Archives: Courses

Die Veranstaltung führt in zentrale Perspektiven, Theorien und Begriffe aus der Rassismus- und Antidiskriminierungsforschung, Intersektionalität, Gender Studies sowie migrationsgesellschaftlichen und machtkritischen Debatten ein. Im Fokus steht eine reflexive Auseinandersetzung mit gesellschaftlich produzierter Differenz, struktureller Ungleichheit und den politischen Ursprüngen diversitätsbezogener Kämpfe. Methodisch werden kritische, reflexive, künstlerische und partizipative Zugänge kombiniert.

No need to travel all the way across the Atlantic: in this seminar we will use a combination of literary, archival, and field research to explore traces of America, American culture, and American history right here in the city of Essen! In the process, we will hopefully get to see Essen, America, and the relationship(s) between the two in an entirely new light.

This class will allow students to improve their Information Literacy, Analysis, Oral and Written Communication, Teamwork, and Intercultural Knowledge competences.

The seminar will feature close readings and a critical analysis of key texts of popular culture theory from the beginnings of the 20^th century to today. The seminar aims at facilitating a thorough examination of the philosophical, semiotic, political and cultural diagnostic implications of the approaches presented in the selected texts by thinkers such as Adorno, Hall, Storey, Fiske, Jenkins and others. Texts are not discussed in isolation, but will be embedded in their synchronic and diachronic interdependencies. In this way, the differences and similarities in the various approaches will be identified and the historical development of the discourse of popular culture criticism will become apparent.

There will be a moodle room for this seminar containing additional information and the texts. After the registration period, you will be informed by the lecturer regarding further course modalities and the log-in information for moodle!

A young woman who fails to escape the poverty and violence of her childhood surroundings and becomes a prostitute, another young woman who spectacularly rises to stardom on the New York theatre stage, a greedy dentist who ends up being handcuffed to a corpse in the middle of Death Valley, and a Californian pet dog who joins a pack of wolves in Alaska: the plots and themes of some of the most famous works of (North) American literary naturalism (Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Frank Norris’s McTeague, and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, respectively) are nothing short of epic, sensationalist, and melodramatic – and thus do not fit the conventional critical characterization of literary naturalism as a subset of realism at all. In this lecture, we will review traditional and revisionist critical approaches to literary naturalism and examine both canonical and less frequently read works of naturalism from the U.S. and Canada (including French Canada). In addition, we will also take a look at early adaptations and translations of literary naturalism, including D.W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909) and some of the various German translations of Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1904/1954).

This course will give an introduction to the diversity of North American literatures. Reading and analyzing texts from pre-colonial times to the present, we will try to get an overview of important movements and authors. In our discussions of writings taken from all main literary genres we will attempt to determine some of the characteristics of North American literature in general and of individual periods and writers in particular. Short introductory lectures on the various periods of North American literature will provide the literary and cultural contexts for our discussion of exemplary texts. Students should purchase the following text: Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).

This class will allow students to improve their Analysis and Intercultural Knowledge competences.