Introduction to American Literary History

© Library of Congress. https://lccn.loc.gov/2018756676

Instructor: Ilka Lensen-Saal

This course offers a survey of North American literature written in English from the period of exploration and colonialism to the antebellum period. Far from being a comprehensive survey, it spotlights a few significant texts and authors who have substantially shaped North American literature and culture. We will focus, in particular, on the various ways in which literature has participated and intervened in the various discussions over race, class, and gender that have been crucial to shaping and reshaping notions of American nationhood. One of the central questions guiding our investigation is whether these texts have produced a distinctive tradition of what we might call “American” writing and what the characteristics of this tradition might be. This is a reading intensive course, be prepared to read ca. 100 pages a week!

Witches and Witchcraft

© Geo. H. Walker & Co. The Witch No. 3. Feb. 29. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2003677982/>

Instructor: Ilka Lensen-Saal

Witch, crone, hag, harpie, she-devil … for a long time appellations like these have been used to target people (mostly female) whose unconventional modes of being in this world and knowing of this world have confounded, challenged, and affronted their more narrow-minded neighbours. The term witch has been deployed bullet-like to mark out, contain, and obliterate what is perceived as radical Otherness – be it with regard to age, sex, race, class, marital status, or reproductive abilities. On this score, it has been instrumentalized to recalibrate personal and communal power relations, property distribution, and social bonds. Yet, in addition to fear of alterity, it has also signalled great power and agency. As an interstitial figure, the witch is situated at the threshold between the (commonly) known and unknown; it can communicate with non-human/ super-human entities and command great creative as well as destructive forces. The etymology of the German word "Hexe," in fact, signals this interstitial power: a spirit that lives in hedges and straddles fences. This course traces the evolution of the witch as an interstitial figure in the Western cultural imagination from the Romantic to the contemporary period, examining its function as literary character and trope in a number of fun texts across the last two centuries.

Climate Change Theatre Action (StuFu)

© Verena Laschinger

Instructors: Ilka Lensen-Saal, Verena Laschinger

In this hands-on workshop, students are asked to take collaborative action in the fight against climate change. Chiming in with numerous international events for our planet’s environmental future, our initiative articulates the urgent need for a climate conscious cultural movement within and beyond the academy. More specifically, we will join the Climate Change Theatre Action series of readings and performances of five-minute plays that is scheduled to take place around the globe between September 19 and December 20, 2025. The participatory project offers an opportunity to rally your creative energies on behalf of raising public awareness of one of today’s biggest challenges: saving our planet. This is a hands-on workshop. Be prepared to actively participate in the conceptualization, preparation, and performance of climate change theatre action. For more information, see https://www.climatechangetheatreaction.com

Things

© https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Museum_of_Innocence_2019.jpg

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

This seminar investigates how things facilitate narrative—how stories are drawn from material objects, as Susan Stewart provocatively asks. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, we will examine how the ideology of things shapes literary realism, where objects and props are embedded in the very fabric of imaginative worlds (Begley). Alongside fiction, we will analyze historical records of colonial exploration and archaeological excavation, exploring how material objects were looted, catalogued, and circulated, often in ways that continue to inform today's debates about restitution, appropriation, and cultural heritage (Sarr and Savoy). These texts document not only the plunder of the colonial era but also the production of knowledge systems—archival, academic, and museological—in which we remain implicated. The course will also introduce students to critical distinctions between gifts, things, and commodities (Appadurai), as well as to key theoretical texts on collecting (Benjamin), curatorial practices, and the politics of display. From the personal album (Kramer and Pelz) to institutional spaces like the museum and the archive (Azoulay), we will explore how objects are framed, made meaningful, and narratively charged across cultural and historical contexts. By drawing on literature, theory, and material culture studies, students will develop an understanding of how objects shape—and are shaped by—narratives of power, identity, and historical memory.

Book Burning - Banning Books

© Foto by Brendan Stevens, via Unsplash

Instructor: Sabine Schmolinsky and Verena Laschinger

On May 10, 1933, books burned in public squares across Germany. Works by renowned authors such as Bertha von Suttner, Erich Kästner, and Sigmund Freud were publicly incinerated by the National Socialists — a symbolic authoritarian attack on freedom of thought, diversity, and art. This seminar examines the historical background and consequences of the 1933 book burnings as an act of state censorship and ideological conformity. Yet the topic has an alarming relevance today: In recent years, censorship of literary works in the United States has increased significantly. Books addressing racism, gender, queer identity, or critical perspectives on history are increasingly targeted by conservative movements and school boards. Here too, we see how the freedom of literature is once again politically contested. This seminar invites participants to explore both of these contexts: How has (and does) literature become a battleground for political and social power struggles? What do lists of banned books reveal about a society, political players, governments? And what can we learn from history for our present moment? Seminar Objectives: • Analyze the 1933 book burnings in their historical context • Explore current censorship practices in the United States • Discuss literary freedom, democratic values, and social responsibility • Reflect on the role of literature as a space of resistance

Climate Fi/action

© Verena Laschinger

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

On June 1, 2017, then–U.S. President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement—a landmark accord designed to unite nations in combating climate change. As French sociologist Bruno Latour noted, this move marked not only a political rupture but a deeper disruption of "the way in which the link between politics and nature used to be organized," revealing—however bleakly—that the "new conservative revolution" is responding to Earth system transformation in the worst possible way (Anthropocene Lecture, HKW Berlin). Since then, the climate crisis has escalated both in urgency and visibility. In 2018, the IPCC's Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C underscored the narrow window left to avoid irreversible damage. The global climate strike movement, catalyzed by Greta Thunberg in 2018, mobilized millions of youth around the world. In 2021, the U.S. formally rejoined the Paris Agreement under President Biden, signaling a renewed (though contested) commitment to international cooperation. That same year, COP26 in Glasgow brought new pledges but also deepened frustrations over unmet goals and global inequities. More recently, 2023 marked the hottest year ever recorded, with extreme weather events—from wildfires to floods—becoming the new normal and raising urgent questions about climate justice, adaptation, and resilience. Taking climate change as an established and accelerating reality, this American Studies seminar introduces students to influential scientific, political, journalistic, and literary voices in the climate discourse. We will engage with foundational theoretical texts, debate conflicting political ideologies, and explore the aesthetic responses of contemporary artists and writers grappling with the possibility—and implications—of the end of the Earth as we know it.

Poetry & Poetics

© Foto by Trust "Tru" Katsande, via Unsplash

Instructors: Verena Laschinger

This undergraduate course offers an exploration of poetry as both an artistic practice and a cultural form. Students will study a range of poetic traditions, movements, and styles—from classical to contemporary, global to local—while engaging with key concepts in poetics, such as voice, form, rhythm, imagery, and metaphor, etc. The course will examine how poets use language to shape meaning, evoke emotion, and challenge conventions, as well as how poetry reflects and resists historical, political, and personal contexts. Through close reading, discussion, and analytical writing, students will gain the tools to interpret poems. Additionally, the course will introduce foundational theoretical texts in poetics to help students think critically about what poetry is, what it does, and why it matters. No prior experience with poetry is required—only a willingness to read attentively, think deeply, and engage creatively with language.

