Lehrende/r: Dr. Birgit Wetzel-Sahm
Veranstaltungsart: Seminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan: Sem:Am.Literature2
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 30
Anmeldegruppe: S II AS
Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007. Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinie
Inhalt: Suburbanization is a process that has shaped cultural and historical developments in the United States. The rise of suburbia has been linked to ideas about class, race, and gender, to changes in American political culture, to success ideologies, opportunities for social mobility, and the construction of American culture itself. We will first discuss transnational origins of the suburban ideal. Adapting 18th-century British models to the American landscape and society, it promoted the Republican ideal of every citizen residing in his own home in an idyllic village carefully designed to remove all traces of the corrupt city. Yet, “suburban wasteland”, “suburban sadness,” “crabgrass frontier,” “Bourgeois utopia” have been familiar terms to satirize and criticize suburbia. We will analyze various constructions of suburbia in literary as well as political, social, and popular discourses from the 1950s to the present. We will read selected short stories by John Cheever, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates, three novels - Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road (1961), Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999) as an example of the transnational suburban experience of a South Korean immigrant, and Tom Perrotta’s Little Children (2004). If time allows, we will watch excerpts from movie versions of some of our literary texts, listen to songs, and read some recent poetry. We will conclude with Eric Bogosian’s play Suburbia (rev.ed. 2006).
