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Instructors: Simge Büyükgümüs
Event type:
online: Proseminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.866.122
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 45
Registration group: AS 122
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
- active participation requirements (see syllabus)
- final argumentative research paper
NOTE: this course requires you to be familiar with the conventions of critical analysis and academic argumentative essay writing. I strongly recommend you take Written English I before attending this course.
You can study up on these subjects by reading
Kusch, Celena. Literary Analysis: The Basics. Taylor & Francis, 2016.
Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Penguin, 2015.
Turabian, Kate L. A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers. 7th ed., University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Contents:
This literary studies proseminar surveys American literature after 1945 roughly to the end of the 20th century. The course introduces students to representative texts and contexts as well as major intellectual currents and questions that emerge during that period.
The texts we will discuss carry labels such as post-war literature as well as “Postmodernism” or “late modernism.” They share a skepticism towards traditional cultural norms, a need to question institutional power , and a contemplative and often introspective tone.
Those who emerged from the rubble of the two World Wars, for instance, could no longer consider civilization an inherently benign and universally civilizing project, for it were the supposedly civilized and technologically advanced nations who had brought humankind to the brink of extinction (and would continue to do so in the ensuing nuclear arms race). Some even grew skeptical about the proposition of human culture and the very notion of (disinterested) art (think Immanuel Kant’s “the beautiful”).
For example, Theodor Adorno noted in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (1949): “to write a poem after Ausschwitz is barbaric.” Post-war writers, like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg questioned traditional cultural norms and identified a listlessness and uprootedness in American culture, despite it having emerged a global super power from the conflict. These inquiries also signaled what Jean-François Lyotard has called in The Postmodern Condition “the end of grand narratives” (stories about the naturalness of material and social world; for instance, about supposedly essential national, racial or gender identities and destinies).
?Towards the end of the 20th century, texts respond to the post-war new world order, the binary world system of the Cold War, and the subsequent notion by some in the West that history had effectively ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and capitalism would continue on in perpetuity. Again, these events effect not universal celebration but a turn to the psychological experiences and traumas of an (American) world system, in which meaning, moral standards, and (self-)worth are subject to the transactional logics of consumerist mass culture and the never-ending performance of socio-economic status. The poet Silvia Plath chronicles these ideas, as do novelists like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. But the literature of post- or late modernity also opens the door to new voices: Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo, and Juno Diaz introduce emancipated native, immigrant, non-white and female voices that try to come to terms with what Americanness means in a world where borders have been opened and communities have become fluid.
Recommended reading list:
Please buy
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. E (9th Edition)
See the table of contents
Digital teaching:
I will specify course content and digital teaching measures at the beginning of the semester. Please monitor your student email account for updates.
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