Im/possible Futures: Sci-Fi’s Dystopia and Utopia

© Photo by Michael Herren on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/grayscale-photo-of-stop-sign-qrysiGC3sFY

Instructor: Linda Meinhardt

Not too long ago, in the mid-twentieth century, American science fiction often sat on the margins of literary culture. You might have walked into a corner shop and found SF tucked away in the pulps, dismissed by critics as little more than “escapist literature.” In the decades since, however, writers have pushed back against such dismissal, and the genre has asserted itself as a powerful means of contesting dominant narratives of human development and futurity. After all, “science fiction is not about the future; it uses the future as a narrative convention to present significant distortions of the present” (Samuel R. Delany). 

Through defamiliarization, SF compels us to see our world—and ourselves—through alien eyes. In this sense, Philip K. Dick’s “Autofac,” with its self-perpetuating machines, can be read as reflecting anxieties about runaway technology and consumer culture. Octavia Butler’s “Amnesty” may be less about aliens than about histories of colonization and forced assimilation. And Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale might suggest that dystopia is not a distant possibility but a mirror held up to patriarchal structures already embedded in society.

Building on these and other key works, this course traces the evolution of American SF across different periods. Our readings will include short stories, novel excerpts, and screenplays ranging from well-known “classics” to works by writers whose voices have often been pushed to the margins of the genre. By the end, the course provides a broad understanding of the major phases of American SF and critical tools for its analysis.

Futurescapes: Science Fiction and the Politics of Tomorrow

© Photo by John Cain on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/a-monster-with-a-red-background-s3PpS4-CitY?utm_content=creditShareLink&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash

Instructor: Linda Meinhardt

“So do you really believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” science fiction author Octavia E. Butler was once asked. Her response: she wrote about such futures because they compel people to confront the problems they refuse to acknowledge—problems that, left unchecked, may grow into full-fledged disasters (Butler, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future”). The futurescapes imagined by Butler and many other science fiction writers are often grounded in the crises of their time, creating spaces to critically engage with political, social, environmental, and other urgent concerns.

In this course, we will explore how works of science fiction construct futures as sites of conflict and possibility. Our readings will not just ask what kinds of futures are imagined, but why, by whom, and for whom. Therefore, we will consider a range of speculative works, beginning with Octavia Butler’s Dawn, which interrogates human domination, power struggles, and the ethics of coexistence; followed by the biotech apocalypse of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake; the satirical dismantling of racial capitalism in Dave Harris’s play Tambo and Bones; Indigenous futurisms in Madeleine Thien’s Buffalo Is the New Buffalo; and the postcolonial visions in the anthology So Long Been Dreaming.

Alongside these primary texts, we will engage with a range of critical frameworks—including postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, and science fiction studies—in order to develop the analytical tools necessary to approach works of SF. By the end of the course, students will have engaged with a diverse body of speculative fiction and critically examined how SF functions as a mode of resistance. 

Writing the Body in Contemporary American Literature

Instructor: Emma Charlotte Weiher

Early American Detectives

© https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/

Instructor: Ilka Lensen-Saal

In this introductory seminar to literature, we focus on the genre of detective fiction. We will examine its constitutive narratological features and trace its evolution from its early beginnings in the mid-19^thcentury to its first flourishing at the turn of the century and its immense popularity in the interwar period of the early 20^th century. While the genre has frequently been seen as the domain of male writers, we will pay particular attention to how female writers have skillfully used and manipulated its conventions to critique dominant, patriarchal structures.

American Melodrama

© Photo from first edition of "The Octoroon" by Dion Boucicault; compliments of Special Collections, Templeman Library, University of Kent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Octoroon#/media/File:THE_OCTOROON_at_The_Winter_Garden,_1859.jpg

Instructor: Ilka Lensen-Saal

Melodrama posits a challenging nexus of poetics & politics for scholars of literary and cultural studies. On the one hand, highly formulaic genre conventions and a blunt, Manichean worldview suggest an inherent conservatism, which has allowed the genre to be readily absorbed by the dominant culture industry, particularly by Hollywood. Its complicity with the dominant ideology can hardly be denied. On the other hand, critics have repeatedly pointed to the genre's penchant for excess and affect in plot, characterization, and mise-en-scène—all of them suggesting a vivacious impulse towards the hyperbolic that persistently transcends and subverts the very conventions and ideologies containing the genre. What emerges then is a genre full of contradictions and, in the words of Thomas Elsaesser, "radical ambiguities." The investigation of such contradictions and ambiguities is at the heart of our seminar discussion. Moreover, since as Daniel Gerould has pointed out, melodrama and the United States came into being virtually at the same time and for the same reasons (the democratic revolution in thought and feeling), we will pay particular attention to the various uses the genre has been put to in US American culture in terms of negotiating issues of race, class, gender, and nationhood. Our investigation will encompass different periods and media, ranging from early American drama to the realist novella to classic Hollywood film.

Werewolves, Vampires, and Other Suspects

© "The Vampire" by Philip Burne-Jones (1897): https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=vampire&title=Special:MediaSearch&type=image

Instructor: Ilka Lensen-Saal

This seminar explores literature's fascination with vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures closely aligned with the figure of the human. As liminal figures vampires, werewolves, revenants and similar creatures thematize and destabilize the boundary between the human and non-human, life and death, past and present, the plausible and the marvelous in highly transgressive acts. This course therefore asks about the cultural and textual function of such figures of liminality. In what ways do they trouble normative notions of knowing and being in the world? What kind of concepts of self and other do they enable? What do they reveal about the relationship of the human to the non-human or more-than-human?

Beep Boop: Rebooting the Human

© Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-black-mask-on-a-red-background-Ia3Dwq_azas

“Beep. Boop. What does it mean to be human?” 

With rapid technological advancements, accelerating ecological crises, and the mounting instability of global capitalist economies, we find ourselves in an era of sweeping transformation—one that demands a fundamental reboot in the way we live, think, and adapt. In this shifting landscape, ‘being human’ can no longer be confined to a rigid definition; instead, it appears to be fluid and constantly in motion, carried by the currents of change. Such a paradigm is reflected in the notion of the posthuman—not just as a theoretical framework, but as a way of understanding a world where bodies merge with machines, nature resists human control, and intelligence is no longer exclusive to one species. The posthuman perspective invites us to unsettle traditional ideas of identity, agency, and existence, forcing us to rethink what it means ‘to be human’ in an era of rapid transformation. 

Literature has long been a space for exploring these shifting boundaries. From reimagined ecologies to cyborg bodies and AI consciousness, literary works have a history of challenging conventional notions of the human. Beep Boop: Rebooting Humanity examines these perspectives through the lens of posthuman theory, engaging with texts from both Western and non-Western traditions. This seminar will explore how authors such as Octavia E. Butler, Philip K. Dick, and Cherie Dimaline interrogate the boundaries between human and non-human existence—mirroring the concerns of posthuman theorists like Rosi Braidotti. By analyzing these intersections, we will uncover how literature reflects, critiques, and reshapes our understanding of ‘being human’ in an age of accelerating transformation. 

City Poems

© Verena Laschinger

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

The city figures prominently in American poetry as a symbol of the nation's exceptionalism and progress as well as of its harrowing political, cultural and social conflicts. To gain a first understanding of poetry's negotiation of developments in city planning, activism, and urban theory, students will be introduced to Walt Whitman's classic "Mannahatta" (1860) and Hart Crane's modernist masterpiece The Bridge (1930). Yet, given that in North America the word “urban” eventually came to signify “Black”, we will focus specifically on poetic evocations of race and racialization e.g. by writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Family Photography

© Sandy Millar via Unsplash

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

In this seminar, we are going to read and discuss foundational works by critics of family photography, including Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Marianne Hirsch, and Deborah Willis. These scholars have offered theoretical terms for investigating family photographs, respectively, as affective punctum; middlebrow art; conduit for postmemory; means of African-American self-representation. Furthermore, we are going to read literary texts which employ family photographs.

Endings

© Verena Laschinger

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

In this seminar we investigate the issue of literary closure, reading critical works on form as well as primary texts of various genres which either accomplish or deliberately forego in any significant way what Barbara Herrnstein Smith has called the “effect of finality, resolution, and stability”. 

American War

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

In this seminar, we will closely read Omar El Akkad’s debut novel American War, investigating how its depiction of the (imaginary) second American Civil War (2074-2095) reflects contemporary political tensions in the post-truth, Trump-era USA. How does the novel subvert or reinforce traditional dystopian storytelling? How does climate change function as both a backdrop and a catalyst for the events in the text which include refugee experience, displacement, radicalization and terrorism? Furthermore, we will survey the critical work that has been done on the novel since its publication in 2017 as well as reviews and media reports. Please get your own copy of the text. Ideally, you have already read the novel at least once before the semester begins.

Literaturwissenschaftliches Kolloquium für BA-Abschlussarbeiten

© Library of Congress. Hartsook Photo

Instructors: Ilka Lensen-Saal and Verena Laschinger

This colloquy is designed to guide you through the research and writing process of your final BA thesis. Our program is open and flexible; the main goal is to assist you in formulating and shaping your thesis. To do so, we will go over basic tools and methods in academic research and writing, then assist you in formulating an effective thesis statement and in outlining the logical steps of your argument. Throughout the process, you are expected to present your work-in-progress at various stages of development to the participants in the colloquy as well as to provide critical feedback to your peers’ work.

Introduction to American Literary History

© Library of Congress. https://lccn.loc.gov/2018756676

Instructor: Ilka Lensen-Saal

This course offers a survey of North American literature written in English from the period of exploration and colonialism to the antebellum period. Far from being a comprehensive survey, it spotlights a few significant texts and authors who have substantially shaped North American literature and culture. We will focus, in particular, on the various ways in which literature has participated and intervened in the various discussions over race, class, and gender that have been crucial to shaping and reshaping notions of American nationhood. One of the central questions guiding our investigation is whether these texts have produced a distinctive tradition of what we might call “American” writing and what the characteristics of this tradition might be. This is a reading intensive course, be prepared to read ca. 100 pages a week!

American Gothic Fiction

© MTI via Unsplash

Instructor: Ilka Lensen-Saal

The Gothic mode of writing emerged in American literature in the late 18th century concurrent with American nationhood. Drawing on Enlightenment principles of reason, freedom, and equality, the new nation proudly proclaimed in 1776 that “all men are created equal,” even as it would go on to consolidate chattel slavery, pursue the displacement and genocide of indigenous people, and keep women, people of color, and poor people disenfranchised. Not surprisingly, for this new nation “certain special guilts awaited projection in the Gothic form” (Fiedler 43). Indeed, ever since the turn of the 19th century American writers have persistently turned to the Gothic to chart the dark side of the nation’s self-understanding: its flight from the past, its foundational violence and repressed encounters with Otherness. Scholar Eric Savoy suggests that indeed the “entire tradition of American Gothic can be conceptualized as the attempt to invoke … the specter of Otherness that haunts the house of the national narrative” (Savoy 13-14). In this seminar, we will study how American writers throughout the long 19th century have deployed the Gothic as a way to evoke and manage the specters of Otherness and to give voice to culture-specific anxieties and repressed desires. We will familiarize ourselves with the various formal features and narrative conventions that constitute the Gothic tradition and examine how they have been used to thematize and chart the intertwined dynamics of progress and repression, innocence and guilt, authority and transgression, dream and nightmare, self and Other that undergird American nation building in the long 19th century.

American Travel Literature

© Verena Laschinger

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

This seminar explores the rich tradition of American travel literature, surveying both the historical development and shifting definitions of the genre. Students will learn to identify terms and concepts central to the genre such as ‘the exotic’, ‘the picturesque’, ‘the grand tour’, ‘the international theme’, ‘the middle passage’, etc. Further students will be introduced to the sustained critical analysis of travel literature with a special focus on colonialization, formation of national identity, globalization, and ecocriticism.

Im/possible Futures: Sci-Fi’s Dystopia and Utopia

© Luna Wang, Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/a-black-and-white-photo-of-a-group-of-skeletons-Tm3frORMTTk?utm_content=creditShareLink&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash

Instructor: Linda Meinhardt

Science fiction fundamentally revolves around concepts of disruption and transgression, serving as a genre that extends beyond the constraints of the present to probe and envision potential futures. Through a diverse selection of short stories from both Western and non-Western authors, this seminar will examine how the genre critiques and reimagines the status quo as it translates contemporary concerns into speculative futurescapes. Central to this seminar is the exploration of science fiction as a means of challenging and deconstructing traditional patterns of perception, existence, and world-ordering, underscoring its ability to redefine and transform established narratives and social practices. This exploration will address the conventions and stylistic elements of the genre, with a specific focus on the subgenres of utopia and dystopia. By exploring central themes such as xeno-cultural encounters, techno-humanism, and other quintessential tropes of science fiction, the seminar will unravel the genre’s defining elements and demonstrate its unique capacity for transformative change.

Decolonize: An Introduction to Decolonial Thought and Practice

© Jordan Engel, 2015, https://terralingua.org/langscape_articles/decolonial-mapmaking-reclaiming-indigenous-places-and-knowledge/.

Instructor: Ilka Lensen-Saal

This course introduces students to the field of Decolonial Studies, with a particular focus on how contemporary theories and practices tackle the colonial legacies determining contemporary Western knowledges, economic and geopolitical power structures, as well as gendered and racial positionalities. We will discuss various de-linking strategies that divert from the colonial matrix of power by changing the rules of engagement in order to create a pluriversal (diverse, inclusive and just) world. We will also consider various concrete examples of decolonial engagement today, such as the Decolonize initiative in Erfurt as well as contemporary decolonializing curatorial practices implemented by the Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde in Leipzig. The map by Jordan Engel (2015) shows a portion of a south-oriented Map of the World’s Watersheds, labeled in their predominant indigenous language.

Witches and Witchcraft

© Geo. H. Walker & Co. The Witch No. 3. Feb. 29. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2003677982/>

Instructor: Ilka Lensen-Saal

This course is offered in English. This is not a course about Harry Potter, nor about Wicked or other contemporary pop cultural crazes about witchcraft. Rather, this seminar invites you to reflect on our contemporary cultural investment in magic and magical beings by taking a longer cultural and closer literary perspective. Witch, crone, hag, harpie, she-devil … for a long time appellations like these have been used to target people (mostly female) whose unconventional modes of being in this world and knowing of this world have confounded, challenged, and affronted their more narrow-minded neighbors. The term witch has been deployed bullet-like to mark out, contain, and obliterate what is perceived as radical Otherness – be it with regard to age, sex, race, class, marital status, or reproductive abilities. On this score, it has been instrumentalized to recalibrate personal and communal power relations, property distribution, and social bonds. Yet, it addition to fear of alterity, it has also signalled great power and agency. As an interstitial figure, the witch is situated at the threshold between the (commonly) known and unknown; it can communicate with non-human/ super-human entities and command great creative as well as destructive forces. The etymology of the German word "Hexe," in fact, signals this interstitial power: a spirit that lives in hedges and straddles fences. This course traces the evolution of the witch as an interstitial figure in the Western cultural imagination from the Romantic to the contemporary period, examining its function as literary character and trope in a number of fun texts across the last two centuries.

North American Women’s Anti-Extractivist Speculative Fiction

© https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Instructor: Atalie Gerhard

At the height of women-led activist movements advocating policies to curb emissions worldwide, this course will look at Anglophone texts by female authors from what are now Canada and the U.S. that center environmental exploitation in their plots. Although such “cli-fi” (Dan Bloom) can be published, for example, as books, films, or songs, this course chooses to emphasize the written texts. In our class, we will discuss selected excerpts from the novels Split Tooth (2018) by Tanya Tagaq (Inuit), Gold. Fame. Citrus (2015) by Claire Vaye Watkins, and Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood. Students are expected to obtain and read The Word for World Is Forest (1972) by Ursula K. Le Guin (total page number: 128). These literary texts allow juxtapositions of current conceptualizations of human relations to the natural world by colonial settlers and Indigenous peoples. In this course, students will practice critical thinking and literary analysis, differentiating between a thesis statement as well as its discussion in the main body of the thesis versus, for example, a summary, academic writing, conducting independent research, and giving and receiving feedback as well as reflecting on it. After this course, students will be able to analyze why, how, and with which implications women’s environmental dystopias challenge “petro-masculinity” (Cara Daggett), which has been feminizing notably North American lands to justify resource extraction since the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the so-called New World in 1492.

The Body in Contemporary Poetry

© oleg-ivanov-zYHuntvIm0I-unsplash

Instructor: Emma Weiher

This seminar looks at a selection of poetry written by contemporary North American writers ranging from the 1960s until today. With a focus on the body as a contested territory in all of the poets’ works chosen for this course, the topic allows for a number of different, subversive and culturally relevant presentations of the body in poetry. The course is aimed to provoke discussions around the body as a means of protest, a site of self-transformation and/or fulfilment, as well as a place of alienation. The poets chosen for this course position the body in highly individual ways: as the desiring body, the suffering body, the subversive body, the racialized body, or even as the aging and neglected body. After an introduction to theories of the body (from psychoanalyst thought to French feminism and affect and trauma studies) we will be looking at texts written by poets that consider the body in very individual ways and thereby illuminate the complexity of the body (and its potential) in contemporary poetry.

Literaturwissenschaftliches Kolloquium für BA-Abschlussarbeit

© Library of Congress. Hartsook Photo

Instructors: Ilka Lensen-Saal and Kai Merten

This colloquy is designed to guide you through the research and writing process of your final BA thesis. Our program is open and flexible; the main goal is to assist you in formulating and shaping your thesis. To do so, we will go over basic tools and methods in academic research and writing, then assist you in formulating an effective thesis statement and in outlining the logical steps of your argument. Throughout the process, you are expected to present your work-in-progress at various stages of development to the participants in the colloquy as well as to provide critical feedback to your peers’ work.

American Realism

Instructor: Ilka Saal

In this seminar, we examine select prose fiction texts of US American literature produced between the Civil War and World War I in relation to the emerging concepts of literary realism, regionalism, and naturalism as well as their overall cultural context. We will study various approaches to conceptualizing these new, related literary forms with regard to their attempts to make sense of a rapidly changing society. In particular, we will focus on how literary texts of the time poetically construct “reality” and how these constructions are shaped by issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and/or race, as well as a competing mass culture. This is a reading intensive course; be prepared to read 150-200 pages a week! (B Ang/Am, B Lit)

City Poems

© Verena Laschinger

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

The city figures prominently in American poetry as a symbol of the nation's exceptionalism and progress as well as of its harrowing political, cultural and social conflicts. To gain a first understanding of poetry's negotiation of developments in city planning, activism, and urban theory, students will be introduced to Walt Whitman's classic "Mannahatta" (1860) and Hart Crane's modernist masterpiece The Bridge (1930). Yet, given that in North America the word “urban” eventually came to signify “Black”, we will focus specifically on poetic evocations of race and racialization e.g. by writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Comprehending Canada

Instructors
Jeffrey Ayres - St. Michael ´ s College (Burlington, U.S.A.)
Magdalena Fiřtová - Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic)
Denisa Krásná - Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic)
Richard Nimijean - Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada)
Tomáš Pospíšil- Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic)

In this online block seminar, students are introduced to the study of Canada and its society, identity, culture, economy, and politics. This course brings together an interdisciplinary team of experts in Canadian Studies whose insights will allow students to gain a better comprehension of Canada. By synthesizing these approaches, we develop a unique and more comprehensive understanding. We explore Canada by looking at its development, its evolving sense of national identity, and the challenges of Canada’s ongoing evolution and survival. We look at Canadian people and how they live in Canada. Subjects covered include: national identity, diversity in Canadian society, race, and ethnicity, Indigenous Studies,Canada-US relations and the border, natural resources, the environment, and the economy, immigration and refugee policies,Canadian narratives as seen in culture, film, and literature.

The online seminar is scheduled to take place in blocks on June 13 and June 20 - 26, 2024 (Zoom).

Please contact Prof. Ilka Saal, if you are interested in participating: ilka.saal@uni-erfurt.de

Early American Detectives

Instructor: Ilka Saal

In this introductory seminar to literature, we focus on the genre of detective fiction. We will examine its constitutive narratological features and trace its evolution from its early beginnings in the mid-19^th century to its first flourishing at the turn of the century and its immense popularity in the interwar period of the early 20^th century. While the genre has frequently been seen as the domain of male writers, we will pay particular attention to how female writers have skillfully used and manipulated its conventions to critique dominant, patriarchal structures. (B Ang/Am, B Lit)

Family Photography

© Sandy Millar via Unsplash

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

In this seminar, we are going to read and discuss foundational works by critics of family photography, including Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Marianne Hirsch, and Deborah Willis. These scholars have offered theoretical terms for investigating family photographs, respectively, as affective punctum; middlebrow art; conduit for postmemory; means of African-American self-representation. Furthermore, we are going to read literary texts which employ family photographs. Lastly, we explore the relevance of family photographs together with family pedagogues and social workers and visit a family photography exhibition.

Gendernauts - Feminismus und Kunstgeschichte

Instructors: Lelah Bender-Ferguson and Verena Laschinger

The topic of this StuFu seminar aims to open a critical perspective to our surrounding everyday visualisations of female/male connotations in body language, images of ideal bodies, as well as advertising with it’s subliminal messaging and objects. Initially, our question must be “ under what circumstances does one become aware of societal gender imprinting and role assignment ?” With which strategies do artists or art historians use alternative identities to question and broaden norms and the conventions of gender and identity (eg. Martha Rosler / Linda Nochlin ) ? Participation in excursions to museums is necessary in order to discuss questions of social gender and identity while viewing original and important works of feminist art. Course participants will hold a referat on one artist or a group of artists. All media are welcome ( eg. dance, performance , video, installation painting, sculpture, design etc.)

