230610 Academic Writing (S) (WiSe 2026/2027)

In this class, students will be given the opportunity to extend and consolidate their writing skills in literary studies through regular and intensive writing tasks. In a range of exercises, students will practise how to develop a research question in literary studies, how to turn this question into a clear and detailed thesis statement as a basis for a well-structured argument, and how to write a coherent, cohesive, stylistically appropriate literary studies paper, analysing and interpreting a literary text.

The set text in this class is the novella Carmilla by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu. It was published in 1872 (25 years before Dracula) and founded the genre of vampire fiction. In Carmilla, however, both the victim and the vampire are women. Read the Wikipedia entry for more information. Please do not choose this Academic Writing class if you are squeamish about old-fashioned language, vampires, Victorian gender roles, Gothic fiction, or (implicit) lesbian/homoerotic themes.

Teilnahmevoraussetzungen, notwendige Vorkenntnisse

This class builds on the Basis2.1 lecture "Introduction to Literary Analysis and Interpretation". Please do not attend this class before you have COMPLETED the lecture.
I will assume that you learnt in your Basis1 classes what an academic paragraph is, and the difference between a narrator and a speaker, and how metaphors work. You should also have understood the basics of the MLA style sheet.

Literaturangaben

(I will select an edition of Carmilla that I will ask you to buy. Please don't just buy the book yet. If you want to start reading the story, you can do so here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10007?msg=welcome_stranger