Lecture: US-American Popular Culture: History, Media, Methods
Tuesday, 9 – 11 am, HS 6
Prof. Dr. 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: Postmodernism: Contexts, Texts, and Issues
Wednesday, 3 - 5 pm, GWZ 2 5.16
Annika Schadewaldt
If you ask psychologist and pundit Jordan B. Peterson, postmodernism is at the root of many of contemporary society’s ills. But what was postmodernism in the first place? And why are people still angry about it? This seminar will introduce students to some of the topics, texts, and basic concepts of postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon spanning roughly from 1965 to 2001. We will read and watch some canonical as well as more peripheral postmodern texts and movies and examine them both as aesthetic objects and complex negotiations of social, philosophical, and technological developments, such as the emergence of new media, the Cold War, ‘late capitalism,’ poststructuralism, and the changing literary field. We will also engage with some scholarly attempts at understanding what ‘postmodernism’ and its related concerns may be. A central question of the class will be how postmodernist texts examine the relationship between storytelling and how we come to know ourselves as well as the world around us. Whereas postmodernism traditionally has been understood as a catch-all periodizing term covering developments of literature and culture in the second half of the twentieth century (or at least the parts deemed worth studying), this seminar will approach postmodernism as one artistic response to contemporary developments among many. We will thus not only try to understand how postmodernism’s practitioners conceptualized their own projects, but we will also critically engage with some of the ways in which ‘postmodernism’ has been used to frame cultural history in certain ways, paying special attention to the relationship of these framings to whiteness and (middle-class) masculinity. We will end the seminar by thinking about why and when (and if) postmodernism has ended and what comes after.
Topics discussed may include: technology and media, consciousness and agency, the spectacle, consumerism, utopia and apocalypse, metafictionality and intertextuality.
Classes for this seminar start in the week of April 13. Please purchase Fran Ross’s Oreo and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (any edition/medium is fine); all other readings will be made available.
Seminar: (Re-)Imagining Nature, the Environment, and the Climate throughout US Fiction
Monday, 3 - 5 pm, NSG 323
Dr. Stefan Schubert
Discussions about climate change and the climate crisis have picked up in intensity in recent years, and while movements like Fridays for Future are particularly prominent in Europe, disagreements over the climate and the environment—and humanity’s role in it—dominate the US national conversation as well. In fact, in the United States, projecting particular images onto the environment and utilizing them for ‘political’ discussions goes back to a long history of constructing and (re-)imagining nature in fictional texts, in literature just as much as in popular culture. This entails the Puritan fear of the wilderness as the ‘place where God is not’ just as much as romanticized versions of nature as a refuge for solitary living, thinking of nature as benevolent and nurturing, or imagining it as a harsh and unforgiving place, a landscape to be conquered.
In this class, we want to probe into such narrative constructions of nature by, first, looking at the history of nature writing in US culture, along paradigms such as the wilderness, the frontier, and the sublime. We will then examine how these themes reoccur in a broad range of genres, media, and time periods: from Thoreau’s Walden to contemporary Native American literature, from Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild to neo-Western movies like Brokeback Mountain or No Country for Old Men, from disaster films (such as the recent Don’t Look Up) to postapocalyptic zombie fiction like The Walking Dead, from science/climate fiction narratives like Snowpiercer to survival video games. In all of these diverse texts, we will focus on studying the poetics and politics of nature from the perspective of literary and cultural studies, combining our analytical interest with theoretical and conceptual impulses surrounding questions, among others, of space, urban vs. rural divides, individualism, community and belonging, and difference (e.g. in terms of gender or class).
Seminar: The Spectacle of Monsters: Crime, Deviance, and the Media in American Culture
Monday, 11 am - 1 pm, NSG 328
Dr. Steffen Wöll
From western outlaws and public enemies of the Great Depression to the war on drugs and mass incarceration of racial minorities: Crime and punishment have long-since occupied a central position in the socio-cultural fabric of the United States. This seminar investigates criminality and social deviance by asking about their representations as pleasure or spectacle in various media formats. We will work with a diversity of theoretical approaches and sources, including Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, racialized representations of perpetrators and victims in police photography (mugshots), the psychology of ‘missing white woman syndrome,’ as well as true crime podcasts and investigative journalism. Introducing an additional analytical level, the seminar will survey actual cases that will help us to understand how race, class, and gender dynamics inform representations of criminality.
Overall module responsibility: Prof. 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.