Life Writing

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In this introductory seminar, students will examine the evolution of the autobiographical genre in the US. We will pay special attention to the ways in which African-Americans, women and members of minority groups use specific modes as well as various media for their self-fashioning in the first person singular to further their emancipatory goals.

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

Literary Animal Studies

© Verena Laschinger

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

We begin this seminar with a discussion of John Berger’s seminal essay “Why look at animals?” (1977), in which the cultural historian surveys the manifold roles that animals used to play in the lives of humans. The “first subject matter for painting was animal,” he writes, just as “the first metaphor was animal”. Later, Berger continues, the animal has “been co-opted into the family” as a pet “and into the spectacle” as a commodity. Twenty-first century scholarship made us increasingly aware of the entanglements between human and non-human animals that profoundly challenge many, if not most, of the current social and cultural practices concerning animals as food, pets, pests, lab rats, or wild others in the global North. Once we have established a repertoire of critical terms and concepts for the study of literary animals and the ways in which they are mediated, we will proceed with reading a select number of literary texts which invite a critical reflection of animal agency and animal rights.

Literature(s) of the Black Atlantic

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Instructor: Luana de Souza Sutter, M. A.

In 1993, the British sociologist and cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy established the concept of the Black Atlantic. The Black Atlantic is a spatio-temporal construct characterized by “the stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering” between Africa and the Anglophone Black Diaspora (3). In this class, we will engage critically with literary works that help us understand Paul Gilroy’s concept, its central themes and tropes as well as its geographical and historical features. We will be reading together different literary forms – seminal publications such as Frederick Douglass’ autobiographical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s essayistic The Soul of Black Folk (1903), as well as contemporary novels that reflect on the dynamics of the Black Atlantic from a transnational stance.

Literaturwissenschaftliches Kolloquium für BA-Abschlussarbeit

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Instructors: Ilka Saal and Verena Laschinger

This colloquy is designed to guide you through the research and writing process of your final BA thesis. Our program is open and flexible; the main goal is to assist you in formulating and shaping your thesis. To do so, we will go over basic tools and methods in academic research and writing, then assist you in formulating an effective thesis statement and in outlining the logical steps of your argument. Throughout the process, you are expected to present your work-in-progress at various stages of development to the participants in the colloquy as well as to provide critical feedback to your peers’ work.

Notions of (In-)Security in American Literature

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Instructor: Christoph Nostitz

In her 2008 essay “In the Name of Security,” Amy Kaplan sensitizes readers with the notion that we live in an age of security–an elastic term whose many meanings have penetrated all aspects of contemporary American political and cultural life. By suggesting a difference between seemingly ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ spaces, the lexicon of security allows for maintaining boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ freedom and captivity, and the meaning of physical borders between nation states. In this seminar, we will explore the rich body of U.S.-American literature that has shaped and continues to shape American imaginations of security and insecurity. Studying the works of literary luminaries such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shirley Jackson, and Yuri Herrera, we will make sense of the literary devices that have sustained notions of (in)security spanning almost two centuries of writing. From unreliable narrators to unique negotiations of reality, we will ask: How do these texts reflect on various experiences of insecurity? How do these texts negotiate the relationship between security and insecurity? And how do these texts encourage readers to question their own notions of security?

Politics and Performances of Whiteness

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Instructors: Jürgen Martschukat and Ilka Saal

The class will discuss the politics and performances of whiteness with a focus on U.S. history and culture. (Stufu)

The Black Radical Tradition in African American Theater

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Instructor: Ilka Saal

Against the odds of a a long, brutal history of anti-Black violence, subjugation, and dehumanization, African Americans have continued to survive, to resist, to rehumanize themselves, and to thrive. Black Studies scholar Cedric Robinson refers to this long history of resilience and resistance as the Black radical tradition. Drama and theater have played an important role in this endeavor. This seminar focuses on the important work accomplished by African American playwrights in the Black radical tradition from the 1950s to the contemporary period.

Things

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Instructor: Verena Laschinger

The key question of this seminar is, how things facilitate narrative, how stories are wrested from material objects (Susan Stewart). Starting in the late nineteenth century, we are going to explore how the ideology of things plays out in literary realism, in which props are part and parcel of the imagination (Varun Begley). Tying in with recent debates about looting, appropriation, and restitution (Sarr and Savoy), we are also going to read late nineteenth-century records of colonial exploration and archeological excavation, which both document the plunder of things and facilitate the knowledge production in which we are still implicated today. The seminar will branch out to familiarize students with conceptual distinctions between gifts, things, and commodities, which represent capitalism (Appadurai), as well as with seminal literary and theoretical texts on the cultural practice of collecting (Benjamin), its creative modes of display as albums (Kramer and Pelz), or in the museum and the archive (Azoulay) as related institutions.

American Gothic Fiction

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Instructor: Ilka Saal

The Gothic mode of writing emerged in American literature in the late 18th century concurrent with American nationhood. Drawing on Enlightenment principles of reason, freedom, and equality, the new nation proudly proclaimed in 1776 that “all men are created equal,” even as it would go on to consolidate chattel slavery, pursue the displacement and genocide of indigenous people, and keep women, people of color, and poor people disenfranchised. Not surprisingly, for this new nation “certain special guilts awaited projection in the Gothic form” (Fiedler 43). Indeed, ever since the turn of the 19th century American writers have persistently turned to the Gothic to chart the dark side of the nation’s self-understanding: its flight from the past, its foundational violence and repressed encounters with Otherness. Scholar Eric Savoy suggests that indeed the “entire tradition of American Gothic can be conceptualized as the attempt to invoke … the specter of Otherness that haunts the house of the national narrative” (Savoy 13-14). In this seminar, we will study how American writers throughout the long 19th century have deployed the Gothic as a way to evoke and manage the specters of Otherness and to give voice to culture-specific anxieties and repressed desires. We will familiarize ourselves with the various formal features and narrative conventions that constitute the Gothic tradition and examine how they have been used to thematize and chart the intertwined dynamics of progress and repression, innocence and guilt, authority and transgression, dream and nightmare, self and Other that undergird American nation building in the long 19th century.

American Short Story

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Instructor: Verena Laschinger

In this seminar students will be introduced to the tradition of American short story writing. Sketching the development of the genre from the nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, the course covers some classic texts by major practitioners and explains theoretical concepts, themes and styles that were characteristic of American short stories at certain moments. Special attention will be given to the specific impact women, non-white, and queer writers had on the development of the genre.

Modules: Please see course catalog

Neoliberalism and Modern American Literature

© https://www.loc.gov/resource/vrg.02722/

Instructor: Max Rosenzweig

In 1980, newly elected British prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared that there was “no real alternative” to a set of policies she and the conservative Tory party endorsed in favor of free markets and capitalist globalization. That same year, Ronald Reagan won the US presidency on the back of a campaign that was predicated on similar measures to the ones Thatcher propagated, thus launching what the sociologist Stuart Hall called “the neoliberal revolution”. In the years and decades to come, neoliberalism not only transformed economic policies but influenced politics, culture, and quotidian life around the globe in ways that suggest that Thatcher’s assessment of the inevitability of neoliberalism’s ascent might have been true all along. In this course, we will focus on the ways in which neoliberalism influenced literature, film, and music from the 1980s onwards, from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities up to contemporary rap music and the “#girlboss” trope. We will look at the ways in which its all-encompassing nature affects different identity groups and how this influence manifests itself in the contemporary discourse on identity politics and cultural production, all the while keeping Thatcher’s dictum in mind and asking if and how the predominance of neoliberalism might be countered, undermined and assessed in new and innovative artistic ways.

