The reading circle offers an opportunity to (re)read and discuss basic CA/IL literature.

This course will examine British detective fiction between 1880 and 1930. Included are a range of investigators and their sidekicks, such as Sherlock Holmes, Martin Hewitt, Max Carrados, Doctor Thorndyke, Gabriel Hanaud, and Hercule Poirot. We shall have a closer look at the construction of a successful detective story as well as the historical circumstances that aided the genre’s popularity with the aim being to gain a better understanding of these works and the times they were written in.

Registering the ambiguous potential of contemporary trends in science and technology, science fiction is a literary genre/mode that is out to envision (all too) possible social situations and worlds, confronting actual societies with their (not too) distant Other (mostly) in the future. This course aims to give a survey of the genre, clarifying its relation to neighbouring types of fiction such as utopia and dystopia, romance and fantasy. A special focus will be on the roots of science fiction in Early Modern, Romantic and Victorian contexts.