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Instructors: Dr. Rene Dietrich
Event type:
Advanced seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.866.523
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Requirements / organisational issues:
This course seeks to read contemporary U.S. experimental writing (contemporary defined narrowly as within the past 10 years, exceptions possible) for its social dimension. Rather than seeing forms of literary experimentation as self-contained writerly endeavors (experimentation and “difficulty” for their own sake), this course wants to ask for how a challenging of literary conventions through specific formal choices can also resonate with an interrogation of an assumed, and often unmarked, status quo on a larger scale. When addressing the “social texts“ of contemporary U.S. experimental writing, the course is not meant to be limited to thinking about how certain experimental texts reflect on specific social problems or injustices of the present-day in the U.S. Rather, reading experimental forms of writing as “social texts” can point us to asking how literary texts themselves can act as a form of social intervention into current issues, as well as opening up spaces for new social and political imaginaries. Thinking about the social work of contemporary U.S. experimental writing in this way can also help to consider how the addressing of contemporary issues points back to longer histories of contested social questions as well as how the contemporary texts work within a longer tradition of experimental writing that has also played a part in thinking society and politics differently at various moments of U.S. history.
The course will look at a wide group of writers, working within various genres (and regularly at the intersections of them). It will include, among others, Deborah Miranda, Claudia Rankine, John Keene, and George Saunders. It will feature an online component throughout the course. Additionally, there are plans for a collaboration with a course in the US (U of Georgia) for the reading of Bad Indians (Deborah Miranda) through an online platform. Please purchase Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians (Heyday, 2013) und Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (Penguin, 2014) for the first weeks of the course. Further obligatory purchases will be announced in the first session.
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