Lehre / teaching WS 2024/2025

06LE11S-20242554

JProf. Dr. Elisabeth Marie Piller, JProf. Dr. Maria Sulimma

Americans in Europe. Transatlantic Travel and Tourism

Combining history, literary studies, and cultural studies, this seminar, offered jointly by the English Department and the History Department, focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century literary representations of American travel and tourism to/in Europe as well as the historical discourses and developments they reflected and shaped. We will discuss questions of (self)discovery, national identity (or its limitations), commercial exploitation and transatlantic power. As an example that demonstrates the complex situation of American authors writing from and/or about Europe, consider this passage from the African American author James Baldwin:

In my necessity to find the terms on which my experience could be related to that of others, Negroes and whites, writers and non-writers, I proved, to my astonishment, to be as American as any Texas G.I. And I found my experience was shared by every American writer I knew in Paris. Like me, they had been divorce from their origins, and it turned out to make very little difference that the origins of white Americans were European and mine were African – they were no more at home in Europe than I was (Nobody Knows My Name, 1961, pp. 17-18).

Whether they identify as temporary tourists on “the grand tour,” fugitives on the run from unjust persecution, soldiers, expatriate modernist writers, postwar leftist internationalists, or cosmopolitans, American writers have visited Europe for many different reasons. The first half of the seminar will focus on tourism and travel in literature prior to 1900. Among the writers whose work we will read and discuss are Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry James. As more “recent” modernist and postmodernist writing, in the second half of the seminar, we will read writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Ben Lerner.

Das Abgabedatum für die Hausarbeit ist der 01.04.2024.
Mündliche Prüfungen nach individueller Absprache i.d.R. zwischen dem 10. Februar und dem 18. April 2024.
Zu erbringende Prüfungsleistung
Term paper research proposal (2-3 pages, including research question, hypothesis, structure, bibliography; due January 30, 2025)
Term papers are due on April 1,2025. Students should write a clear and original analysis focusing on a special topic of their choosing and building upon our class readings and discussions.
Students who require an oral examination instead of a term paper do not need to write a proposal but should be aware that oral exams will be in the first week after classes end.

Zu erbringende Studienleistung:

Regelmäßige Teilnahme
Referat/mündliche Präsentation
Essay
Schriftliche oder mündliche Ergebnissicherung

Literatur:

All texts will be made available on ILIAS. We will read Henry James’ Novella Daisy Miller and you may want to buy a copy (preferably the penguin edition)

Bemerkung / Empfehlung:

Bei diesem Seminar handelt es sich um eine Kooperationsveranstaltung von Frau Jun.-Prof Elisabeth Piller (Historisches Seminar) mit Jun.-Prof. Maria Sulimma (Anglistik).

Angestrebt wird eine paritätische Verteilung der Studierenden beider Institute.

Die Veranstaltungsbelegung via HISinOne ist zwischen Montag, dem 09. September 2024 ab 9.00 Uhr und Montag, dem 07. Oktober 2024 bis 12.00 Uhr möglich.

Veranstaltungsart: Seminar

Veranstalter: Historisches Seminar

Termin, Ort: Do 16 - 18 Uhr (c.t.); 17.10.24 - 06.02.25, Kollegiengebäude IV/Übungsraum 2