Introduction to American Literary History

© Library of Congress. https://lccn.loc.gov/2018756676

Instructor: Ilka Saal

This course offers a survey of North American literature written in English from the period of exploration and colonialism to the antebellum period. Far from being a comprehensive survey, it spotlights a few significant texts and authors who have substantially shaped North American literature and culture. We will focus, in particular, on the various ways in which literature has participated and intervened in the various discussions over race, class, and gender that have been crucial to shaping and reshaping notions of American nationhood. One of the central questions guiding our investigation is whether these texts have produced a distinctive tradition of what we might call “American” writing and what the characteristics of this tradition might be. This is a reading intensive course, be prepared to read ca. 100 pages a week!

Reading Colson Whitehead

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Instructor: Ilka Saal

One of the most prolific contemporary American writers, Colson Whitehead has surprised his readers time and again with innovative takes on established genres (detective, horror, coming-of-age novel, neo-slave narrative) as well as with a heterogeneous cast of characters, ranging from elevator inspectors, salesmen, and consultants to fugitives, zombies, and crooks. In this seminar, we will take the time to read three of his nine novels closely: his debut novel The Intuitionist (1999) and the widely recognized second novel John Henry Days (2001) as well as the Pulitzer-Prize and National-Book-Award-winning The Underground Railroad (2016). The overall goal is to obtain an appreciation of Whitehead’s narrative voice and style along with an understanding of how his aesthetics intersects with key thematic and political concerns in his novels. This is a reading intensive seminar; so only sign up, if you are prepared to take on the required reading assignments!

Contemporary Narratives of Slavery

© Library of Congress. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.0220120b

Instructor: Ilka Saal

Slavery has continued to haunt the literary imagination of the African diaspora well into the 21st century. As novelist Fred D’Aguiar points out, each generation of African Americans “need[s] their own version of the past, to see the past in their own images, words.” In this seminar, we shall examine a number of such generational attempts of rendering slavery in the images and words particular to their specific socio-political and cultural contexts. We will begin with a brief study of the original slave narratives of the antebellum period, which serves as a blueprint for the literature that follows, and then focus on the classic neo-slave narratives of the 1970s and 80s, the post-neo-slave narratives of the 1990s and 2000, as well as the more recent narratives that have emerged since the 2010s. Our study will include autobiographical writing along with prose fiction as well as works from the performing and visual arts. This is a reading intensive course; be prepared to read 150-200 pages a week!

Moby-Dick

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

A masterpiece of Western literature, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is a daunting read. We will spend the whole semester to closely examine this one novel and explore its depths and shallows. To help us navigate the text, we will use a wide range of criticism and commentary. These include classic works by C.L.R. James, Lawrence Buell and Toni Morrison as well as Afrofuturist, queer and transmedia approaches that account for the continued cultural presence of Moby-Dick.

Modules: Please see course catalog

Climate Change Theatre Action (StuFu)

© Verena Laschinger

Instructors: Ilka Saal, Verena Laschinger

In this hands-on workshop, students are asked to take collaborative action in the fight against climate change. Chiming in with numerous international events for our planet’s environmental future, our initiative articulates the urgent need for a climate conscious cultural movement within and beyond the academy. More specifically, we will join the Climate Change Theatre Action series of readings and performances of five-minute playsCCTA websitethat is scheduled to take place around the globe between September 17 thru December 23, 2023. The participatory project offers an opportunity to rally your creative energies on behalf of raising public awareness of one of today’s biggest challenges: saving our planet.This is a hands-on workshop. Be prepared to actively participate in the conceptualization, preparation, and performance of climate change theatre action.

African American Documentaries (Stufu)

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Instructors: Jürgen Martschukat (History) and Ilka Saal (Literature)

As non-fictional motion pictures, documentary films tend to be seen as presenting a factual, objective version of reality. However, as we will learn in this class by studying a variety of documentaries on Black history and culture, each documentary film constructs its story in a complex manner, rendering a particular version of reality. We will begin this class with examining the theory and concept of the documentary film as a genre. This will be followed by an in-depth study of a number of different documentary films, film styles, and approaches to filmmaking. Each film will be introduced by a group of students; the group will be responsible for a double session of film screening, context presentation, analysis, and discussion.

Modules: Please see course catalog.

American Realism

Instructor: Ilka Saal

In this seminar, we will examine select prose fiction texts of US American literature produced between the Civil War and World War I in relation to the emerging concepts of literary realism and naturalism. We will study various approaches to conceptualizing these new, related literary forms with regard to their attempts to make sense of a rapidly changing society. In particular, we will focus on how literary texts of the time poetically construct “reality” and how these constructions are shaped by issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and/or race. This is a reading intensive course; be prepared to read 150-200 pages a week!

Modules: Please see course catalog.

City Poems

© Verena Laschinger

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

The city figures prominently in American poetry as a symbol of the nation’s exceptionalism and progress as well as of its harrowing political, cultural and social conflicts. To gain a first understanding of poetry’s negotiation of developments in city planning, activism, and urban theory, students will be introduced to Walt Whitman’s classic “Mannahatta” (1860) and Hart Crane’s modernist masterpiece “The Bridge” (1930). Yet, given that in North America the word “urban” eventually came to signify “Black”, we will focus specifically on poetic evocations of race and racialization e.g. by writers of the Harlem Renaissance and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Modules: Please see course catalog.

Family Photography

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This seminar consists of two parts. In the first, which takes the form of regular weekly sessions, we are going to read and discuss foundational works by critics of the genre, including Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Marianne Hirsch, and Deborah Willis, who have offered theoretical terms for investigating family photographs, respectively, as: an affective punctum; middlebrow art; conduit for postmemory; means of African-American self-representation. The second part is scheduled as a block seminar entitled “Fluchtpunkt – Lebenslinie: Mediale Fassungen von Displacement”. Together with photographer Linn Schröder, member of Ostkreuz, Agentur der Fotografen, and Andrea Frank, Associate Professor of Photography at SUNY New Paltz, USA, whose works render specific experiences of displacement in terms of family photographs, we intend to approach the subject from both scholarly and non-scholarly perspectives. To include interested third parties from outside of academia and also allow for personal accounts, this part of the seminar is organized in cooperation with Evangelische Akademie Thüringen. It takes place on Friday May 12 (starting at 4 pm) and Saturday May 13 (all day).

More information on the workshop

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

Literary Animal Studies

© Verena Laschinger

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

We begin this seminar with a discussion of John Berger’s seminal essay “Why look at animals?” (1977), in which the cultural historian surveys the manifold roles that animals used to play in the lives of humans. The “first subject matter for painting was animal,” he writes, just as “the first metaphor was animal”. Later, Berger continues, the animal has “been co-opted into the family” as a pet “and into the spectacle” as a commodity. Twenty-first century scholarship made us increasingly aware of the entanglements between human and non-human animals that profoundly challenge many, if not most, of the current social and cultural practices concerning animals as food, pets, pests, lab rats, or wild others in the global North. Once we have established a repertoire of critical terms and concepts for the study of literary animals and the ways in which they are mediated, we will proceed with reading a select number of literary texts which invite a critical reflection of animal agency and animal rights.

