This series of interactive lectures looks at the American twenty-first century through the lens of major novels, life-writings, and other aesthetic texts. Each lecture will discuss one major cultural artifact – a movie, a novel, an autobiography – on the background of events such as 9/11 or the election of Barack Obama. Close readings of paradigmatic texts will be performed by the students and teacher during the lecture, and power points as well as study questions will be made available through the Stud.IP.
The eighteenth-century artist William Hogarth mastered a new form of telling stories with images: he made detailed engravings of his series of paintings and drawings which he then sold as inexpensive prints. These series told narratives about lousy marriages between the newly rich and the aristocratic, showed how poor country girls are turned into prostitutes when they come to London, and about how those who hurt animals and indulge in blood sports will get their just deserts and be eaten by animals themselves. Hogarth’s funny, bitingly critical, and sometimes quite tragic engravings force his viewers to develop a new method of seeing that registers both developing themes and individual symbols. The aim of this course is to learn to employ the tools that we have learnt in literary studies to analyze visual representations. Hogarth’s prints can be read as critical and comic commentaries on contemporaneous marriage practices and leisure activities as well as about the development of eighteenth-century London. These images tell us much about class and gender roles in eighteenth-century Britain as well as about how we relate stories. We will pay particular attention to The Harlot’s Progress (1732), The Rake’s Progress (1735), Marriage à la Mode (1745), Industry and Idleness (1747), The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751). Please order your copy of Engravings by Hogarth at least four weeks before the beginning of the term.
This seminar examines the election and presidency of Barack Obama as cultural as well as political and historical events. We will discuss readings of Obama’s person such as his being the Black Kennedy or the embodiment of the American dream. This will include an analysis of Obama’s election within the context of American race relations and racial politics, but it will also focus on the media’s intense scrutiny of Michelle Obama, the Obamas’ marriage, children, and bodies, and how these representations play out in terms of gender politics and identity. We will also make reference to how the President and his advisors have successfully used new media in their communication strategies. Through the analysis of written and multimedial representations of Barack Obama and his family, we will attempt to determine the various symbolic meanings of his presidency. At the end of the semester a conference called “Obama – Cultural Meanings, Historical Contexts, and Global Reception” (July 15 -17) will take place in Gießen, which students are encouraged to attend.
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem (1949), Sam Shepard, Buried Child (1978; revised 1995), David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), Oleanna (1992)
What does it mean to be an American man? Is an American man violent and/or inarticulate? Does his masculinity rest on his distancing himself from women, people of color, and gays? We will read and perform some canonized post-war plays in which masculinity is enacted. How do these plays fashion men and represent women? Where do they leave us as viewers? Is the construction of American masculinity in these plays inherently white and violent? Not forgetting simultaneous African-American, queer, and women's theater movements, we will also ask a larger question about genre? Does drama strike us as a more masculine genre than prose and poetry? Why is violence so often depicted there?Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body (1992), Eve Ensler The Vagina Monologues: The V-Day Edition (2001), and Gloria Steinem's "If Men Could Menstruate", reader
In this course we will examine how the body of the self and the body of the Other is experienced in a variety of text types. How do plays, poems, and prose works portray experiences such as ageing, gender, sex, and illness? For instance, how does the manner in which the story is told suggest whether the voice behind the text is male or female? Do certain genres describe embodiment better than others? We will also ask to what degree the body determines how we know and think about the world. For instance, Mark Johnson suggests that all thought arises out of bodily experience (The Body in the Mind, 1987). Our reading list will include Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" (on ageing), Stephen Crane's "The Monster" (on being African-American and disabled), a selection of Katherine Mansfield's stories (on eating, sexuality, and body image), Robert Hass' "A Story About the Body" (on cancer and sex), as well as poems by D.H. Lawrence, Silvia Plath, Maya Angelou, and scenes from The Vagina Monologues. We will begin by reading Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body (1992). Some readings of theoretical texts on textual and human bodies will be required.Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719), Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740); excerpts from Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess; or, The Fatal Enquiry (1719)
We will review more familiar interpretations of these texts based on their narrative structures and challenges to contemporary prejudices against novels. Simultaneously, we will discuss how new critical emphases on colonialism, alterity, materialism, and gender studies have come to make us consider these novels in new ways. We will also discuss how forgotten bestsellers such as Haywood’s Love in Excess; or The Fatal Enquiry contributed to the canonization of the other texts.Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003), Slow Man (2005), Diary of a Bad Year (2007)
