Universität Wien

123044 PS Proseminar Literature / Literary Studies (2015S)

Literary Trauma

5.00 ECTS (2.00 SWS), SPL 12 - Anglistik
Continuous assessment of course work

Registration/Deregistration

Note: The time of your registration within the registration period has no effect on the allocation of places (no first come, first served).

Details

max. 25 participants
Language: English

Lecturers

Classes (iCal) - next class is marked with N

  • Wednesday 11.03. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 18.03. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 25.03. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 15.04. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 22.04. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 29.04. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 06.05. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 13.05. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 20.05. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 27.05. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 03.06. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 10.06. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 17.06. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19
  • Wednesday 24.06. 12:00 - 14:00 Raum 4 Anglistik UniCampus Hof 8 3E-EG-19

Information

Aims, contents and method of the course

Whether private or public, personal or political, trauma is a complex experience that always affects our psyches, our bodies, but also the way in which we inhabit the present, space, and the polis at large. In this course, we will investigate language´s capacity to articulate pain, the narrative strategies employed by writers to communicate what since the 1990s has been theorised as enigmatically ‘aporetic’, ‘unspeakable’, and ‘unrepresentable’. We will address difficult questions of memory and forgetting, of life and death, as well as the potential for renewal, horizons of hope, and futurity. Within this context, we will read key theoretical texts by Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth, Viktor Frankl, Shoshana Felman, Giorgio Agamben and Dori Laub.
If critics have mostly read this phenomenon symptomatically, that is mainly through the rubric of language – thereby always foregrounding questions of ethics and representation –, in this class, we will put to the test other rubrics of trauma such as time, affect, space and embark on more phenomenological modes of reading – new critical pedagogies through which we will attempt to grasp and imagine what has been deemed unbearable and unthinkable.

Assessment and permitted materials

Class participation, weekly written assignments, mid-term paper, end-term paper & final written test.

Minimum requirements and assessment criteria

Students will become familiar with basic skills required to analyse and interpret different literary genres (poems, short stories, novels and plays). They will also learn how to write academic papers.

Examination topics

interactive, small-group and classroom discussions, reading assignments, and close-reading of texts.

Reading list

Copies of the following books will be available at the bookshop Facultas am Campus:

Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. London: Penguin, 2000.
Michael Ondaatje. In the Skin of a Lion. London: Picador, 1988.
Gail Jones. Sorry. London: Vintage, 2008.

A reader containing further primary and secondary material will be available at the CopyStudio Schwarzspanierstraße at the beginning of term.

Association in the course directory

Studium: UF 344, BA 612; BEd 046
Code/Modul: UF 3.3.3-304, BA10.1; BEd 08a.1, BEd 08b.2
Lehrinhalt: 12-3041

Last modified: Mo 07.09.2020 15:33