Course description:
This lecture provides an introduction to the methods, concepts, and tools students of literatures in English are advised to use when approaching literary texts. These will help them to obtain a fuller understanding of texts and to express themselves clearly and competently when discussing them. Furthermore, we will look at literature as a particular form of communication, i.e., we will consider the specificity of literary texts, and its various genres: drama, narrative fiction, poetry. We will also talk about different approaches to literature, i.e., literary theory.

Course Aims: This lecture aims to familiarise students with central concepts and tools for the analysis of literary texts of various genres. Students will obtain clear ideas of approaches to literature, methodologies, terminology, and strategies of literary interpretation.

Reading: Please buy and read William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (c. 1601) and Michael Meyer's “English and American Literatures” (utb basics, 4th ed.), both of which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch (Universitäts-Boulevard on campus).
A list of poems, short stories, and extracts from longer works will be made available on Stud.IP.

Please note that both Hamlet and all of the material on Stud.IP is compulsory reading for the exam.

This lecture will introduce students to the basic tools of literary analysis of poetry, drama, and narrative. As well it will introduce into the most relevant theories and methods of literary analysis. These will enable students to be able to discuss and analyze literary works, skills necessary for future literary classes.
Students will have to purchase and read Michael Meyer “English and American Literatures”, 4. überarb. u. erw. Aufl. utb basics (18,90€) and Shakespeare “Hamlet” (app. 12€). Both books are available for purchase through the university bookstore on Universitäts-Boulevard on campus. All other texts are provided through StudIP.
Registration for one of the two classes is mandatory; pls refrain from registering in both lectures; all students will get admitted to one lecture.
Regular attendance and preparation of the reading material is mandatory.

In this course, we will explore the scientific study of language. Students will be equipped with knowledge of the core areas of linguistics: semiotics, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. You will learn about signs, sounds, words, sentences, and meaning. Whenever possible, we will take a contrastive look at English and other languages as well as explore opportunities to apply linguistics.

Why do language learners have accents? How do you read phonetic transcriptions? What are the principles of successful communication? Who's that creature from the course picture? Find out!

Throughout the semester, students are expected to prepare each week's readings and to actively participate in class discussions.

Assessment:
Final exam (on 28 Jan 2026, afternoon)

Literature:
Kortmann, Bernd (2020). English Linguistics: Essentials (2nd ed). Berlin: Cornelsen

Linguistics is the scientific study of language and communication. It deals with all aspects of how people use language and what they must know in order to do so. The class will thus provide an overview of the core areas of linguistics – phonetics and phonology (the study of speech sounds), morphology (the structure of words), syntax (the structure of sentences), semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (the study of meaning and language use in context).

Requirements
Reading the course material, active participation in discussions and groupwork in class, a final written exam (e-Klausur).

Literature:
Kortmann, Bernd. 2020. English Linguistics: Essentials. 2nd ed. Berlin: Cornelsen.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the father of the American short story and modern detective story. In a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales he outlined what we now take as his ‘theory’ of the short story. We will discuss this ‘theory’ as well as Joseph Urgo’s take on the American short story upon which we will base the readings of some of the finest examples of American short stories from the Romantic period to the present. They will include classics by Poe, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin as well as stories by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American authors.

Class requirements are regular attendance, in-depth knowledge of reading material, and active class discussion. Reading the texts is mandatory.

This course takes a closer look at the literary north of England as portrayed in contemporary women's writing. Northern England is often treated as an internal 'other' within English national consciousness and political history and subjected to stereotypes many of which are traceable to the region's industrial history, working-class and neglect during the Thatcher era. In this course, we will attempt to locate 'the North' geographically, conceptually and imaginatively by considering its representation in a range of literary works ranging from psychogeographical poetry to gothic fiction. Taking into account the complex histories and current political debates in the region, we will discuss literary representations of gender, sexuality, working-class culture and race, national identity and environmental politics and examine the role literary form and genre play in contemporary women writers' constructions of the North.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
* Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border (2015)
* Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2018)
* Anita Sethi, I Belong Here (2022)

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

This course provides a basic exploration of the forms, functions, and varieties of English in the contemporary world. It examines how English has evolved into multiple regional and functional varieties, reflecting diverse sociolinguistic, cultural, and technological influences. Students will engage with topics including World Englishes, stylistic and register variation, and the impact of globalisation and digital communication on modern English usage.

Objectives
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
1. explain the concept and scope of contemporary English.
2. identify and analyse major regional varieties of English across the world.
3. distinguish stylistic and register differences in professional and everyday contexts.
4. examine sociolinguistic and cultural factors influencing English usage globally.
5. demonstrate practical competence in using appropriate English varieties and registers for specific communicative contexts.

Think capitalism only lives in boardrooms and balance sheets? Think again. It’s in the words we use, the stories we tell, and the meanings we don't even notice.
This course invites students to explore how capitalist ideologies are woven into the very fabric of the English language. Through critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and etymological inquiry, students will examine how everyday words, phrases, and narratives shape—and are shaped by—the socio-economic realities we inhabit. We will investigate how language does not merely reflect reality, but actively constructs it, uncovering how capitalist markers embed themselves in the meanings we take for granted. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to identify, analyze, and challenge the underlying stories capitalism tells through language—stories we all speak and live by.

Requirements
The usual: read the reading material, join class, participate in classroom discussions, hand in the assignments on time.

Studienleistung (D1a) three worksheets.
Prüfungsleistung (D1c) three worksheets and a ten-page term paper.
Please not that this class cannot be take for ‚Ersatzleistung für das Auslandssemester‘ or General Studies. Erasmus students are welcome.

References
Baker, Paul. 2024. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. 2nd ed. Bloomsbury Academic. Available as ebook from the library.
Klein, Naomi. (2000) 2021. No Logo: An insightful examination of advertising’s impact on society and youth culture. Fourth estate.
Leary, John Patrick. 2019. Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism. Haymarket Books.
Sahner, Simon & Daniel Stähr. 2024. Die Sprache des Kapitalismus. S. Fischer.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

Language is all around us, in signs, graffiti, posters, stickers, shop names, and public notices. In this seminar, we explore how language in public spaces reflects and shapes social life. What can signage tell us about identity, power, multilingualism, or exclusion?

Students will carry out small fieldwork projects, collecting and analysing real-world examples from their own surroundings. Together, we will discuss how space, language, and society interact and what this tells us about the world we live in.

Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004) is a theory of language that assumes that whatever we say or write has a function. These functions can be grouped into three superordinate groups, so called metafunctions; the experiential, the interpersonal and the textual metafunction. Students in this course will get a thorough revision of word classes, phrases and clauses. You will learn to analyse the functions of the constituents of a clause according to the metafunctions. This, in turn, serves to describe texts from all areas of life.
Throughout the term, we will study how Systemic Functional Grammar can help us to judge generative AI’s output, but also how we can use generative AI to make Systemic Functional analyses of texts easier. SFG and Language AIs can profit from one another, and we are a part of the process.

Requirements
Participation in discussions in class and group work, which requires the students‘ attendance. Reading the course material. The students will do several small written tasks that add up to their grade (PL) or „pass“ (SL).

This class can be taken for the WD module, the Focus Module, for the D module (D1c and D2b will require a term paper), as well as for ‚Ersatzleistung für das Auslandssemester‘. Erasmus students are of course welcome.

Reference
Halliday M.A.K & Christian M.I.M Matthiessen. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. Hodder Arnold.
Thompson, Geoff. 2014. Introducing Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. Routledge. Available for download from the library.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the father of the American short story and modern detective story. In a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales he outlined what we now take as his ‘theory’ of the short story. We will discuss this ‘theory’ as well as Joseph Urgo’s take on the American short story upon which we will base the readings of some of the finest examples of American short stories from the Romantic period to the present. They will include classics by Poe, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin as well as stories by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American authors.

Class requirements are regular attendance, in-depth knowledge of reading material, and active class discussion. Reading the texts is mandatory.

