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Opium and Literature- Lecturer
- Dr. Nadine Böhm-Schnitker
- Details
- Hauptseminar
2 cred.h, Sprache Englisch
Time and place: Thu 14:15 - 15:45, A 603 (Bismarckstr. 1)
- Prerequisites / Organisational information
- Zugehörigkeit zu den Modulen
BA English and American Studies: Hauptmodul A. (Zulassungsvoraussetzung: Zwischenmodul II)
HA Lehramt Englisch an Gymnasien: Hauptmodul L-GYM Literature. (Zulassungsvoraussetzung: Zwischenmodul Literature/Culture) – HA (80 %) Alte Studiengänge (Studienbeginn vor WS 07/08): Hauptstudium. (Zulassungsvoraussetzung: Zwischenprüfung)
HA MA English Studies: Core Modules; Master Module II Culture/Literature
MA Literaturstudien - intermedial und interkulturell (Anglistik als Kernfach): Modul 9 Aufbaumodul
- Contents
- This advanced seminar explores Romantic,Victorian and neo-Victorian literature with regard to discourses on opium, appropriated for example to bolster notions of literary inspiration, to inform literary criticism and to support Britain’s colonial enterprise. The opium trade elucidates capitalist atrocities in the context of colonial expansion and Empire building, culminating in two so-called Opium Wars. Cultivated in India, marketed by the East India Company, and forced onto a Chinese market to lubricate global trade, opium has become shorthand for colonial exploitation. In a domestic British context, however, opium was normalized as a quotidian drug employed to pacify children, to help people sleep or to alleviate pain. In literature, opium not only inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge to an innovative strand of poetry or Thomas De Quincey to a new form of a flâneurist confession, it also becomes a mediator for unconscious processes in Wilkie Collins’s sensation fiction. Besides, the opium den is turned into an important literary setting as well as a cultural motif illustrating the colonial impact of opium on British citizens. Neo-Victorian fiction, in its turn, reflects on the historical as well as the literary long-term effects of a drug flooding markets, cementing power hierarchies and calibrating cultural practices. We will address discourses on opium in order to explore their manifold intersections with negotiations of race, gender and class, with debates on the function of literature, notions of creativity and inspiration, as well with strategies of economic and imperial expansion.
- Recommended literature
- Primary Texts
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" (1798)• Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821)• Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868)• Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (1891)• Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (2008)• Dan Simmons, Drood (2009)
Secondary Texts:
The further course reading is made available via StudOn or can be retrieved from the seminar library.
- Additional information
- Registration is required for this lecture.
Die Registration via: CASSY Erlangen
- Verwendung in folgenden UnivIS-Modulen
- Startsemester WS 2015/2016:
- Anglistik, Modul 9 C (M 9)
- Master Module II: Culture (Master II: Cult)
- Master Module II: Literature (Master II: Lit)
- Department: Chair of English Literature and Culture (Prof. Dr. Feldmann)
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