128303 VO Literary and Cultural Theories and Concepts / Theory (MA) (2021W)

NB
Due to the ongoing public health situation, this course will be an online event. All theory texts, slides and recorded lectures or scripts will be made available on Moodle, but each lecture (60 min) comes with a live Q&A (30 min, Thursdays, 2.15-2.45 pm) in BBB or Zoom (tba) with the respective lecturer/s and the exam organizer. During this time, 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. Please make sure that i) you have watched the recorded lecture or read the uploaded script, ii) as well as the set texts by the time you log on for the live Q&A and iii) come armed with one question. NB: the Q&A is an integral part of this course, not an optional extra event. If you cannot attend the Q&A, you should plan to attend the MA Theories & Concepts lecture next winter term, as this lecture cannot be offered in the summer term. Please consider this when planning your MA degree.

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: Marxism, narratology, British cultural studies, new historicism, psychoanalysis, theories of modernism, postmodernism and posthumanism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, theories of 'race' and postcolonial studies, gender studies, queer theory, intersectionality, disability studies, celebrity studies, cultural memory, the environmental humanities and life-writing studies. The following colleagues from the Department will share their expertise with you: Eva Zettelmann, Dieter Fuchs, Sarah Heinz, Lukas Klik, Tatiana Konrad, Julia Lajta-Novak, Sandra Mayer, Kevin Potter, Tamara Radak, Susanne Reichl and Katharina Wiedlack and Sylvia Mieszkowski. The latter will also be organizing and marking the final exam.