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History is vicious thing because it changes like a vexed image, depending on who looks, when you look, and how you look. Maybe literature can deal with this better than history books, which seem to have to choose one perspective. History is akin to Memory, collective or cultural memory or re-memory (as Toni Morrison calls it), sometimes to Trauma, first-generation or second-generation trauma aka post-memory, sometimes to the Archive, sometimes to Textuality or Intertextuality – and sometimes of course also to media and/or commodity culture. In this seminar we will look at six texts: one from the Age of Reform, a sentimental history of Puritanism (Hope Leslie) and one from Southern Modernism, a fragmented history of race and class (Absalom, Absalom). We will read two from postmodernism: a graphic novel of post-memory (Maus), a specular (and speculative) history of the Kennedy murder (Libra). And we will study two texts from the last two decades: a legal/propertied pre-history of slavery (A Mercy) and a Turtle Mountain history of termination (The Night Watchman). How do these texts deal with history? How do they treat the vexed images of historical perspectives? Why do they try? These will be some of our questions.
Reading:
- Catherine Maria Sedgwick – Hope Leslie (1827)
- William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom! (1926)
- Art Spiegelman – Maus (1980-91)
- Don DeLillo – Libra (1988)
- Toni Morrison – A Mercy (2008)
- Louise Erdrich – The Nightwatchman (2020)
Hybrid/Online Format: This will be a synchronous course – depending on what is allowed either through Zoom or in person in a room (see below) – or a mixture of in-class and Zoom. We will meet on a weekly basis, so you need to block the time. You need to be in Berlin!
Support:
There will be a Moodle site with information and links. On this site you will also find the information in which final format the seminar will be held.
Requirements:
- In a small group produce a podcast on one of the books on a specific topic. MAP: this module demands a 20-page term paper in one of the two seminars.
Please register through Agnes, it’s my only way to get the access data to the moodle course to you! |
