Anglistik / Englisch / Amerikanische Literatur und Kultur

Textual Analysis PLUS!
Slave Narratives and Neo-Slave Narratives

Slave narratives range among the earliest texts of African American literature. Written by fugitive or freed slaves, they deal with their authors’ transition from slavery to self-emancipation and form a response to white supremacy that is shaped by the discourse of Abolitionism and the literary modes of their age, such as Sentimentalism and Realism. This course will focus on classic slave narratives and on 20th century neo slave narratives – postmodern fictions that transform and re-write the 19th century genre.
PLUS! means that this course will offer students additional online tools as for questions, discussions and explorations – anytime, anywhere, at your own individual pace.

Required Texts:
Frederick Douglas. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave.
Harriet Jacobs. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
William Wells Brown. Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter.
Toni Morrison. Song of Solomon.
Ishmael Reed. Flight to Canada.

Textual Analysis PLUS!
Slave Narratives and Neo-Slave Narratives

Anmeldung erforderlich über C@mpus: 171212770

Critical Animal Studies

Critical Animal Studies is a relatively new interdisciplinary approach within the humanities that inquires into the status of non-human animals in cultural discourses. Critical Animal Studies examine the concepts of animality, the constructions of the human, the non-human and the inhuman, and their impact on questions of ethics and politics, such as the interconnectedness of speciesism, racism and sexism. Critical Animal Studies also address the troubled boundary between the human and the animal – a boundary that has become porous with Darwinism’s and Freudianism’s assumption that man is an animal too.
We will explore the question of the animal from Antiquity to the present and deal with issues like anthropocentrism and species equality, with the “becoming animal” and with contact zones that blur the boundaries between the human and the non-human. Next to seminal texts by Critical Animal Studies’ key theorists, we will focus on the representations of the animal in literary texts by E. A. Poe, Jack London, Eugene O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Malamud and Paul Auster.

Required Texts:
Bernard Malamud. God’s Grace.
Paul Auster. Timbuktu.
Ernest Hemingway. Death in the Afternoon.
Eugene O’Neill. The Hairy Ape. A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes.
Additional texts will be made available on ILIAS.

Critical Animal Studies

Anmeldung erforderlich über C@mpus: 171213320

Transhumanism