123045 PS PS Literary Studies (2023W)

From House of Cards to Fleabag, we have become somewhat accustomed to “fourth-wall breaks”, in which a performer looks directly into the camera, acknowledging the presence of the audience, in recent film and television. In this course, we will focus on literary precursors of this device, tracing its historical development in a broadly chronological way. We will start with early forms of self-reflexive and metafictional literary texts such as Shakespeare’s sonnets and [excerpts from] Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, discuss the famous “Reader, I married him” passage and other sections from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, then move on to Woolf’s modernist parody of Victorian literary discourse in Orlando. Finally, we will turn to the ‘golden age’ of metafiction and metatheatre in postmodernism (Atwood, Stoppard) and take a look at contemporary examples that also employ self-reflexivity and/or metafiction in intriguing ways (Smith, Agbabi).

In addition to discussing the literary texts in detail via small-group and plenum discussions, we will revise a range of analytical tools and theoretical approaches, giving students the chance to develop their analytical and academic writing skills further and providing them with basic theoretical tools for the critical analysis and interpretation of literary texts. At the end of this course, students will have learned how to find and narrow down a research topic, formulate a research question, find and integrate secondary literature, adhere to the rules of good scientific practice, and structure and write a term paper.