Class is a central category for understanding and discussing British society, culture and literature. At a basic level, class implies a social hierarchy that can be analysed with the categories of education, occupation, money, leisure activities, housing, clothing, language, etc. Yet, how exactly can they help us recognize and define a literary character’s social status or the social setting of a text as a whole? In this seminar, we will read non-fictional and fictional texts to bring to light the inscribed class-based power relations, which may not be immediately apparent – at least to uninitiated readers today.
This seminar will draw on material from the 19th and early 20th centuries because the modern terminology of upper, middle and lower classes has been developed along the Industrial Revolution and its crucial re-structuring of society. We will study excerpts from Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times (1854) and Friedrich Engels’s non-fictional account The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) to explore the intersections of space and class in the industrial centres of Northern England. Moving into the 20th century, the texts we will address class as a central means of characterising the protagonists in Dorothy L. Sayers’s crime novel Whose Body? (1923) and John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957).
This class will be taught both synchronously and asynchronously using ZOOM and the Lernraum+. If possible, smaller groups will meet in person on campus, i.e. provided that no contact restrictions must be observed.
Please purchase: Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body? and John Braine, Room at the Top (any editions will do). Please read Sayers’s crime novel before the course begins. Further material will be made available.
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23-ANG-AngVM1 Vertiefungsmodul 1: Britain | 1.2 British Literature: Genre, Periods, Authors | Studienleistung
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Studieninformation |
1.3 British Cultural Studies: Theories, Periods, Media | Studienleistung
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Studieninformation | |
23-ANG-AngVM7 Vertiefungsmodul 7: Literary Studies, Cultural Studies and Linguistics in the Classroom | 7.1 Literary Studies in the Classroom | Studienleistung
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Studieninformation |
- | benotete Prüfungsleistung | Studieninformation |
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Zu dieser Veranstaltung existiert ein Lernraum im E-Learning System. Lehrende können dort Materialien zu dieser Lehrveranstaltung bereitstellen: