Course Overview
Whether a poem, novel, newspaper article, instructions, or a political speech ? every text has an intention, a particular style, and a cultural, political, and biographical background. Philology's task is to systematically investigate these interrelationships ? in particular in terms of content and form.
Literary studies regards a text as a form of communication and art and critically examines its genre, style, era, reception, impact, and author. Questions addressed include, for example: What influence did the text have on the discourse of its time - and vice versa? How does it affect us today? Why are some narrators convincing, while others are not?
Linguists primarily focuses on the elements of language: the sounds, word and sentence structures, and the meaning of linguistic units. It also investigates, using, for example, empirical methods, how language is acquired and adapted for certain purposes, addressing questions such as: What is language? How do we acquire language, and what happens in our brain when we actively use it?
Philosophy, especially as philosophy of the cultural world, explores all kinds of artifacts. It complements philological research with logic; onthology; ethics; theories of science, cognition, and argumentation; rounded out by cultural studies perspectives that illuminate, for example, what zeitgeist a text reflects.
Because philology's scientific approach concerns all languages equally, at RWTH, two philologies and philosophy are combined into one interdisciplinary course of study.
Students develop their individual skill profile by choosing two of three components offered:
The core curriculum is concerned with the basics of philosophy and gives students an intensive look at two languages and their literature. Linguistics is dealt with exclusively in the context of English Studies. In the specialization, one of the two selected components is studied in greater depth.
A special feature of the curriculum is its connection to learning units from other disciplines. This offers students the opportunity to experience the wide range of diverse perspectives available at RWTH Aachen University.