Englisch-Sprachklausuren

10. April 2006 – Johannes Windrich

Oscar Wilde: „The Poet as Teacher“.

It is one of Goethe’s profound aphorisms, that "Every day we should in some way renew our impressions of the true and the beautiful by a verse from some great poet, the sight of a painting or a statue, or by a noble thought from some heroic mind; for the spiritual within is ever in danger of being choked and suffocated by the rank luxuriance of the weeds and thorns that crowd our daily life". In this country, however, Art has but few temples wherein lessons of grace and beauty can be taught the people; nor can even the glorious book of Nature be enjoyed by those who, with toiling hands and ever lowered eyes, work day and night at the loom of life to earn the scanty bread of subsistence. The poor in these rough northern climes have little time for the dreamy musings over the illuminated pages of Nature, to which the luxurious indolence of a southern existence gives such full facility. The sunset and the cloud, the spiritual influence of dying day, or of night with her starry host; the grandeur of the lonely mountain, the song of waters, the choral music of the waving trees – all the beauty and melody of the world, is, in a great degree, mute and veiled to our weary toiling slaves of civilisation. But literature, in the full plenitude of its ennobling influence, can reach all classes, the lowest as the highest. The words of man can permeate where the music of the forest trees never can be heard. In the cabin, the cellar, the factory, the mine, amongst the children of the cities or the plains, wherever there is a soul however darkened, the souls of other men can reach him; the divine thinkers of all ages may come in and sit down by him, though his dwelling be the meanest hut. The soul at least can “build herself a lordly pleasure-house,” be the poor, toiling, material frame ever so lowly located. The duty of a government, then, is to ameliorate the condition of the people as far as possible by affording every facility whereby these angel ministers may pass to and fro amongst them.

7. April 2005 – Bernhard Metz

Jonathan Swift: „A Tale of a Tub“.
in: Jonathan Swift: A Tale of a Tub. With Other Early Works 1696-1707.

ONCE upon a Time, there was a Man who had Three *Sons by one Wife, and all at a Birth, neither could the Mid-Wife tell certainly which was the Eldest. Their Father died while they were young, and upon his Death-Bed, calling the Lads to him, spoke thus,
SONS; because I have purchased no Estate, nor was born to any, I have long considered of some good Legacies to bequeath You; And at last, with much Care as well as Expence, have provided each of you (here they are) a new †Coat. Now, you are to understand, that these Coats have two Virtues contained in them: One is, that with good wearing, they will last you fresh and sound as long as you live: The other is, that they will grow in the same proportion with your Bodies, lenghtning and widening of themselves, so as to be always fit. Here, let me see them on you before I die. So, very well, Pray Children, wear them clean, and brush them often. You will find in my ||Will (here it is) full Instructions in every particular concerning the Wearing and Management of your Coats; wherein you must be very exact, to avoid the Penalties I have appointed for every Transgression or Neglect, upon which your future Fortunes will entirely depend. I have also commanded in my Will, that you should live together in one House like Brethren and Friends, for then you will be sure to thrive, and not otherwise.
HERE the Story says, this good Father died, and the three Sons went all together so seek their Fortunes.
I shall not trouble you with recounting what Adventures they met for the first seven Years, any farther than by taking notice, that they carefully observed their Father’s Will, and kept their Coats in very good Order; That they travelled thro’ several Countries, encountred a reasonable Quantity of Gyants and slew certain Dragons.

* By these three Sons, Peter, Martyn and Jack; Popery, the Church of England, and our Protestant Dissenters are designed. W. Wotton.
† By his Coats which he gave his Sons, the Garments of the Israelites. W. Wotton.
An Error (with Submission) of the learned Commentator; for by the Coats are meant the Doctrine and Faith of Christianity, by the Wisdom of the Divine Founder fitted to all Times, Places and Circumstances. Lambin.
|| The New Testament.

Siehe auch: Beispielübersetzungen 1, 2, 3 und Hinweise zur Klausur.

14. Oktober 2004 – Markus Edler

James Joyce: „James Clarence Mangan“ (1902).

Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state. The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life – the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet is intense – the life of Blake or of Dante – taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. With Mangan a narrow and hysterical nationality receives a last justification, for when this feeble-bodied figure departs dusk begins to veil the train of the gods, and he who listens may hear their footsteps leaving the world.

But the ancient gods, who are visions of the divine names, die and come to life many times, and, though there is dusk about their feet and darkness in their indifferent eyes, the miracle of light is renewed eternally in the imaginative soul. When the sterile and treacherous order is broken up, a voice or a host of voices is heard singing, a little faintly at first, of a serene spirit which enters woods and cities and the hearts of men, and of the life of earth – det dejlige vidunderlige jordliv det gaadefulde jordliv* – beautiful, alluring, mysterious. Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy.

