| Lerninhalte |
The course focuses on the construction and literary representation of the relationship between culture and nature, humans and land/ landscape/"wilderness" in English literature with a special emphasis placed on enclosures (both real and metaphorical). The term "enclosures" signals the appropriation of common land by the nobility since the late Middle Ages, a development that has provoked strong social resistance movements with repercussions in literary texts since the early 16th century. Thomas More (Utopia, 1517), William Shakespeare (As You Like It, ca 1600; 1, 2, 3 Henry VI, ca 1591), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe, 1719), John Clare (Enclosure Poems, 1830s), Thomas Hardy (The Return of the Native, 1878; The Woodlanders, 1887), Jim Crace (Harvest, 2013) – we will read and discuss a selection of these texts from literary-critical, social-political, postcolonial, and ecocritical perspectives. In the context of the Anthropocene and the multiple ecological crises we face today, critical readings of these texts challenge the still dominant ideology that conceives of the non-human world as categorically separate from humans and as mere raw material to be used and exploited by (some) humans for their own benefit.
Please buy and read As You Like It and Robinson Crusoe as soon as you can. (There will be a place for everyone who wishes to participate – so please use the semester break to read and do not wait until the term starts!) Additional texts will be made available via Stud.IP |
