(S) The Student’s Guide to Literature, or: "How to read a novel?"

This seminar is designed for third year BA students as well as for LikWa and “Staatsexamen” students.

If you have ever wondered how literature works and how to interpret complex but fascinating texts, this is the seminar for you. The goal is to critically examine the unique characteristics of literature, to understand how texts produce meaning, and to examine why different interpretations of one and the same text are possible. We will, of course, also discuss the limits of interpretation and how they can be defined.

As a practical example we will focus on Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997), a mesmerizing book which John Updike has not only called "a work of highly conscious art" but also compared to a "a devotionally built temple." Other critics have described Roy’s novel as "a masterpiece, utterly exceptional in every way" and as "a banquet for all the senses we bring to reading." It goes without saying that The God of Small Things is also one of the most influential postcolonial novels published over the last 30 years and gives great insight into the problems India and the 'developing world' face today.

This seminar is a compact seminar, i.e. we will meet several times at the beginning of the term and then over a weekend in June/July.