British Literary Studies

British literary studies is one of the oldest academic disciplines since the inception of ‘Anglistik’ and the foundation of English Departments in Germany. Consequently, it has seen various transformations since the end of the nineteenth century. Today, it is a cross-disciplinary field of re­search and teaching, closely interlinked in its re­search areas and methods of investigation with linguistics, cultural studies and didactics. Furthermore its study requires an integration of various other discourses (e.g. history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, pedadogy, educational sciences, religion, philosophy, the fine arts, music or theatre studies).

British Literary studies comprises a number of subdisciplines such as literary history, literary theory and criticism, genre poetics, textual analysis and interpretation. It uses a wide scope of critical and analytical tools ranging from close reading and deconstruction to cultural materialism, contextualisation, gender studies or postcolonial studies.

The concept and the definition of literature have undergone significant changes over time which exemplify the historicity of the term. A very broad and highly undifferentiated definition of literature sees it as encompassing all written communications (and excluding oral literatures). A narrower definition limits literature to poetic and imaginative texts.

In our de­part­ment, we don’t just study and teach canonical texts, but tend to select texts where the com­mu­ni­cation between text, author and reader is well working at present – may that be a text produced several hundreds of years ago or just this year. Students are offered courses on texts dating from the medieval period to the present. The texts represent a huge generic diversity  (poetry, drama, fiction, and prose). It is a specialty of our train­ing here to also include theatre studies, children’s literature, picturebooks, childhood studies, intercultural literary studies i(e.g. Anglo-Russian literary relationships) and New English Literature//Postcolonial literature (e.g. from South Africa and Canada). We regard texts within their socio-cultural contexts, train various critical approaches (author-, text-, context- and reader based). As there is no independent meaning of a literary text apart from or outside of lan­guage, linguistics and literary theory (e.g. reader response theory, narratology) play an im­por­tant role. This is meant to avoid simplistic and reductionist readings (surface readings which focus on content, plot, action and character only, treat literature exclusively in the sense of real life and real people, without any consideration of their narrative constructedness). This contributes to discovering and deconstructing the meanings conveyed through the deeper layers of texts. Because literature is apt to trigger multiple constructions of meaning/ways of reading, the differentiation between past significance and present meaning (especially in the case of so-called classics) is paramount, i.e. the changing reception history of texts. So what we are aiming at is to train students to develop from naïve readers into very sophisticated ones: open, curious, eager, and critical. And of the type that cherishes reading as a lifelong obsession!