This course takes a closer look at the literary north of England as portrayed in contemporary women's writing. Northern England is often treated as an internal 'other' within English national consciousness and political history and subjected to stereotypes many of which are traceable to the region's industrial history, working-class and neglect during the Thatcher era. In this course, we will attempt to locate 'the North' geographically, conceptually and imaginatively by considering its representation in a range of literary works ranging from psychogeographical poetry to gothic fiction. Taking into account the complex histories and current political debates in the region, we will discuss literary representations of gender, sexuality, working-class culture and race, national identity and environmental politics and examine the role literary form and genre play in contemporary women writers' constructions of the North.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
* Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border (2015)
* Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2018)
* Anita Sethi, I Belong Here (2022)

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first course of the Practical Language Foundation module (“SP-Basis”) taken in the winter semester.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first course of the Practical Language Foundation module (“SP-Basis”) taken in the winter semester.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first course of the Practical Language Foundation module (“SP-Basis”) taken in the winter semester.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work and giving you 6 credit points.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work for which you will receive 6 credit points.
The focus of both modules is on academic writing in English at university level, and you will develop the skills necessary to plan and write academic essays. This semester, you will be looking at structural elements such as paragraphing, writing a thesis statement and using citation etc. while also developing academic language skills in terms of word choice, grammar and syntax. Diagnostic tasks will indicate which personal areas of language you need to develop in order to achieve the academic level of writing for this level.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work for which you will receive 6 credit points.
The focus of both modules is on academic writing in English at university level, and you will develop the skills necessary to plan and write academic essays. This semester, you will be looking at structural elements such as paragraphing, writing a thesis statement and using citation etc. while also developing academic language skills in terms of word choice, grammar and syntax. Diagnostic tasks will indicate which personal areas of language you need to develop in order to achieve the academic level of writing for this level.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work for which you will receive 6 credit points.
The focus of both modules is on academic writing in English at university level, and you will develop the skills necessary to plan and write academic essays. This semester, you will be looking at structural elements such as paragraphing, writing a thesis statement and using citation etc. while also developing academic language skills in terms of word choice, grammar and syntax. Diagnostic tasks will indicate which personal areas of language you need to develop in order to achieve the academic level of writing for this level.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.
Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) enables you to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing the opportunity to work on language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. You will explore areas such as politics, traditions, important people and histories of countries connected to the English-speaking world. Different countries will be critically analysed with the goal of gaining and expanding knowledge about a specific English-speaking culture. You will have the opportunity to practice the communication skills of discussion, analysis, compromise, persuasion, problem solving etc. At the end of the course, you will present your own unique ideas, putting theory into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.
Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) enables you to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing the opportunity to work on language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. You will explore areas such as politics, traditions, important people and histories of countries connected to the English-speaking world. Different countries will be critically analysed with the goal of gaining and expanding knowledge about a specific English-speaking culture. You will have the opportunity to practice the communication skills of discussion, analysis, compromise, persuasion, problem solving etc. At the end of the course, you will present your own unique ideas, putting theory into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

This class is for students who have already completed CBIS as it is the last preparation phase for the oral proficiency interview taken upon completetion of CBIS and C&C.
Students who have previously taken but not successfully passed the oral exam are also welcome to join.
The aim of the Culture and Communication class is to help you prepare for the final SP-Proficiency module oral exam taken when you have completed the SP-Proficiency module. This class will deal with two different areas from which you will be able to develop ONE research project as the basis for your oral exam.
You will be looking at defining moments which have greatly influenced events within the English-speaking world. Your task will be to investigate the processes which led to a particular event, define the event itself and explore the long-term and short-term consequences. A critical analytic approach be will necessary as you explore the causes and implications of the topic of your choice.
In addition, we will work on improving important aspects of grammar, pronunciation, intonation as well as developing the confidence and fluency needed to successfully pass the exam. Whereas CBIS was more about collaboration and teamwork, Culture and Communication allows you to build upon the research skills developed last semester as you move forward with your own project.

In this workshop, we will explore and experiment with contemporary methods of improvisational theater—the art of making up theatrical moments on the spot, without a script. It is one of the most vibrant and current forms of theater of today and is deeply ingrained in US popular culture.

You will first learn the basic principles of improvisational theater and how to apply them to improvised scenework. Later, you will encounter a specific performance structure that will serve as a framework for a public performance.

Through this work, you will build confidence in public speaking, explore practical approaches to collaborative creation, and gain insight into the production and marketing process of a theatre production. In addition, we will reflect on how these skills can be beneficial both in academic contexts as well as in the professional world beyond academia.

There will be a regular class on Monday 2.15-3.45pm during the semester, in which we will cover the basics of improvisational theater, followed by an intensive in the lecture-free period (2-6 March 2026, 10am-1.30pm) led by the student assistant Tarja Spiekermann, which will focus on a specific performance structure and prepare for a public performance on 7 March 2026. If you participate in the theatre workshop, you can choose either to be a performer or take on a behind-the-scenes role in production and marketing.

Films are usually appreciated as mere entertainment. However, they always convey ideas about self and society, right and wrong, good and bad. Moreover, they offer specific conceptions of race, class,gender, ethnicity, sexuality. In watching a selection of classical and post-classical Hollywood films we will focus on the representation of the Orient as an imaginary space that serves as a canvas upon which fears and anxieties are projected.
This course is highly recommended to students participating in the course “Key Topics in Cultural History: Analyzing Hollywood Cinema”.
Requirements:
• regular attendance
• oral presentation and handout

Course description:
This lecture provides an introduction to the methods, concepts, and tools students of literatures in English are advised to use when approaching literary texts. These will help them to obtain a fuller understanding of texts and to express themselves clearly and competently when discussing them. Furthermore, we will look at literature as a particular form of communication, i.e., we will consider the specificity of literary texts, and its various genres: drama, narrative fiction, poetry. We will also talk about different approaches to literature, i.e., literary theory.

Course Aims: This lecture aims to familiarise students with central concepts and tools for the analysis of literary texts of various genres. Students will obtain clear ideas of approaches to literature, methodologies, terminology, and strategies of literary interpretation.

Reading: Please buy and read William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (c. 1601) and Michael Meyer's “English and American Literatures” (utb basics, 4th ed.), both of which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch (Universitäts-Boulevard on campus).
A list of poems, short stories, and extracts from longer works will be made available on Stud.IP.

Please note that both Hamlet and all of the material on Stud.IP is compulsory reading for the exam.

This lecture will introduce students to the basic tools of literary analysis of poetry, drama, and narrative. As well it will introduce into the most relevant theories and methods of literary analysis. These will enable students to be able to discuss and analyze literary works, skills necessary for future literary classes.
Students will have to purchase and read Michael Meyer “English and American Literatures”, 4. überarb. u. erw. Aufl. utb basics (18,90€) and Shakespeare “Hamlet” (app. 12€). Both books are available for purchase through the university bookstore on Universitäts-Boulevard on campus. All other texts are provided through StudIP.
Registration for one of the two classes is mandatory; pls refrain from registering in both lectures; all students will get admitted to one lecture.
Regular attendance and preparation of the reading material is mandatory.

In this course, we will explore the scientific study of language. Students will be equipped with knowledge of the core areas of linguistics: semiotics, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. You will learn about signs, sounds, words, sentences, and meaning. Whenever possible, we will take a contrastive look at English and other languages as well as explore opportunities to apply linguistics.

Why do language learners have accents? How do you read phonetic transcriptions? What are the principles of successful communication? Who's that creature from the course picture? Find out!

Throughout the semester, students are expected to prepare each week's readings and to actively participate in class discussions.

Assessment:
Final exam (on 28 Jan 2026, afternoon)

Literature:
Kortmann, Bernd (2020). English Linguistics: Essentials (2nd ed). Berlin: Cornelsen

Linguistics is the scientific study of language and communication. It deals with all aspects of how people use language and what they must know in order to do so. The class will thus provide an overview of the core areas of linguistics – phonetics and phonology (the study of speech sounds), morphology (the structure of words), syntax (the structure of sentences), semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (the study of meaning and language use in context).

Requirements
Reading the course material, active participation in discussions and groupwork in class, a final written exam (e-Klausur).

Literature:
Kortmann, Bernd. 2020. English Linguistics: Essentials. 2nd ed. Berlin: Cornelsen.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the father of the American short story and modern detective story. In a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales he outlined what we now take as his ‘theory’ of the short story. We will discuss this ‘theory’ as well as Joseph Urgo’s take on the American short story upon which we will base the readings of some of the finest examples of American short stories from the Romantic period to the present. They will include classics by Poe, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin as well as stories by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American authors.

Class requirements are regular attendance, in-depth knowledge of reading material, and active class discussion. Reading the texts is mandatory.

This course takes a closer look at the literary north of England as portrayed in contemporary women's writing. Northern England is often treated as an internal 'other' within English national consciousness and political history and subjected to stereotypes many of which are traceable to the region's industrial history, working-class and neglect during the Thatcher era. In this course, we will attempt to locate 'the North' geographically, conceptually and imaginatively by considering its representation in a range of literary works ranging from psychogeographical poetry to gothic fiction. Taking into account the complex histories and current political debates in the region, we will discuss literary representations of gender, sexuality, working-class culture and race, national identity and environmental politics and examine the role literary form and genre play in contemporary women writers' constructions of the North.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
* Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border (2015)
* Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2018)
* Anita Sethi, I Belong Here (2022)

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

This course provides a basic exploration of the forms, functions, and varieties of English in the contemporary world. It examines how English has evolved into multiple regional and functional varieties, reflecting diverse sociolinguistic, cultural, and technological influences. Students will engage with topics including World Englishes, stylistic and register variation, and the impact of globalisation and digital communication on modern English usage.

