William Blake

William Blake (1757-1827) is the first major poet of the Romantic Age. His alluring, mysterious, sometimes deceptively easy, at other times obscure and riddled, language combines with a radical critique of what he understood as a fallen society ruled by a deadening rationalism. In his early and still most famous collection, Songs of Innocence and Experience, he explored the essential ambivalence of human nature by dialectically scrutinising the meanings of such opposites as childhood and adulthood, good and evil, or power and powerlessness. Later, he expanded on these and other themes by creating a full-blown mythopoetic universe that consisted of parallel worlds, was peopled by strange characters such as the Four Zoas, and featured bizarre places like the four-dimensional city of Golgonooza. This universe was first evoked in shorter ‘prophetic’ songs, for example The Book of Urizen, and later both refined and hugely complicated in Blake’s great epic poems, especially in his overwhelming Jerusalem. The Emanation of the Giant Albion.

In this Hauptseminar, we will carefully approach and explore some of these intricate, often stunningly difficult, but at the same time immensely inspiring texts. To get at the basis of Blake’s poetological, religious, mythological and political beliefs, however, some courage is needed: in order to grasp what ‘all of this’ is about, one needs to get immersed in poetical narratives of fantastically twisted creations that inherently resist all narrative and logical linearity.

Please note:

Personal attendance during the first session is mandatory to maintain enrolment status. Please direct all inquiries about vacancies to britkult.fragen.fk15tu-dortmundde.

Most of the texts will be made available on Moodle. In case a text needs to be purchased, this will be announced in the first session.

Assignments depend on the respective course of studies and will be explained in the first session.