Summer Term 2019
Below you will find all classes taught by staff members associated with the Chair of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies during the summer term 2019. Additional courses will be added throughout the following weeks.
Prof. Dr. Mark U Stein
AOR Dr. habil. Markus Schmitz
Felipe Espinoza Garrido
Deborah Nyangulu
Julian Wacker
Prof. Dr. Mark U Stein
South Asian Diaspora Literature
096637 | Lecture | Tue. 12-14 | JO 1
The migration from South Asia (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and Pakistan) can be divided into two distinct strands: first, the indentured labourers in the late 19th century to the Caribbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia; second, the mid-20th century migrations to the UK, USA, Canada, and elsewhere. These groups can be formalized as diasporas: communities who share a common national or ethnic or cultural origin, and who may share a common language and a common religious faith.
What texts by Salman Rushdie, MG Vassanji, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Romesh Gunesekera, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Kiran Desai, and Monica Ali share, is that they are written in diaspora. They are penned not in South Asia ... but elsewhere. There is some distance, then, between these texts and their authors’ 'cultural origins'.
Diaspora literatures reflect and promote connections between cultural origins and present locations; they mediate different social and cultural groups; they reach back to distinct historical moments; they remember departures and arrivals – and what came before, after, and in between. They draw on collective memory, they add to it, and in the process revise, rewrite, and transmit memory; from one generation to the next; and from one location to another.
This lecture course, then, explores diaspora literatures from several locations, including the UK, the Caribbean, Canada, and the US.
Postcolonial Postmortems
096677 | Seminar | Wed. 8:30-10 | ES 226
Crime has long cut across national boundaries and recent crime fiction has tended to do the same. Migrant detectives, postcolonial policewomen, transcultural operatives are now the order of the day, almost. Vital clues require “transcultural forms of understanding”, and to readers the investigation “discloses new interpretive methods and processes of social investigation, often challenging facile interpretations of the postcolonial world order”.
What are the forms, tropes, and issues that mark this emerging crime fiction? What does a 'postcolonial' perspective bring to this genre “apart from the well-known, and valid, discourses of resistance, subversion and ethnicity?” The 'postmortem' of the postcolonial “not only alludes to the investigation of the victim's remains, but also to the body of the individual text and its contexts”.
Participants are expected to chair a session, offer a presentation, and/or write a term paper which engages with some of the above topics. Confirmed participants will receive a list of four set texts by email and are expected (a) to get copies of these novels and (b) read them before the first session. There will be a mandatory reading test on these novels for all participants at the beginning of the semester. Term papers (5.000 words) will be due eight weeks after the last class.
Participants are expected to chair a session, offer a presentation, and/or write a term paper.
There will be a mandatory reading test on these novels for all participants at the beginning of the semester.
Term papers (5.000 words) will be due eight weeks after the last class.
Nigerian Literature
096736 | Seminar | Tue. 10-12 | ES 226
This class will be taught as a block seminar. Apart from weekly sessions in April, the seminar will take place on Friday, 24 May, and Saturday, 25 May, 2019.
What is "Nigerian literature"? Can the category of the nation state contain the anglophone writing from this part of Africa? And what are some of the concerns and forms which characterize it? This project seminar is designed to address questions such as these. After some introductory sessions, students explore these questions independently and in groups and then present their findings in the context of a block seminar.
Participants are expected to read two novels, as well as some short stories, poems and one play. Bibliographic details will be emailed to participants.
Postgraduate Class (Literary Studies)
096740 | Colloquium | Wed. 10-12 | AE 11
This postgraduate class has been designed to assist 4th-semester M.A. students of National & Transnational Studies programme with respect to their individual MA thesis projects. It consists of a combination of in-class discussions and individual supervisions outside the classroom. The postgraduate class provides feedback and advice, both thematic and organizational. Focusing on the participants’ questions, problems, and needs, it is designed as a collaborative forum for the critical reflection of research questions and hypotheses, theoretical and methodological conceptions, and first results.
In addition, there will be the opportunity to discuss student career plans for the time after graduation. We will focus on both, academic options and the professions. Those embarking on academic careers will have the opportunity to discuss provisional ideas for their planned PhD projects and fellowship applications and receive advice on other aspects of academic career-building.
First in-class meeting: April 10th, 2019
AOR Dr. habil. Markus Schmitz
Transgressive Memoirs: Intellectual Autobiographies and Postcolonial Criticism
096732 | Seminar | Wed. 14-16 | ES 130
This seminar locates itself at the disciplinary intersections of auto/biography studies and postcolonialism. It brings together the politics and aesthetics of self-narratives with the question of theory. The seminars’ didactical conception starts from the premise that reading memoirs written by postcolonial intellectuals can stimulate new ways of encountering and understanding key concepts of postcolonial criticism.
