123232 AR Literature Course (interactive) (2012W)

Contents: The course is intended for future teacher of English at an Austrian AHS in the final year(s) of their studies. It will focus on exploring the didactic potential of literary texts from various Anglophone cultural traditions for teaching in the (advanced) grammar school class-room. Starting from a screening of course-books currently approved for teaching English at Austrian AHS, new contemporary literary texts will be introduced featuring topics that relate not only to the main issues of the current AHS-curriculum but that can also be shown to be valuable for the (proposed) requirements of the "Zentralmatura", and, moreover, can provide useful material for writing a "pre-academic pape" ("Vorwissenschaftliche Arbeit"). While the texts proposed in a previous course covered a wide range of genres from the Middle Ages to the present, the course of the WS 12/13 will focus on contemporary Anglophone short fiction only. The list of authors includes T.C. Boyle, Helen Simpson, Salman Rushdie, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Colm Toibin, Roddy Doyle, William Trevor, Nadine Gordimer, Ann Enright and women writers of popular fiction ("chick-lit"). Each of the works of short fiction will be examined as to its heuristic and pedagogic value as well as its didactic potential (notably in view of advancing the pupils' cross-cultural understanding, moral and aesthetic judgement, and for developing some advanced critical awareness of the current condition of humanity).