135113 SE BA-SE: Literary Characters (2024S)

Literary texts rarely function without people and their actions. In this respect, literary figures or characters are one of the most important content-constituting categories. In order to be able to analyse these figures scientifically, it is first necessary to determine the main aspects under which they are created. Basically, it can be said that persons in literature reflect people in reality in all their characteristics and functions, i.e. in terms of gender, age, ethnicity, nationality or regional/local origin, social status, character, profession, religious beliefs and much more. Since antiquity, human characters have been sorted and satirised in literature (Theophrastus, Elias Canetti), especially types such as the misanthrope, the melancholic, the hypochondriac (all to be understood as gender-neutral, but in canonical literature - Molière, for example - mostly exemplified by men). Comedy has readily adopted such stereotypical figures, and in narrative genres, too, typifications that are explored by imagology serve to generate comedy - or resentment. However, literary figures are also elementary components of mythology, hagiography (literature of the lives of saints) and, of course, real history when turned into stories. Further character specifications are based on the respective text genres: fairy tale characters, characters in crime novels, series heroes, comic characters, acting animals. There are entire universes of characters (superheroes) and extensive genealogies (such as in the courtly novel).
Depending on our interests, we will deal with some groups of characters and text genres, but in any case also with the associated fiction theory and with special questions that are of specific interest today: e.g. with the invariance of characters in text or film series, with the presence of the professional and working world in literature, with stereotypes that are increasingly considered unacceptable today and thus also put literary studies under linguistic pressure, with the metafictional motif of the rebellion of invented characters against their creators, with the quasi-eternal life of originally literary characters due to their success (Don Quixote, Donald Duck).
It is obvious that the parallel attendance of my lecture "thematic studies“ can be useful in order to categorise the subject area of this seminar in the broader field of general research into the content of literature.
As this is a BA seminar, the discourse on our topic will be accompanied by some short writing exercises to help with the preparation of the final term paper.