124344 PS Literary Studies / Proseminar Literature (2018S)

This course will familiarize students with core-terms of poststructuralist theory such as: discursive practice/constructions and deconstruction in regard to historically-specific patriarchal and feminist discourses on femininity, gender, and the body of the 19th and 20th centuries. Considering aspects of theories by Foucault, Derrida, Beauvoir, Gilbert & Gubar, deLauretis and Cixous/Kristeva, we will explore how these can be applied to an analysis of dialectical constructions of femininity produced by master-discourses of Romanticism and Victorianism; how this dialectics was challenged by 19th cent female literary & poetic imagination and significantly subverted in modernist and postmodernist deconstructions. Additionally, we will consider how the angel/demon construction shapes constructions of masculinity in literary representations.
Special focus will be put on the meaning of the texts in the historical, cultural and social contexts of the respective literary period. This analysis will be embedded in a discussion of related stylistic devices and narrative strategies such as: dramatic monologue, metaficiton, intertextuality, rewriting, deconstruction. Literature will be read in context of responding to changing historical, social and cultural conditions wherein literary devices become discursive tools for critical comment and reflection.