128303 VO Literary and Cultural Theories and Concepts (MA) (2024W)

All theory texts and slides will be made available on Moodle. Each lecture (60 min) is immediately followed by a Q&A session with the respective lecturer/s, the exam organizer and the tutor (30 min). Both the lecture and the Q&A are compulsory. During the Q&A, you will have the opportunity to direct your questions to the lecturer/s as well as raise more general issues relevant to the lecture series.

In order to put this lecture series together for you, some of the colleagues who teach literary and cultural studies at our department have decided to pool their resources. Together, we will give you context, we will attempt to do justice to literary and cultural theory's complexities and help you disentangle what's confusing or challenging about approaches. We are committed to helping you distinguish theories from concepts and methods and we will do our best to show you how theory and cultural objects of analysis (literary or other), can be brought into a productive dialogue with each other and how to avoid smothering the object of analysis with theory. Using theory in combination with cultural objects of analysis is meant to create something new: an idea that is the beginning of your own interpretation, since this is where scholarship starts, and being able to do it is what you will have to demonstrate in your MA theses.The following approaches, including some of their theories and concepts will be discussed: Narratology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, the Bakhtinian approach to culture & literature, new historicism, cultural materialism & cultural studies, Life writing & cultural memory, poststructuralism, deconstruction, gender studies, queer theory, disability studies, intersectionality and the environmental humanities and eco-justice criticism. The following colleagues from the department will share their expertise with you: Eva Zettelmann, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Dieter Fuchs, Elke Mettinger-Schartmann, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Julia Lajta-Novak, Katharina Wiedlack, Tamara Radak, Sarah Heinz, Marta Werbanowska, and Kevin Potter. The latter will also be organizing and marking the final exam.