Anglistik SoSe 2010
GCSC-DoktorandInnenenringvorlesung
„Schlüsselthemen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik /
Key Topics in English Studies and American Studies“
SoSe 2010
Leitung: Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning und Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hallet / DoktorandInnen des GCSC
Mi 12 - 14 Uhr, A 4; ECTS 2,5
In der Ringvorlesung "Schlüsselthemen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik" stellen DoktorandInnen des GCSC Schlüsselthemen und Hauptgebiete der Anglistik und Amerikanistik für Studierende der JLU vor.
Ziel der Vorlesung ist es, Ihnen als Studierenden Überblickswissen zu zentralen Themen und Gebieten der anglistischen und amerikanistischen Literatur- und Sprachwissenschaft sowie Didaktik aus einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Perspektive zu vermitteln. Die in einem wöchentlichen Rhythmus stattfindende Vorlesung eignet sich daher ideal als Grundlage für die Themenfindung von Hausarbeiten (bzw. Abschlussarbeiten) und zur Prüfungsvorbereitung. Mit dieser Vorlesung profitieren Sie direkt von der intensiven Forschungstätigkeit am GCSC: die DoktorandInnenenausbildung wird zu einem wichtigen Motor der Lehre.
In the "Key Topics in English Studies and American Studies" lecture series, PhD students at the GCSC will present an introduction to the key issues and main topic areas of English studies for students at JLU. The aim of this series is to provide students with a basic understanding of central topics and areas of English and American literature, linguistics and didactics from the perspective of the study of culture. The weekly lectures are therefore an ideal resource when searching for a term-paper or a final thesis subject as well as useful exam preparation. This series allows students to benefit directly from the intensive levels of research being carried out at the GCSC, making postgraduate study a significant driver of university teaching.
Modulzuordnungen:
- Modul Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies
- Modul Cultural Studies
- Modul Literary Genres
- Modul Literary Periods
- Modul Literary Theory
Semesterprogramm
14.04.2010 Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hallet / Stefanie Bock
Einführung
21.04. Prof Dr. Nünning
Epoche - Gattung - Autor, oder: Was ist und wie erarbeite ich mir ein literaturwissenschaftliches Prüfungsteilgebiet?
Literarische Gattungen
28.04. Anne Rüggemeier
Narrating Selves. Generischer Wandel und gegenwärtige Entwicklungen der Autobiographie
05.05. Martin Spies
The Stuart Court Masque – An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Masque Genre in the 17th Century
Ansätze, Konzepte und Methoden der Cultural Studies
12.05. Melani Nekić
Image, Writing and Layout: The Multimodal Analysis of Tourism Websites
19.05. Birte Christ
"White is not better than black, but rich is definitely better than poor”: The New Poverty Studies and the Category of ‘Class’
26.05. Thijs Willaert & Floris Biskamp
Postcolonial Problems, or why The Kiterunner does (not) matter
02.06. Daniel Mai
Making Sense of the Past in the Light of the Present: Collective Memory, Cultures of Remembrance and Your New Car
09.06. Michael Basseler
The Knowledge of Literature: Approaches, Methods, Applications
16.06. Daniel A. Holder
‘Old’ vs. ‘New Negro’: The Harlem Renaissance as a Key Topic in American Studies
Ansätze und Entwicklungen der Erzähltheorie
23.06. Christina Mohr
Telling the Untellable – Cognition, Narration, and the Vietnam War Experience
30.06. Nina Lange
Time in the Novel. Theories, Concepts and Methods for the Analysis of the Representation of Time
07.07. Sabrina Kusche
Die Medialisierung des Erzählens. Genres, Trends und neue theoretische Ansätze in der Erzähltheorie
14.07. Abschluss und Klausur schreiben
Narrating Selves. Generischer Wandel und gegenwärtige Entwicklungen der Autobiographie
Anne Rüggemeier
In Zeiten von Social Networks und Blogging sind wir tagtäglich mit alltagstauglichen Selbstnarrativen konfrontiert oder auch dazu herausgefordert, uns selbst (digital) zu erzählen. Anhand welcher Kategorien wählen wir aus, was erzählenswert ist und was nicht? Was verstehen wir unter einem normalen, guten oder erfolgreichen Leben? Und was hat die literarische Gattung der Autobiographie damit zu tun?
Dieser Teil der Ringvorlesung nähert sich dem Thema Narrating Selves von zwei Seiten. Zum einen vermittelt er einen Überblick über die historische Entwicklung der Autobiographieforschung und führt anhand exemplarischer Positionen in die Komplexität autobiographischer Gattungsbestimmung ein. Zum anderen soll anhand der dynamischen Wechselbeziehung von (Er)Leben, Erinnern und Erzählen über die Bedeutung von Gattungen als konventionalisierte Erzählschemata nachgedacht werden, mit deren Hilfe wir unser eigenes Leben (narrativ) ordnen und wahrnehmen.
Anhand konkreter Textbeispiele aus der neueren autobiographischen Praxis wird verständlich werden, inwiefern die Literaturwissenschaft zu einer Neudefinition und Rekonstruktion des Genres und seiner Geschichte herausgefordert ist.
