Students will have to buy and read Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours (1998) and Alan Bennett's play The History Boys (2004).

Students are expected to participate regularly and actively, to prepare a presentation, and to write a term paper.

Intertextuality, a term first coined by feminist critic Julia Kristeva in the 1960s, has since gone on to be used in a variety of literary theories and as an approach to a host of literary texts. It has also become a conceptual approach to teaching literature in school, as outlined by Wolfgang Hallet in his book-length study Fremdsprachenunterricht als Spiel der Texte und Kulturen (2002).
In this class, we shall be approaching the concept of intertextuality from the viewpoint of literary studies and examine the many forms and functions it performs. Two literary texts will be central to our discussions: Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys (2004) and Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (1999). Bennett’s play follows a group of Sheffield A-level school pupils on their preparation for the entry exams for the two most prestigious English universities: Oxford and Cambridge. Cunningham’s novel is a generic and intertextual hybrid: both a post-modern rewriting of Virginia Woolf’s famous modernist novel Mrs Dalloway (which is transposed to 1990s New York), as well as a semi-fictional biography of Virginia Woolf herself. Both texts offer many references to history, politics, and literature, which we will study in detail. Finally, we will also turn to the relation between intertextuality and intermediality, by watching film versions of both texts and examining the construction of intertextuality on film.