16445 PS/HS

Nuruddin Farah (Samuel-Fischer-Gastprofessor)

Narratives of Subversion

Di 18.00-20.00 Uhr
Rost- / Silberlaube Habelschwerdter Allee 45, KL 24/122d

Beginn: 17. April 2007

Of the rich literary writings penned by men and women over the ages, there are very few novels that are as engaging or as powerful as those written by authors who set out to subvert, narratives that mark their appearance with their own unique starting points – as do all great works in any genre. One can think of Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, and even of Carlo Collodi and Lewis Carroll as being subversive, detracting from what and undermining the authority of what had been there before they came on the scene. In these seminars we will explore the subversive nature and originality of the following texts: Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness, Virginia Woolf‘s Mrs Dalloway, Albert Camus‘s The Stranger, Chinua Achebe‘s Arrow of God, Margaret Laurence‘s Stone Angel, George Lamming‘s In the Castle of My Skin, Toni Morrison‘s Beloved, Salman Rushdie‘s Midnight’s Children, and Tayeb Salih‘s The Wedding of Zein. Where possible, we will look for the common thread that runs through them, if any.

Recommended reading will include two seminal essays: T.S. Eliot‘s “Tradition & the Individual Talent“ and Virginia Woolf‘s “The Common Reader.“