128303 VO Literary and Cultural Theories and Concepts / Theory (MA) (2021S)

NB
Due to the ongoing public health situation, this course will be taught online. All theory texts, slides and recorded lectures or scripts will be made available on Moodle, but each lecture (60 min) comes with a live Q&A (30 min, Friday, 9:00-9:30 am) in BBB or Zoom (tba) with the respective lecturer/s and the exam organizer. During this time, you will have the opportunity to direct your questions to the lecturer/s as well as raise more general issues relevant to the 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.

This is the second iteration of our MA theory lecture series. In the future, this course will most likely only be offered during the summer terms. Please consider this when planning your MA. Once again, 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, British cultural studies, new historicism, psychoanalysis, theories of modernism, postmodernism and posthumanism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, theories of 'race' and postcolonial theory, performativity and performance studies, gender studies, queer theory, intersectionality, disability studies, celebrity studies, cultural memory and life-writing studies, and the environmental humanities. The following colleagues from the Department will share their expertise with you: Eva Zettelmann, Elke Mettinger-Schartmann, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Sarah Heinz, Lukas Klik, Leopold Lippert, Dieter Fuchs, Tamara Radak, Kevin Potter, Katharina Wiedlack, Julia Lajta-Novak, Sandra Mayer, Tatiana Konrad and Sylvia Mieszkowski. The latter will be organizing and marking the final exam.