Nobel Prize winning, South African novelist Coetzee’s non-realism and constant undermining of narratorial authority do not allow the reader to adopt the views of the narrator or to accept the novel’s world as fact. On the one hand, Disgrace deals critically with racism and the oppression of women and animals in the post-apartheid era; on the other, the narrative makes us distrust its reliability. Elizabeth Costello constructs its protagonist through a series of public lectures which she holds, and the text hovers between argumentative essay and fiction. Slow Man (2005) also presents the reader with a hall of mirrors when its central ailing character realizes that he is the literary creation of the novelist Elizabeth Costello. Diary of a Bad Year offers yet a new narrative form which recalls Jacques Derrida’s early criticism. The novel is comprised of split or tripartite pages divided into the ‘strong opinions’ of the fictional writer JC on subjects such as terrorism and torture, a more conventional fictional first-person description of this writer’s experiences as he composes his book, and, finally, the narrative of the young woman who types the book for him. The novels discussed in this course deal with rape and social iniquity, animal suffering, the ageing body, and ethical problems in representation.Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2006), Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Don DeLillo, Falling Man (2007), Gavin Hood, director, Rendition (2007); essays by Susan Sonntag, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 9, 2001 as well as the revelation of the torture of Iraqi inmates in Abu Ghraib by American soldiers during the spring of 2004 have presented critical thinkers and artists with a number of moral and aesthetic problems: How should one adequately respond to the new sense of uncertainty and vulnerability that followed the attacks on New York and Washington, and later on Madrid and London? How does one reconcile the ideology of spreading democracy with the practice of torturing individuals or imprisoning them without legal representation? How are European nations implicated in the Bush administration's justification of war on the basis of protecting freedom? How can suffering and death due to terrorism or the torture of suspects be represented in ways that are non-voyeuristic and ethical? Given the practices of extrajudicial incarceration and rendition how do we now understand concepts such as human rights and democracy?
In this course we will study both fictional and philosophical responses to 9/11 and the 'war on terror.' We will use these texts as ways of thinking about the ethics of the post-9/11 era and considering how fictional texts can perform ethical work. Critical essays by current philosophers will help us to place recent political events within larger debates about human rights and history. Please read Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2006) before the class begins.
Bleak House (1852-3) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), non-fictional writing
This course features two Dickens novels in which poverty, illegitimacy, judicial injustice, and class prejudice play major roles. In it we will also take note of some of Dickens's essays on related social issues such as capital punishment and the rehabilitation of 'fallen women'. Our purpose is to discover how Dickens's writing frequently fuels Victorian reformist energies and at other times furthers more conservative agendas.
EPG students: Dickens's work serves as an example of how literature may serve to alter cultural perceptions of social issues. By studying his novels, we may question how literature potentially works as an ethical force within the society out of which it emerges and into which it is received. More specifically, we will delineate the aesthetic means with which Dickens so effectively conveyed his own moral views. An awareness of the moral inconsistencies in Dickens's textual universe will lead us to ask how much responsibility an author bears towards her or his society and readers to be an arbiter of right and wrong. The question of the author's responsibility will lead us then into a discussion of our own responsibilities as readers (and teachers) of literary studies. We may, for instance, question the preconceptions about morality which we as twenty-first century individuals take to our readings of Victorian texts. Finally, we will use Dickens's texts as a basis for a wider discussion of the connection between literature and social policy.
Norton Anthology of Poetry or class reader
This course aims to help participants to become more comfortable with talking and writing about poetry. In it we will develop strategies for analyzing unfamiliar poems in order to take some of the dread out of working with poems under exam conditions. We will review features of poetry in various literary periods as well as terms used for describing poems. Hopefully, the course will increase students' enjoyment of reading poetry and, for some, writing poems. Our particular focus will be on poetic metaphor and how various theories of metaphor can be used as a method for entering the texts.
David Hare, Murmuring Judges (1991); Jessica Blank, Erik Jensen, The Exonerated: A Play (2003); Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, Guantánamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom' (2004)
These three recent plays, two British and one American, investigate forms of judicial injustice and unfair imprisonment. David Hare’s play, the second of a trilogy about British institutions, portrays a young, idealistic lawyer’s disillusionment in the face of the entrenched problems and prejudices of the British criminal justice system as well as a woman constable’s efforts to expose police corruption. The Exonerated dramatizes the stories of six individuals who were formally on America’s death row. Guantánamo also puts the actual experience of inmates on stage, British detainees in the American naval base and detention center Camp Guantánamo in Cuba. "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” is Camp Gitmo’s motto: in the name of so-called freedom, more than six hundred individuals have been incarcerated without legal representation by the United States government since 2002. Called "illegal combatants” they have been deemed to be without the rights guaranteed to both civilians and prisoners of war by the Geneva conventions. In "verbatim theater” the stories of several detainees are told through their letters from prison being read aloud, the sworn testimony of their families, as well as statements by public officials such as Donald Rumsfeld.