To this end class participants are invited to engage with selected auto-writings as forms of cultural criticism that explicitly address the tension between individual experience, collective testimony, and epistemic decolonization. Texts to be read and discussed in class include Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987); Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage (1999), Edward W. Said’s Out of Place (1999), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s If Only (2006), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s In the House of the Interpreter (2012) and Stuart Hall’s Familiar Stranger (2017). Transgressing the conventional aim of making sense of individual critics’ lives we will deploy these and other narratives to biographically trace the historical worldliness of the respective critics’ theoretical interventions.
Offering a fresh perspective on familiar as well as less familiar critical figures by putting their criticism in the context of their self-narrated lives the seminar sets focus on the intersection of autobiography and theory. By doing so it wishes to sensitize class participants for the postcolonial intellectual auto-narratives’ particular capacity to explain postcolonial criticism in its relation to competing notions of subjectivity, collectivity, or universality and to grasp the dense nexus of experience, investigation, and knowledge-production in postcolonial discourse.
Introductory readings (to be read by the first in-class meeting):
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. “Introduction” Bart Moore-Gilbert. Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation. New York: Routledge, 2009, pp. xi-xxvi.
Huddart, David. “Postcolonial theories of autobiography and autobiography in postcolonial theory,” Chapter I of David Huddart. Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2008, pp. 1-25.
First in-class meeting: 10.04.2019
Escape to Europe: Comparative Readings of Refugee Imaginaries
096735 | Seminar | Thu. 12-14 | AE 209 | 2 SWS
This seminar aims at selectively tracing the historical transformation of Middle Eastern and African imaginaries of refugee-migration to Europe. Class participants will be introduced to selected English, French, and Arabic language representations (in translation) across various genres (including literature, performance art, music, film and the vlogo/blogosphere) which question our learned sureties and conventional definition of refugee-ism. (Visual and sonic) texts to be discussed in class include Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun (1962), Jabra Ibrahim Jabra‘s The Ship (1970), Mahi Binebine’s Cannibales (1999), Yusri Nasrullah’s El Medina (1999), Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), Larissa Sansour's A Space Exodus (2008), Merzak Allouache’s Harragas (2009), Hassan Blasim’s “Reality and the Record” and “The Truck to Berlin” (2009), Boris Lojkine’s Hope (2014) and Hiwa K’s View from Above (2017). We will use these and other creative works as equally poetical and ethical correctives to the dominant European emplotment of the so-called refugee crisis.
Class participants are invited to shift their focus from often de-individualizing and victimizing representations of refugees as human beings erased from individual presence, voice, and agency to narratives which show refugees as active, politicized and creative agents of their own destiny. Examining the (generic) limits of telling refugee stories the seminar argues for an altered politics of literary and cultural criticism – one that intentionally goes beyond conventional migration studies’ self-assigned tasks of humanitarian advocacy and political consulting.
Presentations and in-class discussions are to trigger off a critical counter-analysis to both the political fiction of factuality and the learned interpretive taxonomies of historical and socio-anthropological migration research on which this fiction rests. Suggesting new ways of understanding the historical presence of refugee migration the seminar at the same time encourages to test out the role of comparative literary and cultural studies within the multidisciplinary field of forced and clandestine migration studies.
Introductory readings (to be read by the first in-class meeting):
Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Elena, et al. “Introduction: Refugee and Forced Migration Studies in Transition,” The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, edited by Elena Fiddian Qasmiyeh, Gil Loescher, Katy Long, and Nando Sigona. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 1-14.
Abderrezak, Hakim. "Harragas in Mediterranean illiterature and cinema," Véronique Machelidon and Patrick Saveau (eds.). Reimagining North African immigration: Identities in flux in French literature, television, and film. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2018, pp. 232-252.
First in-class meeting: 11.04.2019
Felipe Espinoza Garrido
Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies II: Gruppe IV
096625 | Course | Wed. 18-20 | ES 131 | 2 SWS
Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies is a two-semester course: Part I of the course took place in the winter semester and covered both literary and non-literary cultural representations. In the summer semester, part two of the course focuses on literature. It provides an overview of literary genres and discusses methods and tools for textual analysis and interpretation. Reading American, British, and postcolonial texts, students are introduced to the practice of literary and cultural studies. Building on the knowledge acquired in the winter term, they learn how to combine specific critical and theoretical perspectives with detailed exploration of three set texts.
Please get a copy of the following texts and read them before the beginning of the term:
William Shakespeare. Hamlet. Eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Arden, 2006.
Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: W.W. Norton 2002.
Tsitsi Dangarembga. Nervous Conditions. Banbury: Ayebia Clarke Publishing, Ltd., 2004.
Students must have read all three texts by the beginning of the summer semester.
The listed editions of Hamlet and Leaves of Grass are strongly recommended, but others - including online editions - are acceptable as well.
