135113 SE BA-SE: Unfinished. Fragmentary Works of World Literature (2025S)

Major works of world literature remained unfinished and still puzzle audiences and literary scholars today, e.g. Gottfried von Strasbourg's ‘Tristan’, Francesco Petrarch's epic ‘Africa’ or Edmund Spenser's ‘The Faerie Queene’, romantic novels such as Ludwig Tieck's ‘Franz Sternbald's Wanderings’ and ‘The Revolt in the Cévennes’ or Dorothea Schlegel's ‘Florentin’, S. T. Coleridge's poem ‘Kublai Khan’, Flaubert's novel ‘Bouvard et Pécuchet’ and Charles Dickens' famous last novel “The Mystery of Edwin Droodod”. T. Coleridge's poem ‘Kublai Khan’, Flaubert's novel ‘Bouvard et Pécuchet’ and Charles Dickens' famous last novel “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”. But great novel projects also failed in the 20th century, or remained (apparently) unfinished: Marcel Proust's ‘Jean Santeuil’, Robert Musil's ‘The Man without Qualities’, Hans Henny Jahnn's ‘River without Shore’, the three great Kafka fragments ‘The Trial’, ‘The Castle’ and ‘America’ (‘The Stoker’), Thomas Mann's ‘Felix Krull’ (?), Ingeborg Bachmann's ‘Death Species’ project or Heimito von Doderer's ‘The Border Forest’. The seminar will discuss questions of holistic vs. fragmentary aesthetics on the basis of an exemplary selection and attempt to describe how philology and the reading public deal with large fragments of world literature.