets and bad investments; criticism about how women were objectified and treated as commodities on a marriage market during Victorian period Laura gets sick, Lizzie gets juice squeezed all over her her, Laura licks it and is healed

Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” (1867) "Dover Beach" is a great example of a poem that's honest about how dark and scary life can be sometimes. The speaker of this poem just flat out tells us that we shouldn't expect life to be full of "joy" or "love" (33). → loneliness

→ The poet focuses on a single moment in order to discover profound depths. Here, the moment is the visceral serenity the speaker feels in studying the landscape, and the contradictory fear that that serenity then leads him to feel. To accomplish that end, the poem uses a lot of imagery and sensory information. It begins with mostly visual depictions, describing the calm sea, the fair moon he world's mystery has declined in the face of modernity → dealing with Victorian responses to faith and doubt Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Windhover” (1918) → seems to be admiring a bird poetic tricks like spring rhythm, in stress, in shape, he transforms image of a bird into an intense meditation on religious epiphany difficult to read, makes up words 20th and 21st Centuries: Novels: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) → capture modern age, not afraid of trivia; feminist: gender bending to get the whole experience of life → modernist novel; Modernism: questioning and dismantling of institutions and concepts (after WWI); Anti Enlightenment and Anti Romanticism Mrs Ramsay: conventional gender role, loves → focused on Ramsay family and visit of island in Scotland plot: talk about going to the lighthouse, first don't but in the end of the book they go time: a lot can be lost in time; 8 children and guests; Briscoe: paints, but doubts; Charles Tansley: says women cant neither paint nor write immorality thru art (portrait brings Mrs Ramsey back) - Mrs Ramsey dies, Mr Ramsey philosopher - stream-of-consciousness literary technique, no action, mostly dialogue as thoughts - Themes: loss, subjectivity, problem of perception Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001) → novel about writing → meta-fiction explores depths of human nature set during WWII in England divided in 4 parts (1935 England, wartime England, France, present-day England) reality vs imagination, guilt and forgiveness, remorse, Briony tries to atone her guilt in different ways (with power of imagination) Briony (protagonist), Cecilia, Robbie, Leon, Paul, Lola

Drama: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1952/1955) → Tragicomedy → wide interest, most influential play in 20th century exchanging inconsequential dialogue; action and inaction non-arrival = absence of God? Sense of life? Desire? Final fulfillment never arrives? Key word: perhaps

→ Vladimir (responsible and mature) (called Didi and Mr.Albert) and Estragon (called Gogo) (poor memory) waiting for Godot → complimentary personalities Pozzo (becomes blind) and his slave Lucky (first entertainment, than dumb); messenger boy - two acts, repetition → both men don't know why and when they are meeting Godot - about hope → pitiful hope wait for hope to arrive passing time → they need each other suicide as an potion → NOT GOD; French „godillot“ = military boot Religious interpretation: waiting for a savior Political interpretation: Pozzo and Lucky is the relationship between capitalist to his labor allegory of the Cold War Lucky is lucky because his actions are determined absolutely by Pozzo (oder flüchtende Juden die auf Schleusner warten) Poetry: Rudyard Kipling, “If” (1910) → wrote the 'Jungle Book' → a paean about stoicism; about being strong in the face of pain; about being patient, finding a happy medium between extremes of emotion; 32 lines of advice about how to be stoic; stoic: enduring pain, hardship, misfortune Instruction manual abou...