All three plays dramatize how harsh injustice is enacted in the name of the law or in the so-called war on terror. They challenge viewers to regard legal institutions critically, to empathize with the experience of the incarcerated and the underrepresented, and to take political action. Study of the plays also invite discussions about the relative value of collective public safety and individual rights. Moreover, the plays insist that their viewers confront the current attitude of punitivity towards those considered criminal.
EPG: Inevitably, our readings of these plays will force us to confront questions about the relations between the literary, the political, and the ethical. Applied ethical questions will be addressed with regard to how prisoners should be treated and to what degree states should guarantee their rights. More general ethical considerations will arise in respect to our expectations of how political theater and art should be, for these plays foreground the role of literary artifacts in political discussions. These plays insist that literary artifacts do not belong to a separate arena of aesthetic inquiry, but are inextricably imbedded in the material world.
In the Heart of the Country (1977), Foe (1986), Disgrace (1999)
South African Nobel and Booker prize winner, J. M. Coetzee challenges readers both with his style and his subject matter: apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, colonialism and postcolonial violence, master-servant and animal-human relations, historical scarring, rape, and gender inequity number among the disturbing themes of his novels. Techniques such as narrator unreliability, antirealism, and time reversals unsettle reading habits and expectations as much as do our confrontations with Coetzee's uncomfortable subject matter. In this course we will discuss the degree to which ethical questions are ineluctably entwined with aesthetic considerations in Coetzee's fictions and will perhaps allow ourselves to be unsettled and questioned by them.
EPG Students: While avoiding overt political frameworks, Coetzee's fiction forces readers to consider their positions with regard to apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, to colonialism, animal abuse, and sexual violence. Moreover, his style makes us question how such experiences are and can be adequately told and read. Such reflections highlight and destabilize the process by which we make and mediate moral judgments.
Hogarth's "Four Stages of Cruelty", Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Beginning with a discussion of Rochester's "A Satyr against Reason and Mankind" (1675) and William Hogarth's "The Four Stages of Cruelty" (1750), we find that animals are put to various, often contradictory uses during the eighteenth-century. They may be employed in literature as vehicles for satire, as mirrors of humankind's failures, or as substitutive figures for humans considered less worthy: foreigners and women. As Hogarth's prints show, blood sports in which animals were violently killed such as cockfighting were enormously popular and cruelty to animals was rampant. In this course we will trace varied attitudes towards animals by paying particular attention to two canonical texts: Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe.
Whereas Robinson Crusoe equates "savages" and "cannibals" with wild beasts, and imposes rule over them on his island, Gulliver learns from the Brobdingnags to think of man as "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Moreover, during his fourth voyage, Gulliver comes to worship the supremely rational Houyhnhnms—noble horses who coexist without violence—and to be increasingly horrified by the filthy and vicious Yahoos who so greatly resemble himself. Considering the status and uses of animals in these texts will help us to ask questions about gender, alterity, and ethics not only with regard to the eighteenth century but also with respect to our time.
EPG Schein: Thinking about animals raises questions about our status as humans. Recently, philosophers like Peter Singer have argued that the traditional assumption that nonhuman beings are inherently inferior is analogous to the poor thinking that has informed racist as well as sexist attitudes. This "speciesism" needs to be overridden. The eighteenth century saw a nascent movement to humanize animals that has culminated in the animal rights movement today. The Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham reasoned that if animals can suffer, and clearly they can, then they deserve rights and protection just as humans do. We will ask how the 'humane' treatment of animals reflects on human ethics and we will ponder the question of how animal rights may be taught in the classroom.
Measure for Measure, Shakespeare's Sonnets, The Turn of the Screw, Nikki Giovanni's poetry
Bleak House, Little Dorrit, non-fictional writings
Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Mara Hornbacher
Greta Olson - Professor of English and American Literature and Cultural Studies - University of Giessen
BA Vassar College / University College London (Philosophy / Studio Art)
MA, PhD, and Habilitation University of Freiburg (English / American Studies / Philosophy)