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WiSe 22/23: Reading Alexander von Humboldt: A nobleman from Berlin - the world's first environmentalist?

Susanne Scharnowski

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Subject: In the 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was probably the most famous naturalist-explorer in the Western world, referred to by some as “the Napoleon of science” (he was born in the same year as the famous Frenchman). He was friends with Simón Bolivár, met the US president Thomas Jefferson, and is said to have influenced the biologist Charles Darwin as well as writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Not only the Berlin university and the newly opened Humboldt Forum are named after him (and his brother Wilhelm): various species of plants and animals, rivers, mountains, even an asteroid and the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon bear his name. There are Humboldt schools, streets, parks, and counties in the USA, and Wikipedia has a special category for “things named after Alexander von Humboldt”. During the 19th century, his fame was based mostly on his journey through South America, where he explored the Spanish Empire on the verge of its collapse, as well as on his public lectures and his popular publications, especially his ambitious major work Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe. More recently, he has been re-discovered and described as “the first environmentalist” and as the “founder of a humane, socially conscious ecology”. Program: This course offers the opportunity to delve deeply into life, work and impact of a figure who deserves to be better known, especially because he was a builder of bridges, connecting science and literature, Enlightenment and Romanticism, the Old and the New World, and his Prussian hometown Berlin with the French capital where he lived and worked for more than 20 years. To get acquainted with Humboldt, we will study and discuss extracts from his books as well as academic texts about his work. In doing so, students will practice some of the skills and techniques that are necessary for developing academic reading comprehension: systematic/ critical reading, skimming/ scanning/ extraction of specific information/ in-depth (extensive) reading; taking notes, highlighting; summarising, paraphrasing, synthesising; using dictionaries and encyclopaedias, detecting connections and contradictions in and between texts; evaluation & appreciation of texts; drawing inferences about a meaning of a word from context; weaving together ideas from content; drawing inferences from content; recognizing a writer’s purpose, attitude, tone, and mood. Students will have to purchase a reader with the texts on which the course is based at the copyshop Habelschwerdter Allee 37 (next to “Rostlaube”). Should you select this course? You should be interested in the topic of the course as well in working on and improving your academic reading skills. Workload and assessment: Students will read between 10 and 15 pages of texts in English per week, some of which date from the 19th century, and will have to prepare various homework assignments (oral and written). The final assessment will consist of a written assignment (submission: 20 February, 2023.) If you want to participate, you must attend the first, at the latest the second session (17 or, at the latest, 24 October); joining the course later won’t be possible. You must attend at least 80% of the classes (13 out of 16). close