Moodle

Populism has experienced a real boom in social discourse in Europe in recent years, and particularly now in light of the COVID-19 health crisis. This lecture will be held in conjunction with the public lecture series Populism - Semantic Dimensions, International Perspectives, and Political Realities. In this public lecture we will focus especially on the complexity of the concept and the phenomenon of “populism,” privileging a “glocal” perspective which operates in a field of tension between the global dimension of populism, on the one hand, and regional/local questions and processes, on the other. In line with an inter- and transdisciplinary approach, this lecture aims to include perspectives from political science, linguistics, social science, as well as cultural and media studies in order to approximate diverse definitions of populism from different points of view. We will also focus on the interconnectedness of politics and popular culture, analyzing, on the one hand, representations of populism in popular culture (particularly in film and TV series), and focusing on the role of popular culture in the propagation of populism (particularly the social media).
 
Course Readings:
A course reader will be made available.

This course is intended to make students familiar with the various theoretical approaches and practices common to the study of culture. It should introduce students to the intellectual roots and contemporary applications of Cultural Studies, focusing on the theoretical bases for the analyses of meaning and power in the production and reception of texts. While this class will offer various approaches to the study of cultures in the English-speaking world, it should also provide students with an opportunity to do Cultural Studies. In our analyses we will therefore draw on a wide range of cultural material (literature, television, films, and commercials) and explore the ways in which questions of representation are interrelated with issues of identity, in particular racial/ethnic, sexual, class, and regional differences.

Texts:
A course reader will be made available.

This course provides a survey of North American literatures, presenting classic novels, plays, and poems. The word “classics” in the title of this lecture indicates the stature and prominence these works have achieved. Illuminating a series of influential works, we will try to grasp the intellectual power (emotional and artistic) of these famous works and the cultural work (including their social and political dimensions) they perform. At the same time, we will also look into the relations of classics and the processes of canon formation. Importantly, we will see that there are different traditions of “classics” and that various bodies of literature have their own classics. Our survey of U.S. American and Canadian literatures then includes classics of African American literature, U.S. Latinx literature, feminist literature, Gay and Lesbian literature, showing that each body of literature has its own definitions of what constitutes a classic.

Course Readings:
There will be a course reader, which will be made available on Moodle.

This course is intended to make students familiar with the various theoretical approaches and practices common to the study of culture. It should introduce students to the intellectual roots and contemporary applications of Cultural Studies, focusing on the theoretical bases for the analyses of meaning and power in the production and reception of texts. While this class will offer various approaches to the study of cultures in the English-speaking world, it should also provide students with an opportunity to do Cultural Studies. In our analyses we will therefore draw on a wide range of cultural material (literature, television, films, and commercials) and explore the ways in which questions of representation are interrelated with issues of identity, in particular racial/ethnic, sexual, class, and regional differences.

The North American West is an extremely powerful concept that has evolved over several centuries in the imaginations of countless people in the US, Canada and abroad. It is an idea (re)produced in books, movies, and paintings which invokes a whole array of abstractions such as frontier, adventure, manifest destiny, opportunity, honor, individualism, and justice. It is often recognized by visual cues such as the cowboy, the horse, the gun, vast stretches of open range, the prairies, and desert mesas. "Going west" usually refers to the act of transcending boundaries and is associated with hopes of self-realization and fulfillment. It is also connected to the urge of expansion and the reaching of one’s limits, which, as Fredrick Jackson Turner has maintained in his famous "frontier thesis," is a key dominant of the American imagination.
This lecture course will offer a broad overview over the American and Canadian West from a variety of perspectives, relying on literature, art, film, and history in order to raise a series of key questions concerning the development of the idea of the West and the concept of "going west." It will focus on the different myths and representations which have played a significant part in the formation of national identities. Our course readings will not only focus on renowned writers of the American West (Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain, and Larry McMurtry), but will also include literatures of the Canadian West, Native American and First Nations voices, Chicano/a writers, and women writers. It will also present the work of painters (George Caleb Bingham, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Remington), look at popular culture ("cowboy" movies) as well as present figures of the popular mythology (Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill). Last but not least, our course will be informed by an understanding that the West is not a monolithic concept or space, but one that encompasses diverse regional cultures, some of them quite different from each other. This understanding will be reflected in the topics to be discussed as part of this lecture course.

This course provides an introduction to the discipline of American Studies and engages the prevailing theoretical approaches to the study of American literatures and cultures. Emphasizing key texts and methods for critically understanding the term ”American,” this class offers an interdisciplinary investigation into North American literature, history, culture, and identity. On the one hand, we will follow a ”classic” American Studies approach and identify a series of foundational myths and scenarios that have contributed to the making of the nation and we will trace them through the centuries. On the other hand, we will also show how a focus on such foundational myths is limiting, as it is dictated by a national and nationalist narrative of the US. Addressing the important shift in its focus and method of analysis of American literature and culture from a nation-state based type of area studies to a transnational American Studies, we will show how recent re-conceptualizations of the field of American Studies have contributed to a remapping of American literature that pays attention to the multi- and transcultural realities of the United States.

Course Readings:

There will be a course reader, which you can order through NamLitCult and pick up at our offices.

This course examines texts written by and about refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants and will afford students the opportunity to reflect on current discussions in politics and media on refugees, migrants and stateless people. Focusing on the representations of migrant trajectories and refugee experiences in literary texts by transcultural Anglophone writers of different origins (Latinx, Asian, and African) who now reside in the U.S., we will look at the different representational and narrative strategies which are employed in order to situate the constructions of diasporic and transnational identities within global processes of colonization, globalization, capitalism, and nationalism. We will deal with depictions of experiences of migrants and asylum seekers who also cross social, and cultural boundaries of normative gender, and institutions of the state. We will focus on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees (2017), Moshin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), and Patricia Engel’s The Veins of the Ocean (2016), and the short stories ”The Asylum Seeker” by Suketu Mehta and ”America” by Chinelo Okparanta.

This course also provides students with a foundational understanding of and critical engagement with key theories, concepts, issues, and debates in critical refugee, diaspora, and transnational studies.

VL "Centuries of Struggle: North American Women's Literatures"
Tue, 12-14
Building A 2 2, Lecture Hall 2.02

Geöffnet für Zertifikat Gender Studies (Aufbaumodul 1: Gender in historischer Perspektive)

This lecture course examines the tradition of women’s writing in North America, introducing the ways in which the study of sex/gender and sexuality as social categories have transformed our 
understandings of culture, history and society. Topics of analysis include the social construction of gender, 
the gendered division of labor, production and reproduction, intersections of gender, race, class and ethnicity, 
and the varieties of sexual experience. Looking at diverse bodies of women’s writings, ranging from Anglo-American and Anglo-Canadian women writers to women of color writers, and covering a long tradition from colonial times to the present period, we will look at the ways in which women have used their voices in order to launch their criticism against gender subordination and define their experiences.

Course Readings:
There will be a course reader, which you can order through NamLitCult and pick up at our offices.