Elective Seminar: Modernity and Modernism in the History of Literature

The seminar includes introductory theoretical and literary-historical insights into the specifics of modernity – in the sense of the period of fin de siecle, the Turn of the Century, die Moderne – and the period of Modernism in the history of literature. The seminar addresses the connections and differences in the literature after 1860 and draws broader literary contexts of the literary modernity in terms of cultural history and the history of ideas. The subject matter of selected seminar themes: seminar papers deal with literary works from the perspective of literary movements, currents and trends of modernity and modernism. Individual themes thus include the issues of Symbolism, New Romanticism, the decadent movement, modernism (that also includes some topics from historical avant-garde as literary movements) and the existential philosophical and literary current. The selected seminar themes focus on distinctive narrative literary works (novels and short prose), poetry and drama. Discussion centres on the connection between literary-historical aspects and morphological (motif-theme, textual, structural and stylistic) aspects of literary works. The seminars are complemented with lectures from literary history, literary theory and comparative literature.