|
Instructors: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Rainer Emig
Event type:
Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.874.522
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: GS II BS
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Contents:
Students, but also many writers, artists, and politicians, love identity. They constantly talk about finding and losing, endangering and asserting it. No matter how strictly we see social and cultural roles as constructed, we appear unwilling to give up the idea that somewhere “inside” us, there lurks an unquestionable personal essence that only belongs to us.
This seminar will investigate the historical, philosophical and ideological origins of the Western belief in identity. It will then check these against two novels that challenge identities, Kipling’s Kim, a colonial tale, and Hari Kunzu’s The Impressionist, in many ways its contemporary counterpart. Students will actively contribute to the seminar through presentations of agreed topics and materials, all of which will be geared towards furthering discussion.
Recommended reading list:
Required Reading
Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Alan Sandison (Oxford World's Classics, 2008 [1901])
Hari Kunzru, The Impressionist (Penguin, 2003)
Recommended Reading
Harold W. Noonan, ed., Personal Identity (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1993)
Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds, Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996)
|