Modules: Please see course catalog.

Nineteenth-century American Women Writers

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

The purpose of this course is to better understand how the struggle for gender, class and race equality has defined the literary works of American women writers in the nineteenth century, which in return turned out to shape the political realities of the nation. Despite their impact, their huge popularity at the time, and their artistic values, literary texts by women writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe remained ignored by twentieth century literary critics until a recovery began in the late 1960s and 70s as America’s founding principles of equality and equal opportunity remained the subject of debates and conflict. We will pay attention to questions of form as well as to the larger cultural/political issues addressed in select writings of important nineteenth century women authors.

Modules: Please see course catalog.

Slave Narratives

© Library of Congress. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.0220120b

Instructor: Ilka Saal

Written between the late 18th and late 19th century, slave narratives detailed the life experience of enslaved Africans under the brutal economic system of New World slavery as well as their escape to freedom. These (mostly) autobiographical narratives enabled African Americans to bear witness to their traumatic experience, to indict an inhuman system, and to lay claim to the human rights denied to them under slavery. At the same time, they also served as powerful instruments in the abolitionist movement and thus also catered to political exigencies as well as to the expectations of a predominantly white middle-class audience. Slave narratives therefore present us, at one and the same time, with profoundly personal accounts of traumatic experience and the pursuit of freedom and self-determination as well as with complex mediations of experience and aspiration in terms of the demands of genre, the literary market, the political situation, and audience expectations. In this seminar, we shall engage in close readings and critical discussions of several of these original slave narratives. We will consider how they strove to give voice to the experience of unique individuals even as they negotiated the pressures of the political and social. This is a reading intensive course; so be prepared to read several prose works, along with relevant secondary literature, and to participate actively in class discussions.

Modules: Please see course catalog.

Theater & Community

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Instructor: Ilka Saal

Recent political and epidemiological events, along with social, economic, and environmental  developments, and even epistemic trends index an increasing polarization within and between nations, cultures, and people with regard to a variety of issues (e.g. climate, war, migration, social protest, political reform, fake news). What roles can theater and drama play in re/building consensus and negotiating common ground, i.e. in obtaining the basic agreement on a sense of commonality or mutual interest required for social cohesion and collective action? At the same time, given that consensus and common ground are per definition exclusive and exclusionary, as well as often of a pragmatic, temporary, and unstable nature, what are the concrete politics and aesthetics at stake in performing commonality and community? How do theater and drama negotiate the relationship between commonality and difference, individuality and collectivity? These and other questions are the central isssues examined by  the international conference “Theater & Community: Poetics, Politics, Performances,” taking place in Erfurt from 8-11 June 2023.

Our research seminar accompanies this conference. In preparing for the conference, we will consider various critical approaches to the possibilities and limits of community as well as in what ways, “theatrical practice and representation reveal the tensions inherent in community formation” (Fisek 4). Since the conference topic stakes out a rather large field, the goal of this seminar is for each of you to develop a research project of your own, which engages with relevant aspects of the topic through a close reading of one or two specific plays. Besides gaining a deeper understanding of the larger topic, attendance at the conference will provide you with first-hand experience of up-to-date research in the field. You will see how other researchers (senior and junior) approach the topic, what questions they pose, and how they develop their answers in close readings of primary texts. You are therefore expected to attend at least one keynote and one panel; please plan accordingly! At the end of the semester, you will present your own research proposal for discussion to the class.

Modules: Please see course catalog.

Queer Children’s Literature

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Instructor: Verena Laschinger

How is children’s literature queer? Obviously, if it narrates homosocial, -erotic, or -sexual content, if child characters resist heteronormative expectations as tomboyish Jo March already did in the nineteenth-century classic “Little Women”, if they downright refuse to grow-up like Peter Pan, or navigate non-binary identities like Ana and Hayden of “Ana on the Edge” (2020). Yet, in this seminar we will not simply survey texts with a queer content and queer characters. Additionally, students will be introduced to queer theory as a means to critically interrogate cultural constructs like the Child, Childhood and even Children’s Literature itself.

Modules: Please see course catalog.

American Short Story

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Instructor: Verena Laschinger

In this seminar students will be introduced to the tradition of American short story writing. Sketching the development of the genre from the nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, the course covers some classic texts by major practitioners and explains theoretical concepts, themes and styles that were characteristic of American short stories at certain moments. Special attention will be given to the specific impact women, non-white, and queer writers had on the development of the genre.

Modules: Please see course catalog

American Gothic Fiction

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Instructor: Ilka Saal

This seminar is dedicated to the study of a particular mode of writing known as the Gothic, which, notably, emerged in American literature concurrent with the founding of a new form of governmentality: democracy. Drawing on Enlightenment principles of reason, freedom, and equality, the new nation proudly proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” even as it consolidated chattel slavery, pursued the displacement and genocide of indigenous people, and kept women, people of color, and poor people disenfranchised. Not surprisingly, as one of the leading scholars of Gothic fiction, Leslie Fielder, points out, for this new nation “certain special guilts awaited projection in the Gothic form” (Fiedler, 143). Indeed, ever since the turn of the 19th century American writers have persistently turned to the Gothic to chart the dark side of the nation’s self-understanding: its flight from the past, its foundational violence and repressed encounters with Otherness. As another eminent scholar, Eric Savoy, puts it, the “entire tradition of American Gothic can be conceptualized as the attempt to invoke … the specter of Otherness that haunts the house of the national narrative” (Savoy, 13-14). In this seminar, we will study how American writers throughout the long 19th century have deployed the Gothic as a way to manage the specters of otherness and to give voice to culture-specific anxieties and repressed desires. We will familiarize ourselves with the various formal features and narrative conventions that constitute the Gothic tradition and examine how they have been used to thematize and chart the intertwined dynamics of progress and repression, innocence and guilt, authority and transgression, dream and nightmare that undergird American nation building in the long 19th century.

Introduction to American Literary History: Colonial Period to Antebellum (1500-1860)

© Library of Congress. https://lccn.loc.gov/2018756676

Instructors: Ilka Saal

This course offers a survey of North American literature written in English from the period of exploration and colonialism to the antebellum period. Far from being a comprehensive survey, it spotlights a few significant texts and authors who have substantially shaped North American literature and culture. We will focus, in particular, on the various ways in which literature has participated and intervened in the various discussions over race, class, and gender that have been crucial to shaping and reshaping notions of American nationhood. One of the central questions guiding our investigation is whether these texts have produced a distinctive tradition of what we might call “American” writing and, if so, what the characteristics of this tradition might be.

Modules: Please see course catalog.

Introduction to Literary Studies

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Instructor: Verena Laschinger

This lecture series is designed as a basic introduction to literary studies, with a particular focus on literatures in English. It aims to introduce you to key concepts, analytical terms and methods as well as to a number of theoretical approaches that are relevant to the field. You will be introduced to a set of tools for critical analysis and close examination of selected texts from the main literary genres poetry, prose, and drama as well as other media such as photography, film and television. Examples will be chosen from various periods to sketch important developments of literary studies.

