ENG BASF: Den engelsktalende verdens litterære spor

This course builds on all the essential skills and compentencies that you have learned in the first-semester course on ‘Reading and Writing in the Digital Age’, while also pointing ahead towards the third-semester course in ‘Literature as a World-Making Phenomenon’. In the second-semester course you will sharpen your abilities to close-read and analyse literary texts, applying these skills to Anglophone literature before 1900. You will learn how to place older texts in their historical context while considering the challenges of literary periodization. You will be taught how to place Anglophone literature pre-1900 in its transnational and multilingualist contexts, and you will expand and refine the awareness of literary genres and literary terminology that you began to develop in the first semester. The course takes the form of a chronological canon-based survey course, while also questioning canon formation and canon revision as essential considerations for literary scholarship. It deals with texts as material objects through and over time and situates itself within the fields of book and media history as it deals with textual transmission through a broad variety of media. It offers students hands-on experience with e.g. digital archives, online concordance and other text analysis tools, introducing basic Digital Humanities work while demonstrating that text is always tied to language, mediality, and context. These transferable digital skills enhance both academic analysis in the study programme and professional opportunities. The course teaches you to think intertextually, across time, genres and national boundaries and to think comparatively, critically and contextually as you learn how to pinpoint the stylistic, linguistic and thematic features which date a text. As a central part of your academic training, you are encouraged both to develop an academic awareness of the ways in which through time literary texts serve as mirrors of thought and feeling, and to understand the fundamental role played by literature in the self-understanding of any society, including our own.  

The course is integrated with the other second semester courses, e.g. through shared themes such as transnationality (‘Current Perspectives on the Anglophone World’) and multilingual texts and contexts (‘English Linguistics: Variation and Use’).