06.008.0036 S/Ü Studies in Comparative North American Literature II: Specters of American Fascism in U.S. and Canadian Literature and Film

Lehrende/r: Dr. Klaus Schmidt

Veranstaltungsart: online: Seminar/Übung

Anzeige im Stundenplan: 06.008.0036

Semesterwochenstunden: 2

Credits: 6,0

Unterrichtssprache: Englisch

Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 30

Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie zzgl. Bevorzugung höherer Fachsemester
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

Über die Senatsrichtlinie hinaus werden bei der Platzvergabe für diese Veranstaltung Studierende höherer Fachsemester bevorzugt berücksichtigt.

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:
Preliminary Discussion / Introduction: All questions relating to organization will be answered in the first MS Teams session (April 15) and the first instructor video of this seminar.

Procedure and Requirements: Students who take this course as an Übung give a video presentation (including handout); those who take it as a seminar also submit a written paper (in addition to giving a video presentation and preparing a handout). Your papers should average 12-15 pages of text plus outline and bibliography, and should be written in English. The papers must be submitted, at the latest, on August 15, 2021. For the form of your paper, please check “A Guide to Writing Term Papers” on our home page (Fächer/Englisch/Amerikanistik/ Materialien) and the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (see Lehrbuch­sammlung). Your handout should be 1-2 pages summarizing the most important points of your video presentation. Your presentation should average 15 minutes and should be given in English. Further details (introduction to our program, organization, time schedule, etc.) will be discussed in a “predeparture orien­tation” MS Teams session on April 15 and the first instructor video.

Inhalt:
The Trump presidency and its aftermath have shown us the fragility of democracy in the United States. In this seminar, we will therefore study representations of American fascism in U.S. and Canadian literature and film. After familiarizing ourselves with the political, religious, and literary background, we will read and analyze Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), including adaptations for the big and small screen (Schlöndorff, Cine­com Pictures, 1990; Miller, Hulu, 2017–present; Simon and Burns, HBO, 2020). We will also take a closer look at the portrayal of neo-Nazi skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan in the movies American History X (Kaye, 1998), Imperium (Ragussis, 2016), and BlacKkKlansman (Lee, 2018). Other U.S. and Canadian novels that deserve mention as dystopian warnings against American fascism are Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935), T. C. Boyle’s The Harder They Come (2015), and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (2019) (depending on the number of seminar participants, some of these titles can be selected as independent projects; the same applies to Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 [2018] or publications of the Christian Right, such as Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry B. Jenkins’s bestselling Left Behind series [1995–2007]). In our investigations of the fascist underbelly of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America, special emphasis will be placed on the blurred boundaries between sexism/misogyny/homophobia, racism/xenophobia/antisemitism, and nationalism/populism/fundamental­ism, as well as the nexus of U.S. politics, religion, and culture.

Empfohlene Literatur:
Compulsory Reading:

– Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (novel, Canadian, 1985) &
– Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (novel, U.S.-American, 2004).

Atwood’s and Roth’s novels are available as paperbacks. Approximate costs on amazon.de: 15–20 euros (used: even less). Do not purchase “Kindle” editions.

The Handmaid’s Tale should be read before the first day of class.

Indispensable secondary sources will be made accessible in the ILIAS seminar folder once the semester starts.

Digitale Lehre:
To enable time flexibility, this course has been organized in asynchro­nous form, with the exception of two MS Teams “live” sessions in the first (Apr. 15, 2021, 9:40) and eighth (June 24, 2021, 9:40) weeks of the summer semester. The course program will be handled via reading and video assignments (independent studies), student presentations (PowerPoint, OBS, or Panopto videos), and instructor videos (Panopto). All reading assignments (& further primary and secondary materials), student presentations, and instructor videos will be embedded in ILIAS so that ILIAS is the only platform you will need for this course. Please upload your video presentations on Seafile (search “seafile uni mainz”) by clicking on “Bibliotheken / Meine Bibliothek / Hochladen” (in case you have never worked with Seafile, log in once [using your zdv name and password] so that the system recognizes you as a legitimate user; see https:seafile.rlp.net/). Once your video has been uploaded, move the cursor over the file name, click on the second icon that opens to the right, then on “Erstellen,” and generate a direct download link (“Link zum direkten Download”), which you save to the clipboard (“in die Zwischenablage kopieren”) by clicking on the copy-file icon to the right of the link at the bottom. This link, through which your video will start automatically, you send me via e-mail, together with your handout, the day before your presentation is due (see Schedule). In the case of Panopto videos, you do not need Seafile and just send me the Panopto link.