Afterhours – The Cultural Politics and Poetics of Nighttime - Detailseite

In this class, we will consider the night as a spatio-temporal construct that has specific, yet various cultural functions in literature and culture. Take, for instance, Jim Jarmush’s movie Night On Earth (1991) or Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936) we can see that not only do certain social structures and interpersonal relations become possible during nighttime. The night is also often (and maybe most obviously so) mobilized as a cloak of darkness, under the protection of which secrets are revealed, hardships are shared, and illicit desire is given in to. The ways in which people make us of the night are various and, in many ways, reflect how making use of particular parts of the diurnal structure directly translates into assumptions of reputability, propriety, and decency. In this seminar we will ask, who are the individuals who populate the night? What kinds of activities do they engage in? How do the afterhours lend themselves to the constitution of classed, gendered, racialized, and sexualized differences structure our lived experiences also by daylight? And how can we make sense of the fact that the night is such a fascinating phenomenon that repulses, scares, signals towards abandonment and precarity, while at the same time it is capacious and full (queer) potential? 

The focus of this class will be the second half of the 20^th century with case studies from U.S.-American literature and culture. Seminar materials will be provided via Moodle whenever possible, except for one or two novels that participants are expected to acquire themselves (titles t.b.a.).