Objectives
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
1. explain the concept and scope of contemporary English.
2. identify and analyse major regional varieties of English across the world.
3. distinguish stylistic and register differences in professional and everyday contexts.
4. examine sociolinguistic and cultural factors influencing English usage globally.
5. demonstrate practical competence in using appropriate English varieties and registers for specific communicative contexts.

Think capitalism only lives in boardrooms and balance sheets? Think again. It’s in the words we use, the stories we tell, and the meanings we don't even notice.
This course invites students to explore how capitalist ideologies are woven into the very fabric of the English language. Through critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and etymological inquiry, students will examine how everyday words, phrases, and narratives shape—and are shaped by—the socio-economic realities we inhabit. We will investigate how language does not merely reflect reality, but actively constructs it, uncovering how capitalist markers embed themselves in the meanings we take for granted. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to identify, analyze, and challenge the underlying stories capitalism tells through language—stories we all speak and live by.

Requirements
The usual: read the reading material, join class, participate in classroom discussions, hand in the assignments on time.

Studienleistung (D1a) three worksheets.
Prüfungsleistung (D1c) three worksheets and a ten-page term paper.
Please not that this class cannot be take for ‚Ersatzleistung für das Auslandssemester‘ or General Studies. Erasmus students are welcome.

References
Baker, Paul. 2024. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. 2nd ed. Bloomsbury Academic. Available as ebook from the library.
Klein, Naomi. (2000) 2021. No Logo: An insightful examination of advertising’s impact on society and youth culture. Fourth estate.
Leary, John Patrick. 2019. Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism. Haymarket Books.
Sahner, Simon & Daniel Stähr. 2024. Die Sprache des Kapitalismus. S. Fischer.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

Language is all around us, in signs, graffiti, posters, stickers, shop names, and public notices. In this seminar, we explore how language in public spaces reflects and shapes social life. What can signage tell us about identity, power, multilingualism, or exclusion?

Students will carry out small fieldwork projects, collecting and analysing real-world examples from their own surroundings. Together, we will discuss how space, language, and society interact and what this tells us about the world we live in.

Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004) is a theory of language that assumes that whatever we say or write has a function. These functions can be grouped into three superordinate groups, so called metafunctions; the experiential, the interpersonal and the textual metafunction. Students in this course will get a thorough revision of word classes, phrases and clauses. You will learn to analyse the functions of the constituents of a clause according to the metafunctions. This, in turn, serves to describe texts from all areas of life.
Throughout the term, we will study how Systemic Functional Grammar can help us to judge generative AI’s output, but also how we can use generative AI to make Systemic Functional analyses of texts easier. SFG and Language AIs can profit from one another, and we are a part of the process.

Requirements
Participation in discussions in class and group work, which requires the students‘ attendance. Reading the course material. The students will do several small written tasks that add up to their grade (PL) or „pass“ (SL).

This class can be taken for the WD module, the Focus Module, for the D module (D1c and D2b will require a term paper), as well as for ‚Ersatzleistung für das Auslandssemester‘. Erasmus students are of course welcome.

Reference
Halliday M.A.K & Christian M.I.M Matthiessen. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. Hodder Arnold.
Thompson, Geoff. 2014. Introducing Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. Routledge. Available for download from the library.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the father of the American short story and modern detective story. In a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales he outlined what we now take as his ‘theory’ of the short story. We will discuss this ‘theory’ as well as Joseph Urgo’s take on the American short story upon which we will base the readings of some of the finest examples of American short stories from the Romantic period to the present. They will include classics by Poe, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin as well as stories by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American authors.

Class requirements are regular attendance, in-depth knowledge of reading material, and active class discussion. Reading the texts is mandatory.

This course takes a closer look at the literary north of England as portrayed in contemporary women's writing. Northern England is often treated as an internal 'other' within English national consciousness and political history and subjected to stereotypes many of which are traceable to the region's industrial history, working-class and neglect during the Thatcher era. In this course, we will attempt to locate 'the North' geographically, conceptually and imaginatively by considering its representation in a range of literary works ranging from psychogeographical poetry to gothic fiction. Taking into account the complex histories and current political debates in the region, we will discuss literary representations of gender, sexuality, working-class culture and race, national identity and environmental politics and examine the role literary form and genre play in contemporary women writers' constructions of the North.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
* Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border (2015)
* Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2018)
* Anita Sethi, I Belong Here (2022)

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first course of the Practical Language Foundation module (“SP-Basis”) taken in the winter semester.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first course of the Practical Language Foundation module (“SP-Basis”) taken in the winter semester.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first course of the Practical Language Foundation module (“SP-Basis”) taken in the winter semester.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work and giving you 6 credit points.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work for which you will receive 6 credit points.
The focus of both modules is on academic writing in English at university level, and you will develop the skills necessary to plan and write academic essays. This semester, you will be looking at structural elements such as paragraphing, writing a thesis statement and using citation etc. while also developing academic language skills in terms of word choice, grammar and syntax. Diagnostic tasks will indicate which personal areas of language you need to develop in order to achieve the academic level of writing for this level.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work for which you will receive 6 credit points.
The focus of both modules is on academic writing in English at university level, and you will develop the skills necessary to plan and write academic essays. This semester, you will be looking at structural elements such as paragraphing, writing a thesis statement and using citation etc. while also developing academic language skills in terms of word choice, grammar and syntax. Diagnostic tasks will indicate which personal areas of language you need to develop in order to achieve the academic level of writing for this level.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work for which you will receive 6 credit points.
The focus of both modules is on academic writing in English at university level, and you will develop the skills necessary to plan and write academic essays. This semester, you will be looking at structural elements such as paragraphing, writing a thesis statement and using citation etc. while also developing academic language skills in terms of word choice, grammar and syntax. Diagnostic tasks will indicate which personal areas of language you need to develop in order to achieve the academic level of writing for this level.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.
Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) enables you to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing the opportunity to work on language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. You will explore areas such as politics, traditions, important people and histories of countries connected to the English-speaking world. Different countries will be critically analysed with the goal of gaining and expanding knowledge about a specific English-speaking culture. You will have the opportunity to practice the communication skills of discussion, analysis, compromise, persuasion, problem solving etc. At the end of the course, you will present your own unique ideas, putting theory into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.
Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) enables you to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing the opportunity to work on language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. You will explore areas such as politics, traditions, important people and histories of countries connected to the English-speaking world. Different countries will be critically analysed with the goal of gaining and expanding knowledge about a specific English-speaking culture. You will have the opportunity to practice the communication skills of discussion, analysis, compromise, persuasion, problem solving etc. At the end of the course, you will present your own unique ideas, putting theory into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

This class is for students who have already completed CBIS as it is the last preparation phase for the oral proficiency interview taken upon completetion of CBIS and C&C.
Students who have previously taken but not successfully passed the oral exam are also welcome to join.
The aim of the Culture and Communication class is to help you prepare for the final SP-Proficiency module oral exam taken when you have completed the SP-Proficiency module. This class will deal with two different areas from which you will be able to develop ONE research project as the basis for your oral exam.
You will be looking at defining moments which have greatly influenced events within the English-speaking world. Your task will be to investigate the processes which led to a particular event, define the event itself and explore the long-term and short-term consequences. A critical analytic approach be will necessary as you explore the causes and implications of the topic of your choice.
In addition, we will work on improving important aspects of grammar, pronunciation, intonation as well as developing the confidence and fluency needed to successfully pass the exam. Whereas CBIS was more about collaboration and teamwork, Culture and Communication allows you to build upon the research skills developed last semester as you move forward with your own project.

In this workshop, we will explore and experiment with contemporary methods of improvisational theater—the art of making up theatrical moments on the spot, without a script. It is one of the most vibrant and current forms of theater of today and is deeply ingrained in US popular culture.

You will first learn the basic principles of improvisational theater and how to apply them to improvised scenework. Later, you will encounter a specific performance structure that will serve as a framework for a public performance.

Through this work, you will build confidence in public speaking, explore practical approaches to collaborative creation, and gain insight into the production and marketing process of a theatre production. In addition, we will reflect on how these skills can be beneficial both in academic contexts as well as in the professional world beyond academia.

