Lecture: US-American Popular Culture: History, Media, Methods
Tuesday, 9 – 11 am
Prof. Katja Kanzler
This lecture will provide an introduction to US-American popular culture and popular culture studies. It will cover three main areas: First, it will discuss what popular culture actually is – how it has been conceptualized, also in relation to other fields of cultural and literary expression, and what kinds of questions American Studies scholarship has raised about it. Two, the lecture will survey significant milestones in the historical development of US popular culture, from 19th-century minstrel shows to 21st-century (post-)television. Third, it will take a closer look at some of the media that function as carriers of popular culture, how their medial particularities have been conceptualized and what specific methods of analysis they require.
Choose two out of three seminars:
Seminar: “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”: American Postwar Literature and Culture
Tuesday, 3 - 5 pm
Annika Schadewaldt
The postwar decades hold a special place in the public memory as a watershed moment for US-American literature and culture and its self-descriptions. Often called a time characterized both by conformity and dissent, mainstream and counterculture, the postwar marks the (alleged) beginning of many things we now consider quintessentially American: youth culture, consumer capitalism, suburbia, identity politics, etc. This seminar will not only serve as an introduction to some of the canonical works of the literature and (popular) culture of the period but also try to engage with the question why the 1950s and 1960s have come to be the locus of a variety of nostalgic desires for the US. Among the topics and artistic movements we will discuss are youth rebellion, the Beats, confessional poetry, suburban sadness, and the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement. Authors may include Baldwin, Ginsberg, Plath, Didion, and Salinger, but we will also engage with other media such as film.
Seminar: Aliens, Androids, and Others: Cultural Anxieties in Science Fiction Film & TV
Wednesday, 11 am – 1 pm
Dr. Eleonora Ravizza
Science fiction, as JP Telotte has written, “represent(s) our most pressing cultural anxieties.” From exploring the fear of alien invasion in The War of the Worlds and Independence Day to exorcising the threat of nuclear holocaust in Wargames and the Terminator series to blurring the lines between human and machine in Ex-Machina and Westworld, science fiction has often looked toward the future with trepidation, merging a fascination of the unknown with a negotiation of contemporary fears. In this seminar, we will explore the various ways in which cultural anxieties have been reflected and processed through popular science fiction films and TV series throughout the decades. We will employ various theoretical approaches in order to analyze the convergence of ideological, political, and cultural fears with issues of gender, class, and race.
Seminar: Fictions of Class in US Culture
Thursday, 11 am - 1 pm
Dr. Stefan Schubert
The United States likes to imagine itself as a classless society, a claim that rests on the narrative that everybody has the same opportunities to achieve the ‘American Dream.’ In this seminar, we want to critically contest this notion by examining how questions of class have propelled a vast number of fictional narratives and how the stories the US tells about itself, in turn, prominently relate to issues of social class in myriad ways. In other words, we aim to gain an understanding of the complexity of class by studying US literature and popular culture—from rags-to-riches stories of the 19th century to contemporary films criticizing middle-class consumerism, from memoirs depicting the hardships of the working class to fantastic texts that metaphorically imagine a class struggle.
One central goal of the seminar will be to learn about different theories and conceptualizations of class (e.g. in terms of power, different forms of capital, status and habitus, consumption, or intersections with other categories of difference) in order to apply them to meaningful analyses. A second concern will be to work out the range and variability of issues of class in US fiction in different genres, media, and periods of time. Together, these two impulses will allow us to address questions such as: How can class be narrativized—how does class motivate stories, and how can questions of class be rendered in textual, audiovisual, metaphorical, etc. ways? Are there specific genres or forms of writing that particularly lend themselves to discussing issues of class, and why? How are concerns of class interwoven with questions of power and difference in US culture—what, overall, is the cultural work of fictions of class?
Overall module responsibility: PD Dr. Olaf Stieglitz
Module organization & coordination: Tobias Schlobach
This module is meant to provide students with the opportunity to engage in-depth selected societal, historical, and political themes that have shaped and shape the United States. Issues will be explored in terms of basic questions relating to American identity, the nature of power in American society, the negotiation of forms of consensus, and how American dynamics influence the country’s exercise of power and transcultural undertakings in the international arena.
