*EAS-1411*:
If you are allotted to this course you will automatically be signed up for the corresponding Übung "Survey of English Literature II: Restoration, Neo-Classicism and Pre-Romanticism " (Thursdays, 10:00 -11:30). Be sure to keep this slot free in your timetable.
*EAS-1412*
If you are wrongly allotted to the Übung, please make sure to sign out of it, in order to open up the slot for your fellow students.
Leistungsnachweis
Short response paragraphs or presentations
Final Research Essay (5000 words) or Portfolio
Online/Digitale Veranstaltung
Veranstaltung wird nicht abgehalten.
Hauptunterrichtssprache
englisch
Sonstiges
*EAS-1411*:
If you are allotted to this course you will automatically be signed up for the corresponding Übung "Survey of English Literature II: Restoration, Neo-Classicism and Pre-Romanticism " (Thursdays, 10:00 -11:30). Be sure to keep this slot free in your timetable.
*EAS-1412*
If you are wrongly allotted to the Übung, please make sure to sign out of it, in order to open up the slot for your fellow students.
Sense, sensibility, sensation, sentiment, sentimentality – in the mid-eighteenth century these terms form an intricate web of overlapping meanings and connotations. They permeate philosophical, scientific, and medical discourses, always circling around consequential questions regarding the relation of body and mind, feeling and thought, passion and reason. Present-day conceptions of the Enlightenment as the ‘Age of Reason’ tend to obscure how much the period was immersed in discussions about the role of what today we call ‘emotions’ or ‘affects’ and their significance for sociality and morality.
The ‘Sentimental Novel’ as a literary genre reflects these issues, participating in and commenting on the contemporary ‘cult of sensibility’ and its objective of individual and collective refinement of the faculties of feeling. Confronting its protagonists with episodes of heart-rending distress, supreme happiness, and all imaginable stages in between, it explores the emotional responses, sympathy, moral sense, and cognition of both characters and readers.
In this seminar, we will read and discuss Laurence Sterne’s short novel _A Sentimental Journey_ (1768), often numbered among the pioneering works of the genre, and Henry Mackenzie’s equally short _The Man of Feeling_ (1771), sometimes called its most paradigmatic representative. The third novel will be Jane Austen’s _Sense and Sensibility_ (1811), which satirises sentimentality and the sentimental novel while at the same time continuing some of its concerns. In fact, all three novels at times display an ambiguous and self-conscious attitude towards sentimentalism and sensibility. They often border on the ironic and (implicitly) raise doubts about the practical value of the effusive emotionality they seem to commend.
Students are required to bring their own (print) copies of the three novels. Please, if possible, get hold of the latest ‘Oxford World’s Classics’ editions of the novels, as this would ensure that we all use the same versions of the texts. (They are also very well edited and affordable).