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Instructors: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Oliver Scheiding
Event type:
hybrid: Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.866.522
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: AS 522
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
Talking about the U.S. nation’s origin steeped in “slave labor” and “genocidal bloodshed,” the Native American writer Tommy Orange asks what kind of new stories we need to maintain an “American conversation.” In light of a seething political volcano, he states: “So if we can’t seem to find ways to talk in person, or online, when and where and how do we talk? I think a novel is a kind of conversation. Both the writer and the reader bring their experience to the page. The reader’s experience and ideas can be reshaped, challenged, changed. I know, I’m a writer, so of course I think the answer is books, but I think reading books is a good place to start thinking about and understanding people’s stories you aren’t familiar with, outside your comfort zone and experience.” This course is designed on new stories that represent American expressive culture and how it deals with topics outside the reader’s comfort zone, i.e. race, capitalism, violence, poverty, class, gender and injustice. In doing so, we will study a number of new voices like N.K. Jemisin, Maria Machado, Bryan Washington, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Maurice Carlos Ruffin and others. We explore how these writers use the short form for their imaginative reconstructions of reality that constitutes literature.
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