There will be a regular class on Monday 2.15-3.45pm during the semester, in which we will cover the basics of improvisational theater, followed by an intensive in the lecture-free period (2-6 March 2026, 10am-1.30pm) led by the student assistant Tarja Spiekermann, which will focus on a specific performance structure and prepare for a public performance on 7 March 2026. If you participate in the theatre workshop, you can choose either to be a performer or take on a behind-the-scenes role in production and marketing.

Films are usually appreciated as mere entertainment. However, they always convey ideas about self and society, right and wrong, good and bad. Moreover, they offer specific conceptions of race, class,gender, ethnicity, sexuality. In watching a selection of classical and post-classical Hollywood films we will focus on the representation of the Orient as an imaginary space that serves as a canvas upon which fears and anxieties are projected.
This course is highly recommended to students participating in the course “Key Topics in Cultural History: Analyzing Hollywood Cinema”.
Requirements:
• regular attendance
• oral presentation and handout

Course description:
This lecture provides an introduction to the methods, concepts, and tools students of literatures in English are advised to use when approaching literary texts. These will help them to obtain a fuller understanding of texts and to express themselves clearly and competently when discussing them. Furthermore, we will look at literature as a particular form of communication, i.e., we will consider the specificity of literary texts, and its various genres: drama, narrative fiction, poetry. We will also talk about different approaches to literature, i.e., literary theory.

Course Aims: This lecture aims to familiarise students with central concepts and tools for the analysis of literary texts of various genres. Students will obtain clear ideas of approaches to literature, methodologies, terminology, and strategies of literary interpretation.

Reading: Please buy and read William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (c. 1601) and Michael Meyer's “English and American Literatures” (utb basics, 4th ed.), both of which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch (Universitäts-Boulevard on campus).
A list of poems, short stories, and extracts from longer works will be made available on Stud.IP.

Please note that both Hamlet and all of the material on Stud.IP is compulsory reading for the exam.

This lecture will introduce students to the basic tools of literary analysis of poetry, drama, and narrative. As well it will introduce into the most relevant theories and methods of literary analysis. These will enable students to be able to discuss and analyze literary works, skills necessary for future literary classes.
Students will have to purchase and read Michael Meyer “English and American Literatures”, 4. überarb. u. erw. Aufl. utb basics (18,90€) and Shakespeare “Hamlet” (app. 12€). Both books are available for purchase through the university bookstore on Universitäts-Boulevard on campus. All other texts are provided through StudIP.
Registration for one of the two classes is mandatory; pls refrain from registering in both lectures; all students will get admitted to one lecture.
Regular attendance and preparation of the reading material is mandatory.

In this course, we will explore the scientific study of language. Students will be equipped with knowledge of the core areas of linguistics: semiotics, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. You will learn about signs, sounds, words, sentences, and meaning. Whenever possible, we will take a contrastive look at English and other languages as well as explore opportunities to apply linguistics.

Why do language learners have accents? How do you read phonetic transcriptions? What are the principles of successful communication? Who's that creature from the course picture? Find out!

Throughout the semester, students are expected to prepare each week's readings and to actively participate in class discussions.

Assessment:
Final exam (on 28 Jan 2026, afternoon)

Literature:
Kortmann, Bernd (2020). English Linguistics: Essentials (2nd ed). Berlin: Cornelsen

Linguistics is the scientific study of language and communication. It deals with all aspects of how people use language and what they must know in order to do so. The class will thus provide an overview of the core areas of linguistics – phonetics and phonology (the study of speech sounds), morphology (the structure of words), syntax (the structure of sentences), semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (the study of meaning and language use in context).

Requirements
Reading the course material, active participation in discussions and groupwork in class, a final written exam (e-Klausur).

Literature:
Kortmann, Bernd. 2020. English Linguistics: Essentials. 2nd ed. Berlin: Cornelsen.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the father of the American short story and modern detective story. In a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales he outlined what we now take as his ‘theory’ of the short story. We will discuss this ‘theory’ as well as Joseph Urgo’s take on the American short story upon which we will base the readings of some of the finest examples of American short stories from the Romantic period to the present. They will include classics by Poe, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin as well as stories by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American authors.

Class requirements are regular attendance, in-depth knowledge of reading material, and active class discussion. Reading the texts is mandatory.

This course takes a closer look at the literary north of England as portrayed in contemporary women's writing. Northern England is often treated as an internal 'other' within English national consciousness and political history and subjected to stereotypes many of which are traceable to the region's industrial history, working-class and neglect during the Thatcher era. In this course, we will attempt to locate 'the North' geographically, conceptually and imaginatively by considering its representation in a range of literary works ranging from psychogeographical poetry to gothic fiction. Taking into account the complex histories and current political debates in the region, we will discuss literary representations of gender, sexuality, working-class culture and race, national identity and environmental politics and examine the role literary form and genre play in contemporary women writers' constructions of the North.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
* Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border (2015)
* Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2018)
* Anita Sethi, I Belong Here (2022)

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

This course provides a basic exploration of the forms, functions, and varieties of English in the contemporary world. It examines how English has evolved into multiple regional and functional varieties, reflecting diverse sociolinguistic, cultural, and technological influences. Students will engage with topics including World Englishes, stylistic and register variation, and the impact of globalisation and digital communication on modern English usage.

Objectives
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
1. explain the concept and scope of contemporary English.
2. identify and analyse major regional varieties of English across the world.
3. distinguish stylistic and register differences in professional and everyday contexts.
4. examine sociolinguistic and cultural factors influencing English usage globally.
5. demonstrate practical competence in using appropriate English varieties and registers for specific communicative contexts.

Think capitalism only lives in boardrooms and balance sheets? Think again. It’s in the words we use, the stories we tell, and the meanings we don't even notice.
This course invites students to explore how capitalist ideologies are woven into the very fabric of the English language. Through critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and etymological inquiry, students will examine how everyday words, phrases, and narratives shape—and are shaped by—the socio-economic realities we inhabit. We will investigate how language does not merely reflect reality, but actively constructs it, uncovering how capitalist markers embed themselves in the meanings we take for granted. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to identify, analyze, and challenge the underlying stories capitalism tells through language—stories we all speak and live by.

Requirements
The usual: read the reading material, join class, participate in classroom discussions, hand in the assignments on time.

Studienleistung (D1a) three worksheets.
Prüfungsleistung (D1c) three worksheets and a ten-page term paper.
Please not that this class cannot be take for ‚Ersatzleistung für das Auslandssemester‘ or General Studies. Erasmus students are welcome.

References
Baker, Paul. 2024. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. 2nd ed. Bloomsbury Academic. Available as ebook from the library.
Klein, Naomi. (2000) 2021. No Logo: An insightful examination of advertising’s impact on society and youth culture. Fourth estate.
Leary, John Patrick. 2019. Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism. Haymarket Books.
Sahner, Simon & Daniel Stähr. 2024. Die Sprache des Kapitalismus. S. Fischer.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

Language is all around us, in signs, graffiti, posters, stickers, shop names, and public notices. In this seminar, we explore how language in public spaces reflects and shapes social life. What can signage tell us about identity, power, multilingualism, or exclusion?

Students will carry out small fieldwork projects, collecting and analysing real-world examples from their own surroundings. Together, we will discuss how space, language, and society interact and what this tells us about the world we live in.

Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004) is a theory of language that assumes that whatever we say or write has a function. These functions can be grouped into three superordinate groups, so called metafunctions; the experiential, the interpersonal and the textual metafunction. Students in this course will get a thorough revision of word classes, phrases and clauses. You will learn to analyse the functions of the constituents of a clause according to the metafunctions. This, in turn, serves to describe texts from all areas of life.
Throughout the term, we will study how Systemic Functional Grammar can help us to judge generative AI’s output, but also how we can use generative AI to make Systemic Functional analyses of texts easier. SFG and Language AIs can profit from one another, and we are a part of the process.

Requirements
Participation in discussions in class and group work, which requires the students‘ attendance. Reading the course material. The students will do several small written tasks that add up to their grade (PL) or „pass“ (SL).

This class can be taken for the WD module, the Focus Module, for the D module (D1c and D2b will require a term paper), as well as for ‚Ersatzleistung für das Auslandssemester‘. Erasmus students are of course welcome.

Reference
Halliday M.A.K & Christian M.I.M Matthiessen. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. Hodder Arnold.
Thompson, Geoff. 2014. Introducing Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. Routledge. Available for download from the library.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the father of the American short story and modern detective story. In a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales he outlined what we now take as his ‘theory’ of the short story. We will discuss this ‘theory’ as well as Joseph Urgo’s take on the American short story upon which we will base the readings of some of the finest examples of American short stories from the Romantic period to the present. They will include classics by Poe, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin as well as stories by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American authors.

