Contemporary Literature: Literary Histories of the Present Age - Detailseite

This seminar offers advanced students the chance to study some of the most influential novels of the last decade. We will ask ourselves what kind of constellation contemporary literature is and what contemporaneity or contemporariness actually mean and how they are signaled and produced by texts. Current theoretical perspectives on temporality, infrastructure, public spheres, gender and sexuality, ecology, immediacy and mediation, migration and cosmopolitanism, or world literature will guide our discussion and relate the literary texts to other discourses that shape and reflect the contemporary world. We will also consistently analyse the texts with regard to style, voice, focalization, genre and the narrative use of time to detect (or to refute the idea of) broader formal tendencies within contemporary literature. In our first meeting, I will propose a provisionary “canon” of the contemporary that we shall look at, but students are highly welcome to recommend additional or alternative texts for the program. By constantly reflecting our process of selection, evaluation, and contextualization we will also address some key problems of canon formation and of literary history. These difficulties can be especially foregrounded in a literary history of the present that inevitably tries to frame aesthetic practices that are heterogenous and in flux.

The Lektürekurs will give us a chance to deepen our investigation of contemporary literature by focusing on additional texts, substantiating our theoretical readings, and/or by looking at specific contemporary developments (e.g. the proliferation of short novels). Students are explicitly invited to suggest their own material and to shape this part of the module according to their own interests in contemporary literature and theory.