100246 SE Modern German Literature: (2019S)

First World War and the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in the mirror of Galician literature: historical memory and literary reflection
The aim of the course is to impart knowledge on the events on the Eastern Front during the First World War as well as the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, as reflected in fiction and journalism. It is about the authors who were from Galicia or were on the Eastern Front during the First World War. Insights into the texts written in different time periods and in different languages (German, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian) will be given in comparison and competencies in this area will be achieved among the students. The course explains the current interpretation of Galicia as a geopolitical border region and presents the theoretical foundations. The approaches are interdisciplinary: literature, cultural studies and history are considered. Relevant to the course are the theories that have gained importance in the course of Cultural Turns, such as Postkolonial Turn and Spatial Turn. Of spatial theories, the phenomenology of space will be in the foreground, especially the topological approach to spatial problems on the basis of behavioral science by Kurt Lewin, who gave the first impetus to his own war experience of Galicia in 1917. The course shows the topicality of the Galician texts for the theme "War and Peace in Central Europe". During the seminars, the selected fiction and journalistic texts should be read in German and analyzed with the help of the illustrated theoretical approaches. The following texts are proposed by known and little-known authors of the Austrian, German-Jewish and Slavic literatures (Polish, Ukrainian and Russian).