Class requirements are regular attendance, in-depth knowledge of reading material, and active class discussion. Reading the texts is mandatory.

This course takes a closer look at the literary north of England as portrayed in contemporary women's writing. Northern England is often treated as an internal 'other' within English national consciousness and political history and subjected to stereotypes many of which are traceable to the region's industrial history, working-class and neglect during the Thatcher era. In this course, we will attempt to locate 'the North' geographically, conceptually and imaginatively by considering its representation in a range of literary works ranging from psychogeographical poetry to gothic fiction. Taking into account the complex histories and current political debates in the region, we will discuss literary representations of gender, sexuality, working-class culture and race, national identity and environmental politics and examine the role literary form and genre play in contemporary women writers' constructions of the North.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
* Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border (2015)
* Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2018)
* Anita Sethi, I Belong Here (2022)

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first course of the Practical Language Foundation module (“SP-Basis”) taken in the winter semester.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first course of the Practical Language Foundation module (“SP-Basis”) taken in the winter semester.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first course of the Practical Language Foundation module (“SP-Basis”) taken in the winter semester.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work and giving you 6 credit points.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work for which you will receive 6 credit points.
The focus of both modules is on academic writing in English at university level, and you will develop the skills necessary to plan and write academic essays. This semester, you will be looking at structural elements such as paragraphing, writing a thesis statement and using citation etc. while also developing academic language skills in terms of word choice, grammar and syntax. Diagnostic tasks will indicate which personal areas of language you need to develop in order to achieve the academic level of writing for this level.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work for which you will receive 6 credit points.
The focus of both modules is on academic writing in English at university level, and you will develop the skills necessary to plan and write academic essays. This semester, you will be looking at structural elements such as paragraphing, writing a thesis statement and using citation etc. while also developing academic language skills in terms of word choice, grammar and syntax. Diagnostic tasks will indicate which personal areas of language you need to develop in order to achieve the academic level of writing for this level.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work for which you will receive 6 credit points.
The focus of both modules is on academic writing in English at university level, and you will develop the skills necessary to plan and write academic essays. This semester, you will be looking at structural elements such as paragraphing, writing a thesis statement and using citation etc. while also developing academic language skills in terms of word choice, grammar and syntax. Diagnostic tasks will indicate which personal areas of language you need to develop in order to achieve the academic level of writing for this level.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.
Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) enables you to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing the opportunity to work on language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. You will explore areas such as politics, traditions, important people and histories of countries connected to the English-speaking world. Different countries will be critically analysed with the goal of gaining and expanding knowledge about a specific English-speaking culture. You will have the opportunity to practice the communication skills of discussion, analysis, compromise, persuasion, problem solving etc. At the end of the course, you will present your own unique ideas, putting theory into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.
Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) enables you to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing the opportunity to work on language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. You will explore areas such as politics, traditions, important people and histories of countries connected to the English-speaking world. Different countries will be critically analysed with the goal of gaining and expanding knowledge about a specific English-speaking culture. You will have the opportunity to practice the communication skills of discussion, analysis, compromise, persuasion, problem solving etc. At the end of the course, you will present your own unique ideas, putting theory into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

This class is for students who have already completed CBIS as it is the last preparation phase for the oral proficiency interview taken upon completetion of CBIS and C&C.
Students who have previously taken but not successfully passed the oral exam are also welcome to join.
The aim of the Culture and Communication class is to help you prepare for the final SP-Proficiency module oral exam taken when you have completed the SP-Proficiency module. This class will deal with two different areas from which you will be able to develop ONE research project as the basis for your oral exam.
You will be looking at defining moments which have greatly influenced events within the English-speaking world. Your task will be to investigate the processes which led to a particular event, define the event itself and explore the long-term and short-term consequences. A critical analytic approach be will necessary as you explore the causes and implications of the topic of your choice.
In addition, we will work on improving important aspects of grammar, pronunciation, intonation as well as developing the confidence and fluency needed to successfully pass the exam. Whereas CBIS was more about collaboration and teamwork, Culture and Communication allows you to build upon the research skills developed last semester as you move forward with your own project.

In this workshop, we will explore and experiment with contemporary methods of improvisational theater—the art of making up theatrical moments on the spot, without a script. It is one of the most vibrant and current forms of theater of today and is deeply ingrained in US popular culture.

You will first learn the basic principles of improvisational theater and how to apply them to improvised scenework. Later, you will encounter a specific performance structure that will serve as a framework for a public performance.

Through this work, you will build confidence in public speaking, explore practical approaches to collaborative creation, and gain insight into the production and marketing process of a theatre production. In addition, we will reflect on how these skills can be beneficial both in academic contexts as well as in the professional world beyond academia.

There will be a regular class on Monday 2.15-3.45pm during the semester, in which we will cover the basics of improvisational theater, followed by an intensive in the lecture-free period (2-6 March 2026, 10am-1.30pm) led by the student assistant Tarja Spiekermann, which will focus on a specific performance structure and prepare for a public performance on 7 March 2026. If you participate in the theatre workshop, you can choose either to be a performer or take on a behind-the-scenes role in production and marketing.

Films are usually appreciated as mere entertainment. However, they always convey ideas about self and society, right and wrong, good and bad. Moreover, they offer specific conceptions of race, class,gender, ethnicity, sexuality. In watching a selection of classical and post-classical Hollywood films we will focus on the representation of the Orient as an imaginary space that serves as a canvas upon which fears and anxieties are projected.
This course is highly recommended to students participating in the course “Key Topics in Cultural History: Analyzing Hollywood Cinema”.
Requirements:
• regular attendance
• oral presentation and handout

Course description:
This lecture provides an introduction to the methods, concepts, and tools students of literatures in English are advised to use when approaching literary texts. These will help them to obtain a fuller understanding of texts and to express themselves clearly and competently when discussing them. Furthermore, we will look at literature as a particular form of communication, i.e., we will consider the specificity of literary texts, and its various genres: drama, narrative fiction, poetry. We will also talk about different approaches to literature, i.e., literary theory.

Course Aims: This lecture aims to familiarise students with central concepts and tools for the analysis of literary texts of various genres. Students will obtain clear ideas of approaches to literature, methodologies, terminology, and strategies of literary interpretation.

Reading: Please buy and read William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (c. 1601) and Michael Meyer's “English and American Literatures” (utb basics, 4th ed.), both of which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch (Universitäts-Boulevard on campus).
A list of poems, short stories, and extracts from longer works will be made available on Stud.IP.

Please note that both Hamlet and all of the material on Stud.IP is compulsory reading for the exam.

This lecture will introduce students to the basic tools of literary analysis of poetry, drama, and narrative. As well it will introduce into the most relevant theories and methods of literary analysis. These will enable students to be able to discuss and analyze literary works, skills necessary for future literary classes.
Students will have to purchase and read Michael Meyer “English and American Literatures”, 4. überarb. u. erw. Aufl. utb basics (18,90€) and Shakespeare “Hamlet” (app. 12€). Both books are available for purchase through the university bookstore on Universitäts-Boulevard on campus. All other texts are provided through StudIP.
Registration for one of the two classes is mandatory; pls refrain from registering in both lectures; all students will get admitted to one lecture.
Regular attendance and preparation of the reading material is mandatory.

In this course, we will explore the scientific study of language. Students will be equipped with knowledge of the core areas of linguistics: semiotics, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. You will learn about signs, sounds, words, sentences, and meaning. Whenever possible, we will take a contrastive look at English and other languages as well as explore opportunities to apply linguistics.

Why do language learners have accents? How do you read phonetic transcriptions? What are the principles of successful communication? Who's that creature from the course picture? Find out!

Throughout the semester, students are expected to prepare each week's readings and to actively participate in class discussions.

Assessment:
Final exam (on 28 Jan 2026, afternoon)

Literature:
Kortmann, Bernd (2020). English Linguistics: Essentials (2nd ed). Berlin: Cornelsen

Linguistics is the scientific study of language and communication. It deals with all aspects of how people use language and what they must know in order to do so. The class will thus provide an overview of the core areas of linguistics – phonetics and phonology (the study of speech sounds), morphology (the structure of words), syntax (the structure of sentences), semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (the study of meaning and language use in context).

Requirements
Reading the course material, active participation in discussions and groupwork in class, a final written exam (e-Klausur).

