123043 PS Literary Studies / Proseminar Literature and Cultural Studies (2017W)

Roughly 200 years ago legislators in both Britain (1807) and the United States (1808) made their citizens' participation in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade illegal. Although this did not put an end to slavery itself, it marked a dramatic change in public opinion, economic/political reasoning and philosophical conception of humanity and its fundamental rights. This course's first section will be dedicated to understanding the historical background of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and getting to know its main locations in Britain (especially Liverpool), West Africa, the Middle Passage and the Caribbean. The second section is going to look at how the trade was discussed in 18th economic, political, legal and abolitionist discourses, and to analyse two contemporary literary representations to abolitionism by a black man (Equiano) and a white woman (Moore). Part three is going to be dedicated to late 18th and 19th century icons of oppression proper taken from visual culture (the Brooke, the Wedgwood cameo, Turner's The Slave Ship) and litigation history (the Sommersett case; the Zong case). Part four is going to analyse 20th/21st century literary texts (D'Aguiar, Dabydeen, Philip), a critical autobiography (Hartmann) and a film (The Amistad), which all react to and reflect on the slave trade through iconic events and locations.

One of the goals of this course is to help you hone your skills of observation, analysis and interpretation when it comes to literary texts of different literary genres as well as film and objects of material culture. It is also supposed to give you the opportunity to develop as sense of historical processes and their interaction with mentalities, legislation and political activism. Finally, it aims to help you improve your academic writing skills on all level: especially as far as designing a topic, researching and structuring a paper, using secondary literature, correctly using terminology and cultural/literary theory and the department's style sheet are concerned. We will discuss what plagiarism is, why it is a problem and how to avoid it.