Aufbauseminar The Politics of Satire from Rochester to Fielding

This course could have well gone under the slogan -satire and citizenship”. After the Civil Wars and England's first – (in)famously bloody – attempts at something like democracy, both the era of Stuart Restoration (1660-1688) and the formative years of the subsequent 'bourgeois' turn were marked by profound skepticism on the very possibility of society . Not surprisingly, political and/or social satire shaped into a compelling literary canon ranging from the court wits around Charles II to Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and Henry Fielding. Our goal is to explore this tradition as a political discourse on such issues as governance, community, freedom, responsibility and the like. On the other hand, our interest will stretch beyond the particular politics of the time towards something like a formal politics of the genre. Scholarship loves playing on an etymology of the term that goes back to the idiom 'satura lanx': a plate of mixed foods (or actually fruit). The point being that satire is, ultimately, not a genre in itself but a mix of genres – or rather a 'mixed genre' – adopting various forms of poetry, prose, drama and non-fiction texts like political pamphlets or cultural criticism. It is, in this sense, a mode of transforming (inverting, corrupting, exploding) existing types of texts and conventions into a literary 'anti-system' with its own rules . about two thirds of our material will be from the following editions which you might want to purchase in advance: Rogers, Pat (ed.) Alexander Pope: The Major Works, Oxford UP 2009 [Oxford World's Classics]. Rawson, Claude & Higgins, Ian (eds.) The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift, W. W. Norton & Company 2009 [Norton Critical Editions]. Goldberg, Homer (ed.) Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews with Shamela and Related Writings, W. W. Norton & Company 1987 [Norton Critical Editions]. Leistungsnachweis REQUIRED ASSIGNMENT: - BN: 'experting' on a session of your choice; this will involve an obligatory office hours AND a short paper/recap (2-3 pages) to be submitted within a week after class - AP: dissertation (15-20 pages) or oral exam (30 mins) Anglistik IV: Modern English Literature REQUIRED ASSIGNMENT: - BN: 'experting' on a session of your choice; this will involve an obligatory office hours AND a short paper/recap (2-3 pages) to be submitted within a week after class - AP: dissertation (15-20 pages) or oral exam (30 mins) Universität Düsseldorf SoSe 2016 Zimbulov Alexander