These are realities and these alone give and sustain life. As often as human fear and cruelty, that wicked monster begotten by luxury, are in league to make life ignoble and sullen and to speak evil of death the time is come wherein a man of timid courage seizes the keys of hell and of death, and flings them far out into the abyss, proclaiming the praise of life, which the abiding splendour of truth may sanctify, and of death, the most beautiful form of life.

In those vast courses which enfold us and in that great memory which is greater and more generous than our memory, no life, no moment of exaltation is ever lost; and all those who have written nobly have not written in vain, though the desperate and weary have never heard the silver laughter of wisdom. Nay, shall not such as these have part, because of that high, original purpose which remembering painfully or by way of prophecy they would make clear, in the continual affirmation of the spirit.

* This beautiful, miraculous earth-life, this inscrutable earth-life. Ibsen: When We Dead Awaken.

7. April 2004 – Nicola Gess

Edgar Allan Poe: „The Poetic Principle“ (1850).
in: Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Tales and Poems. With an Introduction by Hervey Allen. New York (The Modern Library) 1938, S. 889-907.

In speaking of the Poetic Principle, I have no design to be either thorough or profound. While discussing, very much at random, the essentiality of what we call Poetry, my principal purpose will be to cite for consideration, some few of those minor English or American poems which best suit my own taste, or which, upon my own fancy, have left the most definite impression. By ‚minor poems‘ I mean, of course, poems of little length. And here, in the beginning permit me to say a few words in regard to a somewhat peculiar principle, which, whether rightfully or wrongfully, has always had its influence in my own critical estimate of the poem. I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, ‚a long poem,‘ is simply a flat contradiction in terms.

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags – fails – a revulsion ensues – and then the poem is, in effect, and in fact, no longer such.

[...]

It is to be hoped that common-sense, in the time to come, will prefer deciding upon a work of Art, rather by the impression it makes – by the effect it produces – than by the time it took to impress the effect, or by the amount of ‚sustained effort‘ which had been found necessary in effecting the impression.

16. Oktober 2003 – Bernd Blaschke

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: „Preface“.
in: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it develops; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.

I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations. The Iliad, the tragic poetry of Greece, – Shakespeare, in the Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream, – and most especially Milton, in Paradise Lost, conform to this rule; and the most humble novelist, who seeks to confer or receive amusement from his labours, may, without presumption, apply to prose fiction a licence, or rather a rule, from the adoption of which so many exquisite combinations of human feeling have resulted in the highest specimens of poetry.

The circumstance on which my story rests was suggested in casual conversation. It was commenced partly as a source of amusement, and partly as an expedient for exercising any untried resources of mind. Other motives were mingled with these, as the work proceeded. I am by no means indifferent to the manner in which whatever moral tendencies exist in the sentiments or characters it contains shall affect the reader; yet my chief concern in this respect has been limited to the avoiding the enervating effects of the novels of the present day, and to the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue.

Siehe auch: Beispielübersetzung.

10. April 2003 – Markus Edler

Salman Rushdie: „Is Nothing Sacred?“

The title of this lecture is a question usually asked, in tones of horror, when some personage or idea or value or place held dear by the questioner is treated to a dose of iconoclasm. White cricket balls for night cricket? Female priests? A Japanese takeover of Rolls-Royce cars? Is nothing sacred?

Until recently, however, it was a question to which I thought I knew the answer. The answer was No.

No, nothing is sacred in and of itself, I would have said. Ideas, texts, even people can be made sacred – the word is from the Latin sacrare, ‚to set apart as holy‘ – but even though such entities, once their sacredness is established, seek to proclaim and to preserve their own absoluteness, their inviolability, the act of making sacred is in truth an event in history. It is the product of the many and complex pressures of the time in which the act occurs. And events in history must always be subject to questioning, deconstruction, even to declarations of their obsolescence. To respect the sacred is to be paralysed by it. The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – Uncertainty, Progress, Change – into crimes.

To take only one such declaration of obsolescence: I would have described myself as living in the aftermath of the death of god. On the subject of the death of god, the American novelist and critic William H. Gass had this to say, as recently as 1984:

The death of god represents not only the realization that gods have never existed, but the contention that such a belief is no longer even irrationally possible: that neither reason nor the taste and temper of the times condone it. The belief lingers on, of course, but it does so like astrology or a faith in a flat earth.

I have some difficulty with the uncompromising bluntness of this obituary notice. It has always been clear to me that god is unlike human beings in that it can die, so to speak, in parts. In other parts, for example India, god continues to flourish, in literally thousands of forms. So that if I speak of living after this death, I am speaking in a limited, personal sense – my sense of god ceased to exist long ago, and as a result I was drawn towards the great creative possibilities offered by surrealism, modernism and their successors, those philosophies and aesthetics born of the realization that, as Karl Marx said, ‚all that is solid melts into air‘.

10. Oktober 2002 – Florian Cramer

Walter Pater: The Poetry of Michelangelo. (Kapitelanfang).
in: Walter Pater: The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Literature, S. 73f.

