128421 SE Literary & Cultural Studies Seminar (MA) (2025W)

Frankly, it wasn't easy to narrow down the corpus of texts/films for this class. So many bitches! Friends who knew I was preparing this course kept asking: "Have you considered Fatal Attraction?", wanted to know "Are you including Gossip Girl? Samantha from Sex in the City?" Or they assumed: "Surely, you are going to do The Silent Wife?" or expressed excitement: "OMG, you get to discuss Thelma & Louise!"…I hope to strike a similar chord with you, but don't get your hopes up…none of the above made the cut; for different reasons. Instead, I found - I think - better, or rather 'meaner', more iconic and more diverse - bitches for you in widely different genres from classic noir to teen comedy to thriller to costume drama to documentary. Your run-of-the-mill bitch usually has overlap with the femme fatale, to which a few of the novels and films I put on the agenda testify. Other cultural objects of analysis make it very clear that one prime criterion is that bitches don't play well with other females because their primary solidarity is not with other women. A few questions we are going to pursue arise from the tension of these two characteristics: are bitches primarily toxic to men? Or to all other people? If the bitch can be a figuration of protest against certain patriarchal structures, is she necessarily compatible with feminism? When Gore Vidal quips "The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so." (Gore Vidal), it becomes clear that being biologically female is not a necessary condition for being a bitch. But under which circumstances can a man be bitchy? There is the bitchy queen, sure. But when Jesse Pinkman (in Breaking Bad) yells at a male police officer whom he cannot see through a closed door: "This is a private domicile, and I will not be harassed, bitch!", it suggests that a man does not have to be read as gay to be called a bitch. We will also pursue other questions: Are bitches necessarily morally corrupt? Are there sexual transgressors who are not bitches? Given the difference in racialised privilege, is there a difference between a typical 'white bitch' and a typical 'black bitch', when it comes to who makes that judgment and what does it entail? Are there bitches who are not punished by our cultural productions? Do we need to see that the bitch does not 'get away with it'? Who punishes her? How? Does she recover? Does she repent? Does she reform? Or do repentance and reformation do away with the bitchiness? If so, is it a loss? And if it is a loss, what exactly are we missing when - to pun on a quote - 'dingdong, the bitch is dead'?

This SE pursues several goals: First and foremost, to hone your skills of analysing and interpreting literary texts as well as films and express your own ideas about them, enhanced by your reading of scholarly texts and by cultural theories and concepts. Secondly, the 'specialist'-task (which every student in class undertakes once) is supposed to provide the basis and impulses for the group work (in which every student in class participates on a weekly basis). You'll be expected to provide a powerpoint presentation as an accompaniment to your 'specialist'-task.

One week before the lesson in which it is your turn to act as specialist, I will meet with you in my office (after our lesson) to discuss your ideas, make suggestions and help you structure your plan for the following week. After each lesson, the current specialist, the next week's specialist and I will get together for an immediate reflexion, which takes into consideration your own estimate of your performance, peer-feedback and feedback from me.