128303 VO Literary and Cultural Theories and Concepts (MA) (2025W)

Each individual lecture (60 min) is immediately followed by a Q&A session with the respective lecturer/s, the exam organiser and the tutor (30 min).

Both the lecture and the Q&A are compulsory. During the Q&A, you will have the opportunity to direct your questions to the lecturer/s as well as raise more general issues relevant to the lecture series. In order to put this lecture series together for you, 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 or challenging about approaches. 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, psychoanalysis, Marxism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, new historicism & cultural studies, life writing & cultural memory, postcolonial criticism, gender studies & queer theory, disability studies, intersectionality and the environmental humanities. The following colleagues from the department will share their expertise with you: Kevin Potter, Eva Zettelmann, Elke Mettinger-Schartmann, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Julia Lajta-Novak, Sarah Heinz, Katharina Wiedlack, Marta Werbanowska and Sylvia Mieszkowski. The latter will also be organising the course and marking the final exam.