Zur Seitennavigation oder mit Tastenkombination für den accesskey-Taste und Taste 1 
Zum Seiteninhalt oder mit Tastenkombination für den accesskey und Taste 2 

Foto: Matthias Friel

Dinosaurs and (the Critique of) Progress - Einzelansicht

Veranstaltungsart Seminar Veranstaltungsnummer
SWS 2 Semester SoSe 2021
Einrichtung Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik   Sprache englisch
Weitere Links comment
Belegungsfrist 06.04.2021 - 10.05.2021

Belegung über PULS
Gruppe 1:
     jetzt belegen / abmelden
    Tag Zeit Rhythmus Dauer Raum Lehrperson Ausfall-/Ausweichtermine Max. Teilnehmer/-innen
Einzeltermine anzeigen
Seminar Mi 16:00 bis 18:00 wöchentlich 14.04.2021 bis 21.07.2021  Online.Veranstaltung Prof. Dr. Wiemann   30
Kommentar

Dinosaurs are a relatively recent species: they hit the scene only in 1842, when British paleontologist Richard Owen coined that name as an umbrella to bring together a group of mysterious fossil findings that could not be assigned to any known animal species. The dinomania that soon hit Victorian Britain, culminating in the 1852 construction of a full fledged dinosaur park around the Crystal Palace, was only the first in a series of dinosaur booms in Western culture up to our own immediate present. The dinosaur, writes cultural theorist W.J.T. Mitchell, is much more important as a cultural object than as a scientific entity: it “changes its appearance and meaning in relation to transformations in modern political economies and to changes in scientific and technological paradigms”. As we will see in the course of the semester, the icon of the dinosaur often serves as a collective symbol through which the problem of progress and modernity is negotiated. 

Guided mainly by fiction, we will in our seminar reconstruct a couple of crucial transformations that the dinosaur as a cultural icon has undergone. Our corpus will range from extracts of the first (long forgotten) novels with dinosaurs in them to Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, from Conan Doyle’s The Lost World to its postcolonial rewriting in Mahasweta Devi’s haunting story of the inexplicable appearance of a pterodactyl in the hinterlands of central India.



Literatur

 

Please buy and read:

  • Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World (Oxford World Classics edn)
  • Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

 

Material avaliable on Moodle will include:

  • Mahasweta Devi, "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha"
  • George Gaylord Simpson, The Dechronization of Sam Magruder
  • short fiction and numerous critical and historical essays 

 

Leistungsnachweis

3 CPs non-graded for

* regular attendance and active participation by contributing to at least two forum sessions;

*a response paper (1000 words) to be submitted at the end of the semester.

 

3 CPs graded for

* regular attendance and active participation by contributing to at least two forum sessions;

* a critical bibliography of one novel to be sumitted by July 31;

* a response paper (1000 words) to be submitted at the end of the semester.


Strukturbaum
Keine Einordnung ins Vorlesungsverzeichnis vorhanden. Veranstaltung ist aus dem Semester SoSe 2021 , Aktuelles Semester: SoSe 2024