Heiko Zimmermann
Name
Heiko Zimmermann
D.O.B.
26th Jan, 1978
Residence
Ludwigsburg, DE

socialise

Please, feel free to use this form:






Confirm code: b776

Other communication channels:

Academia.edu ORCID Twitter Mastodon Instagram Phone Postal Service Skype I am NOT on Facebook PGP/GnuPG Key

linkroll


Hi there! My name is Heiko Zimmermann. I'm a lecturer in English literature and culture.

The things I'm currently doing: teaching English Literature and Culture at the University of Education Ludwigsburg, writing both scholarly papers and articles for magazines, talking at conferences, doing web and print design, discussing contemporary literature on stage, playing the guitar, growing veggies and flowers in my allotment.

Things I did in the past: writing a PhD thesis about the reconfigurations of authors and readers in digital literature, teaching literature at the Universities of Trier, Bayreuth and Sivas, and Trinity College Dublin, studying a teachers' course of Physics and English, working with mentally disabled people, writing in a creative writing group in Leeds/UK, working with exchange students, playing volleyball, coding and working as a swapper in the C64 demo scene, selling my first computer game to a publishing house when I was sixteen, living in a lovely flat with a tiled stove for seven years, starring in a GCSE listening comprehension test... (to be continued)

You can contact me via email. If you are a student of mine, rather come to my office hours. Sometimes I offer sweets and cookies.

For my students at PH Ludwigsburg, the Universities of Trier, Bayreuth and Trinity College Dublin, I have collected some materials here.

papers and articles

Scholarly

Since it has been around for years now, I have to mention my own project Aspects of E. M. Forster again.

Feuilleton / Journalistic

Literary / Other

other stuff

This, again, is an incomplete list.

Talks and Presentations

Interviews / In the Media

Guest Lecturership

Planning and Organising Events

Memberships

web typo design

This is an (incomplete) list of websites I run/have designed or worked with:

I have also done some editing and layouting for print publications.

teaching

Some miscellaneous bits:

This is a list of my lectures and seminars with links to even more details about them:

Summer Term 2021

Winter Term 2020/21

Summer Term 2020

Winter Term 2019/20

SS 2019

WS 2018/19

SS 2018

WS 2017/18

SS 2017

WS 2016/17

SS 2016

WS 2015/16

SS 2015

WS 2014/2015

SS 2014

WS 2013/2014

SS 2013

WS 2012/2013

SS 2012

WS 2011/2012

SS 2011

WS 2010/2011

SS 2010

WS 2009/2010

SS 2009

WS 2008 / 2009

SS 2008

WS 2007 / 2008

SS 2007

1999 - 2008

 

SS 2007: Victorian Literature: From the Sensation Novel to the Contemporary Pastiche - Course Material

Seminar Reader


Number 10 (5th July 2007)

1.) Preparation for penultimate seminar (9th July): Please, read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. What was the fin de siècle, and what does decadence mean? Can you find traces in Wilde's novel? Is it a homoerotic novel?

2.) Presentations: Ljuba will give us some background knowledge about Oscar Wilde's experiences with the Victorian jurisdiction.

3.) Correction of schedule: We decided that you don't have to read A. S. Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance in preparation for the last seminar. We will only discuss some selected passages in a fortnight.


Number 9 (24th June 2007)

1.) NEWS: Due to illness, the session of 25th June cannot be held. I am really sorry about this. Please, do some self-study instead. 1.) Read Middlemarch, ch. 31, last but 4th paragraph, "Miss Vincy was alone". What does the imagery of the chain work and the whip signify? 2.) Read ch. 10, paragraph 6f. What do Casaubon and Dorothea expect? Is there any place for desire/sexuality? 3.) Read Barbara Bodichon's A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women; Together with a Few Observations Thereon, which is available here.

Hannah's presentation will be postponed to 1st June.

For the next session, please also read the text given in the seminar schedule.


Number 8 (21th June 2007)

1.) Presentation: Hannah will tell us about the Victorian "Woman Question".


Number 7 (14th June 2007)

1.) Preparation for next seminar (18th June): Please read George Eliot's Middlemarch. Reading questions/tasks: 1.) Is history important in the novel (think about the Reform Bills)? 2.) Read the beginning of ch. 27 from "An eminent philosopher" to "the candle is the egoism of any person". What does this suggest about realism? 3.) Middlemarch offers a cast of characters ranging from landed gentry (Dorothea, Chettam), middle-class intelligentsia (Lydgate) and bourgeoisie (Vince) to working class. Are the classes depicted in the same way? Think about the number of foregrounded characters of each class. 4.) Think about the way sexuality was expressed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. How does Eliot present it? How are we made aware of sexual feelings?

3.) Presentation: Melina will intruduce us to the life of George Eliot.


Number 6 (7th June 2007)

1.) Preparation for next seminar (11th June): Please read Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret.

3.) Presentation: Merve will tell us about the Victorian Sensation Novel.