Critics of Michelangelo have sometimes spoken as if the only characteristic of his genius were a wonderful strength, verging, as in the things of the imagination great strength always does, on what is singular or strange. A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe,¹ is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable. But that they shall give pleasure and exert a charm over us is indispensable too; and this strangeness must be sweet also – a lovely strangeness. And to the true admirers of Michelangelo this is the true type of the Michelangelesque – sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise, an energy of conception which seems at every moment about to break through all the conditions of comely form, recovering, touch by touch, a loveliness found usually only in the simplest natural things – ex forti dulcedo.²

In this way he sums up for them the whole character of medieval art itself in that which distinguishes it most clearly from classical work, the presence of a convulsive energy in it, becoming in lower hands merely monstrous or forbidding, and felt, even in its most graceful products, as a subdued quaintness or grotesque. Yet those who feel this grace or sweetness in Michelangelo might at the first moment be puzzled if they were asked wherein precisely such quality resided. Men of inventive temperament – Victor Hugo, for instance, in whom, as in Michelangelo, people have for the most part been attracted or repelled by the strength, while few have understood his sweetness – have sometimes relieved conceptions of merely moral or spiritual greatness, but with little aesthetic charm of their own, by lovely accidents or accessories, like the butterfly which alights on the blood-stained barricade in Les Misérables, or those sea-birds for whom the monstrous Gilliatt³ comes to be as some wild natural thing, so that they are no longer afraid of him, in Les Travailleurs de la Mer.

Anmerkungen:

¹ Wie im Deutschen: „Aloe“.
² „Aus dem Starken die Süße“ – unorthodoxes Latein, üblicher wäre z.B. „ex fortitudine dulcedo“.
³ Romanfigur aus Hugos Les Travailleurs de la Mer; ein Fischer, der im Ruf steht, ein Zauberer zu sein.

Siehe auch: Beispielübersetzung sowie Hinweise zur Klausur.

11. April 2002 – Oliver Lubrich

V. S. Naipaul: „Prologue“.
in: V. S. Naipaul: Beyond Belief. Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples. New York 1999, S. xi-xiii.

This is a book about people. It is not a book of opinion. It is a book of stories. The stories were collected during five months of travel in 1995 in four non-Arab Muslim countries – Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia. So there is a context and a theme.

Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to tum away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.

[...]

I began my writing career as a fiction writer, a manager of narrative; at that time I thought it the highest thing to be. When I was asked – nearly forty years ago – to travel about certain colonial territories in South America and the Caribbean and to write a book, I was delighted to do the traveling – taking small airplanes to strange places, going up South American rivers – but then I wasn’t sure how to write the book, how to make a pattern of what I was doing. That first time I got away with autobiography and landscape. It was years before I saw that the most important thing about travel, for the writer, was the people he found himself among.

So in these travel books or cultural explorations of mine the writer as traveler steadily retreats; the people of the country come to the front; and I become again what I was at the beginning: a manager of narrative. In the nineteenth century the invented story was used to do things that other literary forms – the poem, the essay – couldn’t easily do: to give news about a changing society, to describe mental states. I find it strange that the travel form – in the beginning so far away from my own instincts – should have taken me back there, to looking for the story; though it would have undone the point of the book if the narratives were falsified or forced. There are complexities enough in these stories. They are the point of the book; the reader should not look for „conclusions“.

Siehe auch: Beispielübersetzung sowie Hinweise zur Klausur.

10. Oktober 2001 – Bernd Blaschke

David Lodge: Changing Places. (Auszug).

In Morris Zapp’s view, the root of all critical error was a naïve confusion of literature with life. Life was transparent, literature opaque. Life was an open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of things, literature of words. Life was what it appeared to be about: if you were afraid your plane would crash it was about death, if you were trying to get a girl into bed it was about sex. Literature was never about what it appeared to be about, though in the case of the novel considerable ingenuity and perception were needed to crack the code of the realistic illusion, which was why he had been professionally attracted to the genre (even the dumbest critic understood that Hamlet wasn’t about how the guy could kill his uncle, or the Ancient Mariner about cruelty to animals, but it was surprising how many people thought that Jane Austen’s novels were about finding Mr Right).The failure to keep the categories of life and literature distinct led to all kinds of heresy and nonsense: to ‚liking‘ and ‚not liking‘ books for instance, preferring some authors to others and suchlike whimsicalities which, he had constantly to remind his students, were of no conceivable interest to anyone except themselves.

[...]

He felt a particularly pressing need to castigate naïve theories of realism because they threatened his master-work: obviously, if you applied an open-ended system (life) to a closed one (literature) the possible permutations were endless and the definitive commentary became an impossibility. Everything he knew about England warned him that the heresy flourished there with peculiar virulence, no doubt encouraged by the many concrete reminders of the actual historic existence of great authors that littered the country – baptismal registers, houses with plaques, reconstructed studies, engraved tombstones and suchlike trash. Well, one thing he was not going to do while he was in England was to visit Jane Austen’s grave.