Literature:
Kortmann, Bernd. 2020. English Linguistics: Essentials. 2nd ed. Berlin: Cornelsen.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the father of the American short story and modern detective story. In a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales he outlined what we now take as his ‘theory’ of the short story. We will discuss this ‘theory’ as well as Joseph Urgo’s take on the American short story upon which we will base the readings of some of the finest examples of American short stories from the Romantic period to the present. They will include classics by Poe, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin as well as stories by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American authors.

Class requirements are regular attendance, in-depth knowledge of reading material, and active class discussion. Reading the texts is mandatory.

This course takes a closer look at the literary north of England as portrayed in contemporary women's writing. Northern England is often treated as an internal 'other' within English national consciousness and political history and subjected to stereotypes many of which are traceable to the region's industrial history, working-class and neglect during the Thatcher era. In this course, we will attempt to locate 'the North' geographically, conceptually and imaginatively by considering its representation in a range of literary works ranging from psychogeographical poetry to gothic fiction. Taking into account the complex histories and current political debates in the region, we will discuss literary representations of gender, sexuality, working-class culture and race, national identity and environmental politics and examine the role literary form and genre play in contemporary women writers' constructions of the North.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
* Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border (2015)
* Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2018)
* Anita Sethi, I Belong Here (2022)

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

This course provides a basic exploration of the forms, functions, and varieties of English in the contemporary world. It examines how English has evolved into multiple regional and functional varieties, reflecting diverse sociolinguistic, cultural, and technological influences. Students will engage with topics including World Englishes, stylistic and register variation, and the impact of globalisation and digital communication on modern English usage.

Objectives
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
1. explain the concept and scope of contemporary English.
2. identify and analyse major regional varieties of English across the world.
3. distinguish stylistic and register differences in professional and everyday contexts.
4. examine sociolinguistic and cultural factors influencing English usage globally.
5. demonstrate practical competence in using appropriate English varieties and registers for specific communicative contexts.

Think capitalism only lives in boardrooms and balance sheets? Think again. It’s in the words we use, the stories we tell, and the meanings we don't even notice.
This course invites students to explore how capitalist ideologies are woven into the very fabric of the English language. Through critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and etymological inquiry, students will examine how everyday words, phrases, and narratives shape—and are shaped by—the socio-economic realities we inhabit. We will investigate how language does not merely reflect reality, but actively constructs it, uncovering how capitalist markers embed themselves in the meanings we take for granted. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to identify, analyze, and challenge the underlying stories capitalism tells through language—stories we all speak and live by.

Requirements
The usual: read the reading material, join class, participate in classroom discussions, hand in the assignments on time.

Studienleistung (D1a) three worksheets.
Prüfungsleistung (D1c) three worksheets and a ten-page term paper.
Please not that this class cannot be take for ‚Ersatzleistung für das Auslandssemester‘ or General Studies. Erasmus students are welcome.

References
Baker, Paul. 2024. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. 2nd ed. Bloomsbury Academic. Available as ebook from the library.
Klein, Naomi. (2000) 2021. No Logo: An insightful examination of advertising’s impact on society and youth culture. Fourth estate.
Leary, John Patrick. 2019. Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism. Haymarket Books.
Sahner, Simon & Daniel Stähr. 2024. Die Sprache des Kapitalismus. S. Fischer.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

Language is all around us, in signs, graffiti, posters, stickers, shop names, and public notices. In this seminar, we explore how language in public spaces reflects and shapes social life. What can signage tell us about identity, power, multilingualism, or exclusion?

Students will carry out small fieldwork projects, collecting and analysing real-world examples from their own surroundings. Together, we will discuss how space, language, and society interact and what this tells us about the world we live in.

Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004) is a theory of language that assumes that whatever we say or write has a function. These functions can be grouped into three superordinate groups, so called metafunctions; the experiential, the interpersonal and the textual metafunction. Students in this course will get a thorough revision of word classes, phrases and clauses. You will learn to analyse the functions of the constituents of a clause according to the metafunctions. This, in turn, serves to describe texts from all areas of life.
Throughout the term, we will study how Systemic Functional Grammar can help us to judge generative AI’s output, but also how we can use generative AI to make Systemic Functional analyses of texts easier. SFG and Language AIs can profit from one another, and we are a part of the process.

Requirements
Participation in discussions in class and group work, which requires the students‘ attendance. Reading the course material. The students will do several small written tasks that add up to their grade (PL) or „pass“ (SL).

This class can be taken for the WD module, the Focus Module, for the D module (D1c and D2b will require a term paper), as well as for ‚Ersatzleistung für das Auslandssemester‘. Erasmus students are of course welcome.

Reference
Halliday M.A.K & Christian M.I.M Matthiessen. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. Hodder Arnold.
Thompson, Geoff. 2014. Introducing Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. Routledge. Available for download from the library.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the father of the American short story and modern detective story. In a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales he outlined what we now take as his ‘theory’ of the short story. We will discuss this ‘theory’ as well as Joseph Urgo’s take on the American short story upon which we will base the readings of some of the finest examples of American short stories from the Romantic period to the present. They will include classics by Poe, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin as well as stories by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American authors.

Class requirements are regular attendance, in-depth knowledge of reading material, and active class discussion. Reading the texts is mandatory.

This course takes a closer look at the literary north of England as portrayed in contemporary women's writing. Northern England is often treated as an internal 'other' within English national consciousness and political history and subjected to stereotypes many of which are traceable to the region's industrial history, working-class and neglect during the Thatcher era. In this course, we will attempt to locate 'the North' geographically, conceptually and imaginatively by considering its representation in a range of literary works ranging from psychogeographical poetry to gothic fiction. Taking into account the complex histories and current political debates in the region, we will discuss literary representations of gender, sexuality, working-class culture and race, national identity and environmental politics and examine the role literary form and genre play in contemporary women writers' constructions of the North.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
* Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border (2015)
* Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2018)
* Anita Sethi, I Belong Here (2022)

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first course of the Practical Language Foundation module (“SP-Basis”) taken in the winter semester.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first course of the Practical Language Foundation module (“SP-Basis”) taken in the winter semester.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first course of the Practical Language Foundation module (“SP-Basis”) taken in the winter semester.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work and giving you 6 credit points.

The focus of this module is on academic writing in English at university level. The emphasis during ULS 1 is on planning and organising an academic essay in an academic context at university level. It emphasizes writing skills in three broad categories: paragraphing, structure, and argumentation. Not only will students practice structural elements (e.g. topic sentences, outlining strategies), but they will also be working on refining their English language skills, including word choice, grammar and syntax. In addition, they will discover the importance of cohesion and coherence as key skills in good writing.

Materials will be provided via StudIP.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work for which you will receive 6 credit points.
The focus of both modules is on academic writing in English at university level, and you will develop the skills necessary to plan and write academic essays. This semester, you will be looking at structural elements such as paragraphing, writing a thesis statement and using citation etc. while also developing academic language skills in terms of word choice, grammar and syntax. Diagnostic tasks will indicate which personal areas of language you need to develop in order to achieve the academic level of writing for this level.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work for which you will receive 6 credit points.
The focus of both modules is on academic writing in English at university level, and you will develop the skills necessary to plan and write academic essays. This semester, you will be looking at structural elements such as paragraphing, writing a thesis statement and using citation etc. while also developing academic language skills in terms of word choice, grammar and syntax. Diagnostic tasks will indicate which personal areas of language you need to develop in order to achieve the academic level of writing for this level.

University Language Skills 1 (ULS 1) is the first half of the SP-1 module (“SP-1 Sprachpraxis Basismodul”) taken in the winter semester. It requires 90 hours of work and earns you 3 credit points. University Language Skills 2 (ULS 2) is the second half of this module and will be offered in the summer semester, requiring 180 hours of work for which you will receive 6 credit points.
The focus of both modules is on academic writing in English at university level, and you will develop the skills necessary to plan and write academic essays. This semester, you will be looking at structural elements such as paragraphing, writing a thesis statement and using citation etc. while also developing academic language skills in terms of word choice, grammar and syntax. Diagnostic tasks will indicate which personal areas of language you need to develop in order to achieve the academic level of writing for this level.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.
Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) enables you to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing the opportunity to work on language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. You will explore areas such as politics, traditions, important people and histories of countries connected to the English-speaking world. Different countries will be critically analysed with the goal of gaining and expanding knowledge about a specific English-speaking culture. You will have the opportunity to practice the communication skills of discussion, analysis, compromise, persuasion, problem solving etc. At the end of the course, you will present your own unique ideas, putting theory into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.
Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) enables you to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing the opportunity to work on language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. You will explore areas such as politics, traditions, important people and histories of countries connected to the English-speaking world. Different countries will be critically analysed with the goal of gaining and expanding knowledge about a specific English-speaking culture. You will have the opportunity to practice the communication skills of discussion, analysis, compromise, persuasion, problem solving etc. At the end of the course, you will present your own unique ideas, putting theory into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) is the first part of the SP-2 module (“SP-2 Sprachpraxis Aufbaumodul”) to be taken in the winter semester. Culture & Communication (C&C) is taken as the second part of the module in the summer semester. The aim of both parts of the module is to prepare you final oral exam which you can take once you have completed SP-2.