Number 5 (24th May 2007)

1.) Preparation for next seminar (4th June): Please read the Barret Browning's poems, provided in the sixth part of the reader. Think about the imagery in these poems. What is the function of the references to medieval times and to chivalry? Think about the symbols in the poems.

2.) Essay Questions: Please find the questions here. There are also some additional remarks on formal aspects and about writing essays in general. In case you don't like these essay questions, please, feel free to choose another topic (the set texts and the topics mentioned in the schedule). If you are unsure, talk to me.

3.) Presentations: Esra will show us the Victorians' complex relation with sexuality.


Number 4 (17th May 2007)

1.) Preparation for next seminar: Please read the excerpts from Carlyle's Past and Present and Mill's On Liberty, povided in the fourth part of the reader. Think about the differences in their approaches to the ruling of the individual and society. Plus, if you haven't done it yet, please, read the first essay in Ruskin's collection of essays "Unto this Last". You can find the essay in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, which you will find in the Semesterapparat at the library.


Number 3 (10th May 2007)

1.) Preparation for next seminar: Please read Ruskin's collection of essays "Unto this Last".

2.) Presentations: Next time, Changchang will tell us about the Reform Acts 1832, 1867 and 1884.


Second Newsletter (3rd May 2007)

1.) Seminar Reader: In the third part of the reader, you will find some notes on the analysis of poetry, on "The Palace of Art", reading questions for "The Lady of Shalott" and excerpts from Charles Darwin, John Herschel, George G. Stokes and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. I also uploaded part 0 of the reader, which contains the seminar schedule, a list of all participants as well as the presentations.

2.) Preparation for next seminar: Using the list of questions in the reader, please, re-read "The Lady of Shalott". Have a look at the--more or less--scientific texts in the 3rd part of the reader.

3.) Presentations: Next time, there will be a succession of presentations: about the British Empire / Li (re-scheduled), about the life of Charles Darwin / Sandra and about science in the Victorian age in general / Julia and Verena.


First Newsletter (26th April 2007)

1.) Literature: There is a Semesterapparat at the humanities library. It has the number 202. There, you can find: John Ruskin's Unto this Last (in The Complete Works of John Ruskin vol. 17), George Eliot's Middlemarch (in The Writings of George Eliot vols. 12-14 (as you can see this actually is a three volume novel)), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (in Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde), Henry James' "The Figure in the Carpet" (in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories). Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret is not available at the library yet but will be ordered. Matthew Sweet's entertaining tour through Victorian life will also be ordered by the library. I don't know when these books will actually be available there. As soon as A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance will be back at the library, it will added to the Semesterapparat. You can find the current status of shelf 202 here. Anyway, it is surely the best to purchase these books for various reasons.

2.) Seminar Reader: The second part of the seminar reader here.

4.) Preparation for next seminar: Please read Tennyson's "Palace of Art" and "The Lady of Shalott". You will find these texts in the attached part of the seminar reader. (Please print the texts out and bring them with you to the next seminar as we might do some close reading. If printing out texts is a problem, tell me, and I will put subsequent texts into the Semesterapparat.) If you have some time, a) have a look at John Stuart Mill's idea of poetry in "Thoughts on Poetry", b) use an encyclopaedia to find out what chivalry means.

Li and Guo will talk about the British Empire and about Queen Victoria respectively. Maybe you can contribute from your specific perspective (the Empire was huge and you might have an interest in one of the regions).


Mondays 6 p.m. - 8 p.m. (c.t.), Room S80 (NW2)

Those Victorians! How strange they were with their Crystal Palace, their Charles Darwin, their Jack the Ripper or to put it another way with their Empire, their scientific progress and their social changes. When we try to approach them, we will surely have to look at a number of historical details, at developments in science and in the realms of labour, class, gender and philosophy. In Victorian times, fiction was the main source of entertainment for the middle class. Therefore, we are going to read several novels, including George Eliots Middlemarch, of which Virginia Woolf thought it was "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." At the first glance, its a tome, and so is the book we are going to read at the end of the semester: A. S. Byatts Possession, which might help us to see parallels between the Victorians and our time.

Books to purchase:

Other texts will be available online or in a course reader.

As this seminar is a proseminar, it is introductory in character, and you don't have to know too many things beforehand. Therefore, I can only recommend the following standard texts as a preparation: Mario Klarer, Einführung in die Anglistisch-Amerikanistische Literaturwissenschaft and Hans Ulrich Seeber, Englische Literaturgeschichte.

Before enrolling for this seminar, please, notice that there will be a lot to read. Middlemarch has about 800 pages, Possession about 500; Lady Audley's Secret is a novel, so is The Picture of Dorian Gray, and there are some further texts to read.

Further material in due course.

Supervised Theses (Selection):

This list is supposed to give you an idea of the scope of possible topics. However, it is not limited to it. I invite students to approach me with concrete suggestions in the fields of Modernism, late Victorian literature, contemporary British and Irish literature, anglophone literatures of Commonwealth nations, gender studies, queer studies, E. M. Forster, critical theory, creative writing, electronic literature, and the philosophy of literature. Places are limited, however.