120032 PS Interdisciplinary Course (501) = Proseminar Cultural Studies (2009S)

This interdisciplinary course introduces students to poststructuralist cultural and feminist theories on langugage as a site of production of gender-identities and -relations (Butler, Kristeva, Cixous, Cameron etc). Participants will be familiarised hoe these theories can be put into practice in an interpretative analysis of postmodern novels, dramas and films which all centre thematically on dialogues between men and women: verbal and non-verbal debates; the dynamics, symbolics, and breakdowns of their communication.We contextualise these discourses with the appropriate historical-cultural backgrounds, trace similarities and differences, focussing on 2 major questions: 1. WHY does the postmodern centre on such a complex, multilayered negotiation of gender on the discursive-dialogic level? 2.) HOW is this realised - i.e. which narrative, cinematicm theoretical methods are applied? Here we encounter diverse contexts such as: historiography; psychoanalysis; social role-play and desire; collective and individual memory; mechanisms of power and violence; politics and ethnic conflict; symbolic-rhythmic levels.