Content-Based Integrated Skills (CBIS) permits students to implement all four core language skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while turning a theoretical challenge into a practical success. This course is designed to give you an insight into academic research, to develop the skill of critical thinking as well as providing you with the opportunity to work on your language skills. The course content revolves around English-speaking countries and cultures. Students will learn about politics, traditions, accents and histories of the countries connected to the English language or/and the Commonwealth. Each country will be critically analysed with the goal of expanding their knowledge about an “English-speaking Culture.” Students will have the opportunity to make decisions, solve problems, and at the end of the course, present the fruits of your labours as you put your own unique ideas into practice.

This class is for students who have already completed CBIS as it is the last preparation phase for the oral proficiency interview taken upon completetion of CBIS and C&C.
Students who have previously taken but not successfully passed the oral exam are also welcome to join.
The aim of the Culture and Communication class is to help you prepare for the final SP-Proficiency module oral exam taken when you have completed the SP-Proficiency module. This class will deal with two different areas from which you will be able to develop ONE research project as the basis for your oral exam.
You will be looking at defining moments which have greatly influenced events within the English-speaking world. Your task will be to investigate the processes which led to a particular event, define the event itself and explore the long-term and short-term consequences. A critical analytic approach be will necessary as you explore the causes and implications of the topic of your choice.
In addition, we will work on improving important aspects of grammar, pronunciation, intonation as well as developing the confidence and fluency needed to successfully pass the exam. Whereas CBIS was more about collaboration and teamwork, Culture and Communication allows you to build upon the research skills developed last semester as you move forward with your own project.

In this workshop, we will explore and experiment with contemporary methods of improvisational theater—the art of making up theatrical moments on the spot, without a script. It is one of the most vibrant and current forms of theater of today and is deeply ingrained in US popular culture.

You will first learn the basic principles of improvisational theater and how to apply them to improvised scenework. Later, you will encounter a specific performance structure that will serve as a framework for a public performance.

Through this work, you will build confidence in public speaking, explore practical approaches to collaborative creation, and gain insight into the production and marketing process of a theatre production. In addition, we will reflect on how these skills can be beneficial both in academic contexts as well as in the professional world beyond academia.

There will be a regular class on Monday 2.15-3.45pm during the semester, in which we will cover the basics of improvisational theater, followed by an intensive in the lecture-free period (2-6 March 2026, 10am-1.30pm) led by the student assistant Tarja Spiekermann, which will focus on a specific performance structure and prepare for a public performance on 7 March 2026. If you participate in the theatre workshop, you can choose either to be a performer or take on a behind-the-scenes role in production and marketing.

Films are usually appreciated as mere entertainment. However, they always convey ideas about self and society, right and wrong, good and bad. Moreover, they offer specific conceptions of race, class,gender, ethnicity, sexuality. In watching a selection of classical and post-classical Hollywood films we will focus on the representation of the Orient as an imaginary space that serves as a canvas upon which fears and anxieties are projected.
This course is highly recommended to students participating in the course “Key Topics in Cultural History: Analyzing Hollywood Cinema”.
Requirements:
• regular attendance
• oral presentation and handout

Course description:
This lecture provides an introduction to the methods, concepts, and tools students of literatures in English are advised to use when approaching literary texts. These will help them to obtain a fuller understanding of texts and to express themselves clearly and competently when discussing them. Furthermore, we will look at literature as a particular form of communication, i.e., we will consider the specificity of literary texts, and its various genres: drama, narrative fiction, poetry. We will also talk about different approaches to literature, i.e., literary theory.

Course Aims: This lecture aims to familiarise students with central concepts and tools for the analysis of literary texts of various genres. Students will obtain clear ideas of approaches to literature, methodologies, terminology, and strategies of literary interpretation.

Reading: Please buy and read William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (c. 1601) and Michael Meyer's “English and American Literatures” (utb basics, 4th ed.), both of which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch (Universitäts-Boulevard on campus).
A list of poems, short stories, and extracts from longer works will be made available on Stud.IP.

Please note that both Hamlet and all of the material on Stud.IP is compulsory reading for the exam.

This lecture will introduce students to the basic tools of literary analysis of poetry, drama, and narrative. As well it will introduce into the most relevant theories and methods of literary analysis. These will enable students to be able to discuss and analyze literary works, skills necessary for future literary classes.
Students will have to purchase and read Michael Meyer “English and American Literatures”, 4. überarb. u. erw. Aufl. utb basics (18,90€) and Shakespeare “Hamlet” (app. 12€). Both books are available for purchase through the university bookstore on Universitäts-Boulevard on campus. All other texts are provided through StudIP.
Registration for one of the two classes is mandatory; pls refrain from registering in both lectures; all students will get admitted to one lecture.
Regular attendance and preparation of the reading material is mandatory.

In this course, we will explore the scientific study of language. Students will be equipped with knowledge of the core areas of linguistics: semiotics, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. You will learn about signs, sounds, words, sentences, and meaning. Whenever possible, we will take a contrastive look at English and other languages as well as explore opportunities to apply linguistics.

Why do language learners have accents? How do you read phonetic transcriptions? What are the principles of successful communication? Who's that creature from the course picture? Find out!

Throughout the semester, students are expected to prepare each week's readings and to actively participate in class discussions.

Assessment:
Final exam (on 28 Jan 2026, afternoon)

Literature:
Kortmann, Bernd (2020). English Linguistics: Essentials (2nd ed). Berlin: Cornelsen

Linguistics is the scientific study of language and communication. It deals with all aspects of how people use language and what they must know in order to do so. The class will thus provide an overview of the core areas of linguistics – phonetics and phonology (the study of speech sounds), morphology (the structure of words), syntax (the structure of sentences), semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (the study of meaning and language use in context).

Requirements
Reading the course material, active participation in discussions and groupwork in class, a final written exam (e-Klausur).

Literature:
Kortmann, Bernd. 2020. English Linguistics: Essentials. 2nd ed. Berlin: Cornelsen.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

This interactive seminar introduces students to the study of culture in the English-Speaking world. Drawing on a variety of sources, such as autobiography, graphic novels, photography, visual art, and audiovisual media, we will explore key concepts, cultural movements, and historical developments across periods and regions, and use them for culturally conscious close readings. In dialogue with scholarly articles, theoretical texts, and textbook overviews, we will train central academic reading, writing, and presentation skills which will prepare you for more advanced research in cultural studies.
This class is taught in four parallel groups in four different time slots by Dr. Paula von Gleich (groups A and B) and Dr. Anna Auguscik (groups C and D). Please register on Stud.IP and provide your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th choice.
There are also 2 weekly tutorials offered to further train students' skills in academic reading, presenting, and writing in cultural studies and to support students with their study and reading assignments necessary to successfully complete this introductory class (registration on Stud.IP). Tutorials start in week 2.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

Important: This class will take place as a block seminar later in the semester and not weekly as originally scheduled.
Course Description:
This course investigates the intersections of postcolonial ecologies, poetry, and streaming cultures, with a focus on South Asia. Through selected postcolonial poetry by South Asian authors (such as Agha Shahid Ali, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Keki Daruwallaa and Ranjit Hoskote) alongside films and documentaries streaming on Netflix such as (The White Tiger and The Elephant Whisperers), students will explore the ecological narrativization of water and wildlife across media. The course is guided by two central questions: What are the distinct and overlapping strategies through which literature and streaming cultures narrate water and wildlife to engage with the debates on the Anthropocene? How do ecological meanings seep across forms, from page to screen, and what narrativizing and representative politics emerge through these intermedial circulations? By combining theoretical discussions, close reading exercises, and film clip viewings and analysis, the course foregrounds the cultural politics of ecological storytelling and environmental justice in postcolonial South Asia. Please note that the course will be conducted through a combination of online and offline block sessions.