The Empire in Victorian Literature and Culture
096715 | Seminar | Wed. 8-10 | AE 11 | 2 SWS
This seminar will, as its title indicates, shed light on the constructions and deconstructions of the Victorians’ understandings and practices of empire. It focuses on nineteenth-century fiction, yet also with a view to the era’s wider cultural production, including visual and, if to a smaller degree, performative arts. This seminar will thus cover a variety of genres and media, ranging from colonial photography to sensation fiction, with a definite reading list to be distributed after the end of the registration period.
Since ”the ideologies of racism and imperialism were powerfully symbiotic and often indistinguishable from each other” (Brantlinger 2011, 6), Victorian constructions of race, the impact of Darwinist thought, and the empire’s continued reliance on and legitimization of forced labour are of central concern here. These questions cannot be separated from their gendered dimensions where as ”‘black’ (racialized and sexualized) women were indispensable to the construction of Englishness as a form of ‘white’ male subjectivity” (Brody 1998, 7). To tackle these issues, this seminar will engage with cornerstones of empire historiography, e.g. the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and its representations, and other cultural formations, e.g. the evolution of a distinctly British minstrelsy, to name but a few.
Regarding further skills to be acquired, the seminar will focus on researching novels and periodicals through digitized archives and collections, enabling students to do their own archival research.
Deborah Nyangulu
MA Supplementary Seminar: Literary and Cultural Studies
096730 | Seminar | Wed. 14-16 | ES 2 | 2 SWS
This seminar open to MA NTS students supplements a lecture offered by one of the professors in the English department. In the seminar students follow up, debate, and discuss the main themes raised in the lecture. First in class-session will be on April 10.
Postgraduate Class (Literary Studies)
096737 | Colloquium | Wed. 10-12 | ES 227 | 2 SWS
This postgraduate colloquium is the second part of Research Module I and is open to MA NTS students. The colloquium is designed as a space for pitching MA thesis project ideas with peers and the course instructor providing feedback. Students also receive guidance on how to plan for and write their MA theses. Information on research methodologies and theoretical frameworks is also provided depending on students' needs. This colloquium is particularly tailored for students specializing in fields of Literary and/Cultural Studies. If you are enrolled in this course, please email me a (preliminary) title of your planned MA thesis before the first day of class. Make a self-needs assessment and also include in your email research skills that you already possess & research skills which you think you lack. First session will be on Wednesday April 10. In this second part of Research Module I, you will also be expected to complete and hand in your research portfolio which you started working on in semester 1.
Advanced BA Seminar: Understanding Critical Theory and Practice
096678 | Seminar | Tue 10-12 | ES 130 | 2 SWS
This writing-intensive course introduces advanced BA students to concepts of critical theory which they will put into practice by writing short blog articles (about 500 - 1000 words). We will work with a 'keywords model' approach where each student or a group of students will decide on a particular keyword (eg masculinity, imperialism, feminism, capitalism, cosmopolitanism, slacktivism, post-truth, etc). The student(s) will research what the keyword means, how it is used in different contexts, and how its meanings have evolved over time. What kind of debates is the keyword entangled in or what kind of debates does it generate? The student(s) should also be able to demonstrate how the keyword can be applied to , for example, interpret a work of art, a political speech, or a topical issue in the news. We will maintain a page on Learnweb where we will publish the blog articles. All students will be expected to actively participate in all class activities. Students wishing to take part in this course must have an interest in writing and a keen interest in current global affairs. First in-class session will be on 9th April. At the end of the course, students will also be required to hand in an original term paper. See below for some of the recommended readings for this class (you do not have to buy the texts unless you want to):
Raymond Williams: Keywords
Benjamin Peters: Digital Keywords
Stephen Eric Bronner: Critical Theory
Julian Wacker
Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies II: Gruppe III
096624 | BA Course | Thu. 12:00-14:00 | ES 131 | 2 SWS
Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies is a two-semester course: Part I of the course took place in the winter semester and covered both literary and non-literary cultural representations. In the summer semester, part two of the course focuses on literature. It provides an overview of literary genres and discusses methods and tools for textual analysis and interpretation. Reading American, British, and postcolonial texts, students are introduced to the practice of literary and cultural studies. Building on the knowledge acquired in the winter term, they learn how to combine specific critical and theoretical perspectives with detailed exploration of three set texts.
Please get a copy of the following texts and read them before the beginning of the term:
William Shakespeare. Hamlet. Eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Arden, 2006.
Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: W.W. Norton 2002.
Tsitsi Dangarembga. Nervous Conditions. Banbury: Ayebia Clarke Publishing, Ltd., 2004.
Students must have read all three texts by the beginning of the summer semester.
The listed editions of Hamlet and Leaves of Grass are strongly recommended, but others - including online editions - are acceptable as well.