LFU:online

Students will familiarize themselves with methods of the analysis of poetry. They will enhance their ability to perform close readings, set these into cultural and political context, select and critically discuss relevant research, and they will train how to combine these tasks to produce a scholarly analysis and argument.

In this seminar we will track the surprising and delightful adaptability of the sonnet form through several centuries of British literary history. There is hardly an era in which this seemingly constricting from with its 14 lines and its (more or less) fixed rhyme scheme does not play a central role. Form love to religion, from war to class difference, a multitude of topics has been explored in the sonnet. In the course we will analyse sonnets from the 16^th to the 21^st centuries.  More generally, we will train how to analyze poems – skills that can then be transferred to the analysis of other lyrical forms.

Discussion, presentations, group work, writing/research assignments

Oral (group presentations and moderation of a session, active participation in class) and written (short writing assignments during the semester, final paper)

A reader with the poems and additional mandatory reading material will be available at the start of the semester.

Recommended introductory reading:

Tom Furniss/Michael Bath, Reading Poetry: An Introduction, Harlow: Longman, 2007.

BA 2015: positive completion of compulsory module 10

Teacher Training Programme BA 2015: positive completion of compulsory module 13