16420
Graduate Course
WiSe 12/13: Beckett and Coetzee
Claudia Olk
Comments
In one of his interviews, J.M. Coetzee mentions Samuel Beckett as a formative influence: "Beckett can certainly be called a high modernist or even a proto-postmodernist. Beckett was an Irishman and a European with no African connections at all. Yet [...] Beckett can be transplanted into South African surroundings in such a way that he seems almost native there. What does this show? That the history of the arts is a history of unceasing cross-fertilization across fences and boundaries."
This course will be dealing precisely with this cross-fertilization across boundaries. Indeed, the nobel-prize-winning novelist and critic J.M. Coetzee and the dramatist and novelist Samuel Beckett share many features: Both were preoccupied with language and they lived in and between several languages. We will study selected works of both writers and will focus on their respective themes, style and structure to arrive at a comparative and critical analysis.
Texts will include:
J.M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), Summertime (2009)
Samuel Beckett: More Pricks than Kicks (1934), Murphy (1938), Watt (1945), Waiting for Godot (1953)
close
16 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Wed, 2012-10-17 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2012-10-24 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2012-10-31 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2012-11-07 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2012-11-14 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2012-11-21 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2012-11-28 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2012-12-05 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2012-12-12 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2012-12-19 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2013-01-09 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2013-01-16 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2013-01-23 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2013-01-30 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2013-02-06 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2013-02-13 12:00 - 14:00