Modules: Please see course catalog

Moby-Dick

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

A masterpiece of Western literature, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is a daunting read. We will spend the whole semester to closely examine this one novel and explore its depths and shallows. To help us navigate the text, we will use a wide range of criticism and commentary. These include classic works by C.L.R. James, Lawrence Buell and Toni Morrison as well as Afrofuturist, queer and transmedia approaches that account for the continued cultural presence of Moby-Dick.

Modules: Please see course catalog

Nineteenth-Century American Children's Classics

© Library of Congress. Courier Litho Co.

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, published nine years before the American Civil War, has allegedly excited more attention than any book since the invention of printing. Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women has never been out of print and, to this day, is culturally ubiquitous with multiple film and television adaptations. “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”, Ernest Hemingway maintained. In this seminar we will discuss a number of nineteenth-century classics which, having invented some of the most beloved child characters, continue to appeal to children and adult readers alike. We will pay particular attention to the late-nineteenth-century cult of the child, which inspired the so-called “Golden Age” of children’s literature in Britain and North America, the myth of childhood innocence, and its ensuing impact on family, labor, education, and sexuality.

Modules: Please see course catalog

Shakespeare Meets Star Wars: The Bard in American Popular Culture

© tonynetone, licensed under CC-BY-2.0 and adapted from the original

Instructor: Teresa Teklić

For centuries William Shakespeare’s works have been performed and transformed, adapted, appropriated and remediated in a host of different media: in the novel, on film, and more recently also in social media. Such processes of transformation are often said to violate the works’ alleged authenticity, meddle with authorial intent, or “devalue” Shakespeare. Since his oeuvre is traditionally categorized as “high” culture, pop cultural renditions of Shakespeare’s works run the risk of being dismissed as products of inferior value.

This class will engage with questions of cultural production and consumption, by asking, for instance, how cultural value is produced and how it is determined. Does the value depend on the text (assuming that the original Shakespeare is “better” than Shakespeare in contemporary English), the medium (theater vs. film vs. Twitter), the genre (independent cinema vs. Hollywood blockbuster), the institution (the Royal Shakespeare Company vs. fan fiction), or on something else entirely?

We will look at these questions from a distinctly American perspective in order to determine how American culture adapts Shakespeare to a U.S. context, for instance in a Western movie rendition of King Lear or a rewriting of George Lucas’ Star Wars film in Shakespearean English. Texts by scholars like Pierre Bourdieu, Paul du Gay and Stuart Hall, John Fiske, Michel de Certeau, and Henry Jenkins will provide the theoretical framework for the class.

Modules: Please see course catalog.

Theater & the Afterlife of Slavery: Poetics and Politics of Recent Black Theater (2014-2020)

Instructor: Ilka Saal

This seminar is dedicated to the study of  recent developments in African American drama and theater. Over the past decade, US society has undergone an increasing polarization with regard to racial issues, exacerbated by continuous police violence against people of color and white supremacist terror. In response, people of color have devised various political, theoretical, and artistic interventions to resist and undercut the myriad forms of racist discrimination and violence they encounter in their everyday lives. In particular, they have drawn attention to how contemporary racism continues to be fed by the various social, economic, representational, and psychic legacies of slavery. In this seminar, we will examine how contemporary Black drama and theater engages with the afterlife of slavery in content as well as in form. In particular, we will consider how these artistic endeavors intersect with the politics of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as with recent theoretical interventions in the field of Black Studies.

Modules: Please see course catalog

African-American Poetry

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Instructor: Verena Laschinger

This course surveys the diverse body of work of African American poets. We will study early poems e.g. by Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first African American poets to achieve national recognition, works by more contemporary writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Amanda Gorman as well as poems that were recently published in the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project. Engaging political and theoretical issues related to the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, we will specifically examine the interconnections between African American poetry and other cultural forms, including music, visual arts, and folklore.

Modules: Please see course catalog.

Lecture: The City in American Literature

© Verena Laschinger

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

This lecture introduces students to American urban fiction alongside seminal theory from the field of urban studies. We will study representations of cities in American literature diachronically from the 17th century to the 21st century as well as venture into related media such as film, television, and photography. Students will get acquainted with the various ways, in which American cities were simultaneously fictionally imagined as well as materially engineered against the backdrop of both European capitals and the American wilderness. To conceptualize our readings, we will draw on the critical discourse regarding e.g. globalization, postcolonialism, and transnational urbanism.

Modules: Please see course catalog.

Literary Animal Studies

© Verena Laschinger

Instructor: Verena Laschinger

We begin this seminar with a discussion of John Berger’s seminal essay “Why look at animals?” (1977), in which the cultural historian surveys the manifold roles that animals used to play in the lives of humans. The “first subject matter for painting was animal,” he writes, just as “the first metaphor was animal”. Later, Berger continues, the animal has “been co-opted into the family” as a pet “and into the spectacle” as a commodity. Twenty-first century scholarship made us increasingly aware of the entanglements between human and non-human animals that profoundly challenge many, if not most, of the current social and cultural practices concerning animals as food, pets, pests, lab rats, or wild others in the global North. Once we have established a repertoire of critical terms and concepts for the study of literary animals and the ways in which they are mediated, we will proceed with reading a select number of literary texts which invite a critical reflection of animal agency and animal rights.

Modules: Please see official course catalog.

Nineteenth-Century American Children's Classics

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Instructor: Verena Laschinger

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, published nine years before the American Civil War, has allegedly excited more attention than any book since the invention of printing. Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women has never been out of print and, to this day, is culturally ubiquitous with multiple film and television adaptations. “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”, Ernest Hemingway maintained. In this seminar we will discuss a number of nineteenth-century classics which, having invented some of the most beloved child characters, continue to appeal to children and adult readers alike. We will pay particular attention to the late-nineteenth-century cult of the child, which inspired the so-called “Golden Age” of children’s literature in Britain and North America, the myth of childhood innocence, and its ensuing impact on family, labor, education, and sexuality.Module: Please see official course catalog.

Poem, Painting, Photograph: Reading the Contemporary Novel Through Its Intertexts

Instructor: Teresa Teklić

Some of the most interesting contemporary writers use a plethora of intertextual reference and images to enrich and complicate the meanings of their texts. Sheila Heti’s essay-novel Motherhood includes photographs, tarot cards, and reprints of famous impressionist artworks by Berthe Morisot or Paul Gauguin. Ben Lerner’s novels are a veritable feast of intertextuality, including not only reprints of paintings and photographs, but also movie stills (Back to the Future; The Passenger), snippets from political speeches (Ronald Regan’s State of the Union address from 1986), poems, and references to other fictional and nonfictional texts. Sometimes these echoes can even be traced through multiple works: Lerner’s novel 10:04 not only directly references Walt Whitman’s memoir Specimen Days (1882), it also alludes to Michael Cunningham’s eponymous novel (Specimen Days, 2005), which was inspired by Whitman’s memoir. How do these intertexts echo through time? How do they challenge, add to, undermine, or enrich the meanings of the contemporary texts in which they are embedded? We will try to approach these questions by closely engaging with these different (visual) texts and by drawing on theories of intermediality, intertextuality, semiotics, photography, and film studies to deepen our understanding.

Module: Please see official course catalog.