This seminar will unfold over five appointments across the semester (dates below). Together, we’ll step into the world of the lighthouse in British literature and culture.
We’ll begin with Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse and continue with Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping. Midway, we’ll briefly cross the Atlantic for an American perspective, watching and discussing Robert Eggers’ 2019 movie The Lighthouse (starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe). Our exploration then turns to Wilkie Collins’ compact drama The Lighthouse, before closing with a selection of poems, short prose, and paintings that shed further light on this enduring symbol.
Alongside these primary works, theoretical frameworks and critical perspectives will help illuminate the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of lighthouses across literature.
Though a more detailed syllabus and information will follow in the first week of November, please save the following dates.
• November 29, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
• December 13, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Winterson, Lighthousekeeping)
• January 10, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Eggers, The Lighthouse)
• February 3, 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Collins, The Lighthouse)
• February 5, 10 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (various authors, short literary pieces)
Also, I kindly ask you to have these editions available:
• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN: 978-0-19-953661-0)
• Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. HarperCollins, 2005. (ISBN: 978-0-00-718150-6)
All other texts will be provided online.
Please make sure to read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse prior to our first session.
I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks and embarking on this lighthouse journey with you!

Satirical takes on the hardships, ennui and folly accompanying the undertaking of travel have been specifically poignant in exposing the Western practice of modern expeditions. The goal of this seminar is to familiarise students with the expedition as a cultural formation, the connections between Euro-American travel and the book market, and the space for self-criticism provided by satire. We will analyse the forms and functions of humour and irony in travel writing from the eighteenth century in the context of Captain James Cook’s Pacific Voyages, to the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration around Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to more recent mountaineering and environmental expeditions. In order to compose a conceptual toolbox and prepare for a historically grounded analysis of satirical travel writing, we will start by comparing Monty Python’s 1970s sketch (which reimagines the national myth of “Scott of the Antarctic” into a “Scott of the Sahara”) with Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Sur” (1982) about a fictional female-led expedition to Antarctica. We will read and discuss one of the earliest satires of travel in the English language, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), again in dialogue with historical and theoretical contexts. In order to probe the affordances and limits of satire and its critique of the ‘topoi of exploration’, we will then compare and contrast our previous observations with two salient twentieth-century satires of travel: W.E. Bowman’s The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Please, buy and read:
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), ideally in a critical edition, e.g., The Essential Writing of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins. London and New York: Norton, 2010.
- W.E. Bowman. The Ascent of Rum Doodle [1956]. Introd. by Bill Bryson. London: Vintage Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-09-953038-1
- J.G. Ballard. Rushing to Paradise [1994]. London and New York: Liveright, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-87140-337-7

Course description:
Even though the gothic originates in the eighteenth century, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first text to call itself “A Gothic Story” in its subtitle, it is around the turn of the nineteenth century that the gothic suddenly gains in popularity, above all with a female readership. Even though it was criticised, looked down upon, and satirised for its sensationalism, the gothic remained an influential genre throughout the century and well until today. In the course of the nineteenth century, it significantly influenced the main Victorian genre, realism, and many realist novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and different novels by Charles Dickens contain gothic elements and scenes. Towards the mid-century, the gothic developed into a new genre, sensation fiction, but re-asserted itself in more clearly gothic form in the 1890s. It remains a profoundly influential mode in contemporary literature, film, and culture more generally.
In this seminar, we will explore the evolution of the gothic across the nineteenth century. We will focus on three central texts in order to tease out continuities and developments: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Together, we will consider several questions, such as whether there is a specific gothic/sensation aesthetics, why the gothic and sensation might have been so attractive for female readers and authors, why these modes were frowned upon, what role specific landscapes and environments play for the gothic and sensation fiction, and how ‘the other’ and the exotic feature in the gothic.

Reading: Please buy the following texts, which have been ordered by the university bookshop deinunibuch.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Preferred editions are Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, and Norton Critical Editions. In any case, please buy an edition that contains an introduction and explanatory notes. No digital editions, please. Copies have been ordered by the Universitätsbuchhandlung Bremen, on campus.

Important note on course preparation: As is normally the case with nineteenth-century literature, the texts are relatively long, so please plan enough time for reading. We will read the texts in this order: Shelley – Braddon – Stoker. This means that all students should have read Frankenstein by the time the course starts, though knowledge of all texts at this stage will, of course, be an advantage.

This course explores the Scottish Renaissance, a literary and cultural movement emerging in the first half of the twentieth century and now recognised as the Scottish version of European Modernism. As its name suggests, the aim of the Scottish Renaissance was not so much to “make it new” but instead centred around a cultural revival of Scotland’s literary and cultural identity which was thought to be inherently fragmented and in urgent need of reinvention. In this course, we will look at the different ways through which the Renaissance movement aimed to establish Scotland’s status within the literary world and to create its own distinct modern identity. For this purpose, we will take a look at the poetry, essays and fiction published by Scottish writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. We will consider Scottish modernism in relation to its European counterpart and examine how writers explored literary traditions, which avant-garde strategies they adopted, and how they managed to merge artistic innovation with the exploration of national identity and social change in relation to topics such as gender, subjectivity, cosmopolitanism or trauma.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
• Shepherd, Nan. 2016. The Weatherhouse. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Muir, Willa. 1988. Imagined Corners. Edinburgh: Canongate.
• Gibbon, Lewis Grassic. 2020. Sunset Song. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the father of the American short story and modern detective story. In a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales he outlined what we now take as his ‘theory’ of the short story. We will discuss this ‘theory’ as well as Joseph Urgo’s take on the American short story upon which we will base the readings of some of the finest examples of American short stories from the Romantic period to the present. They will include classics by Poe, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin as well as stories by African American, Native American, Hispanic and Asian American authors.

Class requirements are regular attendance, in-depth knowledge of reading material, and active class discussion. Reading the texts is mandatory.

This course takes a closer look at the literary north of England as portrayed in contemporary women's writing. Northern England is often treated as an internal 'other' within English national consciousness and political history and subjected to stereotypes many of which are traceable to the region's industrial history, working-class and neglect during the Thatcher era. In this course, we will attempt to locate 'the North' geographically, conceptually and imaginatively by considering its representation in a range of literary works ranging from psychogeographical poetry to gothic fiction. Taking into account the complex histories and current political debates in the region, we will discuss literary representations of gender, sexuality, working-class culture and race, national identity and environmental politics and examine the role literary form and genre play in contemporary women writers' constructions of the North.

Please acquire a copy of the following books:
* Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border (2015)
* Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2018)
* Anita Sethi, I Belong Here (2022)

Shorter readings will be provided. Please be aware that this is a reading-intensive course.

Cinema as a dominant cultural institution participates in an ongoing “struggle over meaning”. Frequently, however, social and cultural contradictions are not directly displayed in the movies but remain unexpressed or denied. This course will analyze the subtle and often not so subtle ways in which American movies deal with social conflicts and predicaments.
Participation in the corresponding general studies course "Viewing film critically" is obligatory.

Essential readings will be available for download on Stud-IP.
Check out Kanopy at https://unibremen.kanopy.com/

Requirements:
• Regular attendance and oral participation
• In-depth knowledge of the reading material
• In-depth knowledge of the films to be discussed
• Oral presentation and handout
• For a graded Prüfungsleistung (PL): Final paper

This seminar explores the cultural and imaginative currents that shaped America in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on select cultural objects, such as nature writing, the slave narrative, and landscape paintings, we examine how land and bodies of water functioned as symbolic and material sites where questions of power, freedom, resistance, and national or cultural belonging were negotiated. Through a combination of textual analysis and cultural history, we will investigate how the American environment was represented, claimed, and contested in a century marked by expansion, conflict, and environmental and industrial transformation.

This class is open to BA E-SC students studying 3rd semester modules. It is also open to a limited number of international exchange students and students doing ‘Freiwillige Zusatzleistungen,’ ‘Ersatzleistungen,’ and General Studies, including the sustainability certificate BRENA.

Prior enrolment via Stud.IP is mandatory and admission is limited to a maximum of thirty-five students. Further information will be made available on Stud.IP. Please check Stud.IP regularly for updates.
Requirements
• active participation in weekly in-person meetings,
• in-depth study of the primary and secondary material in preparation for each session,
• graded or ungraded assignment in accordance with the respective module requirements.

This course provides a basic exploration of the forms, functions, and varieties of English in the contemporary world. It examines how English has evolved into multiple regional and functional varieties, reflecting diverse sociolinguistic, cultural, and technological influences. Students will engage with topics including World Englishes, stylistic and register variation, and the impact of globalisation and digital communication on modern English usage.

Objectives
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
1. explain the concept and scope of contemporary English.
2. identify and analyse major regional varieties of English across the world.
3. distinguish stylistic and register differences in professional and everyday contexts.
4. examine sociolinguistic and cultural factors influencing English usage globally.
5. demonstrate practical competence in using appropriate English varieties and registers for specific communicative contexts.