128303 VO Literary and Cultural Theories and Concepts / Theory (MA) (2020W)

As part of our brand-new MA curriculum, some of the colleagues who teach literary and cultural studies at our department have decided to pool their resources. Together, we will give you context, we will attempt to do justice to literary and cultural theory's complexities and help you disentangle what's confusing. We are committed to helping you distinguish theories from concepts and methods and we will do our best to show you how theory and cultural objects of analysis (literary or other), can be brought into a productive dialogue with each other and how to avoid smothering the object of analysis with theory. Using theory in combination with cultural objects of analysis is meant to create something new: an idea that is the beginning of your own interpretation, since this is where scholarship starts, and being able to do it is what you will have to demonstrate in your MA theses.

The following approaches, including some of their theories and concepts will be discussed: narratology, Marxism, British cultural studies, new historicism, cultural materialism, psychoanalysis, theories of 'race' and postcolonial theories, performativity and performance studies, semiotics and grammatology; gender studies and queer theory, intersectionality, disability studies, reception theories, celebrity studies, cultural memory and life-writing studies, modernist theories, postmodernism and posthumanism, and the environmental humanities. The following colleagues from the Department will share their expertise with you: Eva Zettelmann, Michela Borzaga, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Elke Mettinger-Schartmann, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Leopold Lippert, Nadja Gernalzick, Tamara Radak, Katharina Wiedlack, Sarah Heinz, Susanne Reichl, Julia Lajta-Novak & Sandra Mayer, Dieter Fuchs, Tatiana Konrad. Sylvia Mieszkowski will organize and mark the final exam.

Due to the ongoing public health crisis, the lectures in this series will take place as semi-synchronous events. The lectures (60 min) will either be pre-recorded or a script will be made available (complete with ppt slides) from Wednesday evening, so you can watch them any time between Thursday morning and the scheduled lecture slot on Friday morning. On Fridays at 9 o'clock, one hour into the official lecture slot, the respective lecturer and the organizer will log on for 30 min to conduct a Q&A via BBB chat. During this time, you will have the opportunity to direct your questions to the presenter/s as well as raise more general issues relevant to the lecture series. Please make sure that you have watched the recorded lecture or read the uploaded script by the time you log on for the chat.