Anne Rüggemeier studierte Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, 
Anglistik und Geschichte an der Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen und der Oxford Brookes University. 2007 schloss sie ihr Studium mit dem Magister Artium und dem 1. Staatsexamen für das Lehramt an Gymnasien ab. Nachdem sie zwei Jahre als EU-Referentin bei der Max-Planck Gesellschaft tätig war, begann sie nach der Geburt ihres Sohnes im Oktober 2009 als Stipendiatin des Gießener International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) an der JLU Gießen zu promovieren. Sie ist Mitglied des International PhD Programme (IPP) “Literary and Cultural Studies” und beschäftigt sich in ihrem Promotionsprojekt mit der Relationalen Autobiographie.
The Stuart Court Masque– An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Masque Genre in the 17th Century
Martin Spies
The last decade has seen a renewed interest in what was probably the most spectacular and multifaceted of English courtly entertainments: the
Martin Spies is a research assistant in the English Department at the
Image, Writing and Layout: The Multimodal Analysis of Tourism Websites
Melani Nekić
With subjects ranging from pieces of furniture to children’s drawings and museum exhibitions, the study of meaning-making activities as realised in diverse socio-cultural contexts and across text types has emerged as a cutting-edge and as yet open-ended topic. What many of these studies have in common is that they have been approached from a multimodal perspective.The aims of this lecture are, therefore, twofold. First, students will be introduced to the multimodal perspective by considering such questions as: What are the benefits of multimodal research? Which theories have served as a starting point for multimodal analyses? Which tools can be applied to the analysis of multimodal texts? Second, for illustrative purposes, the relevant theories, concepts and tools will be applied to the analysis of a tourism website. In what ways do meanings unfold when one navigates the themes commonly used to promote tourism – themes such as sports activities and aspects of cultural and natural heritage? How far do notions of culture tie into the analysis of tourism websites? How can we analytically proceed to investigate tourism websites? Students will thus get an idea of how multiple modes such as image, text and layout interact to construe tourist meanings.
Melani Nekić is a doctoral candidate at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in 
“White is not better than black, but rich is definitely better than poor”: The New Poverty Studies and the Category of ‘Class’
Birte Christ
Since the publication of Walter Benn Michaels’ polemic The Trouble with Diversity (2006), the focal point of American cultural studies has undergone a shift towards class, and, in particular, towards poverty. At the heart of Michaels’ argument is his demand that we use the category of class as a category of inequality rather than of identity. I will first introduce you to this new scholarship of class and poverty and contextualise it by going back to Marxist theory and its impact on the BirminghamSchool and cultural studies in the
Birte Christ studied English and German literature as well as Political Science at the Universities 
of Freiburg and Austin/Texas. She has worked as a lecturer for German at YaleUniversity and as an assistant professor at the North American Studies Programs at BonnUniversity and FreiburgUniversity. Her dissertation focused on middlebrow serial fiction in
Postcolonial Problems, or: Why The Kite Runner Does (not) Matter
Thijs Willaert & Floris Biskamp
Many authors from former colonies consider their literary works a means of resistance to foreign domination – a tendency which has not gone unnoticed, neither in academia nor in your own local bookstore. Yet, while some critics have heralded this postcolonial movement as the liberation of the former colonies, others have accused it of being politically irrelevant, or even of consolidating the dominance of the West. Through a parallel analysis of current positions in academia and the paradigmatic case of The Kite Runner, our lecture aims to shed light on some central concepts and controversies within the polemical field of postcolonial studies and to provide a practical point of entry into this crucial debate.
Thijs Willaert studied English and Spanish literature at the Catholic University of Louvain. After
obtaining a Master’s degree in Western literature and a postgraduate degree in Literary Sciences, he joined the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) to begin work on his PhD dissertation, the subject of which is the interconnection between postcolonial studies and the works of Michel Foucault.
Floris Biskamp has studied Physics and Political Science in
Gießen and
Making Sense of the Past in Light of the Present: Collective Memory, Cultures of Remembrance and Your New Car
Daniel Mai
What do the Volkswagen Beetle, Konrad Adenauer and the Berlin Wall have in common? They are not only fashioned as established cultural icons through which ‘German identities’ are constructed, but also serve as highly symbolic markers of times gone by that are collectively remembered in common ways. But what does it actually mean to speak of the past in terms of ‘culture’ and ‘remembrance’? This lecture will give a short introduction to the field of collective memory studies – one of the ‘hot topics’ in the study of culture. Exploring the sociocultural aspects of memory, my aim is to provide students with a graspable explanation of the two influential concepts of cultural and communicative memory as well as cultures of remembrance. Being models of thought, these concepts not only enable us to understand how societies make sense of, reconstruct and revise their history. Breaking disciplinary boundaries, they can also be applied to modern companies in order to analyse (invented) corporate traditions and strategic processes of history and identity management.
Daniel Mai received his B.A. in Kulturwirt (English Literary and Cultural Studies, Business Studies) from the 
The Knowledge of Literature: Approaches, Methods, Applications
Dr. Michael Basseler
Even though the term Literaturwissenschaft inherently implies that literature and knowledge are somehow related, this connection is by no means an undisputed one. Does literature really know something? Or isn’t it rather that literature is exempt from the obligation of producing and/or transmitting (some kind of) knowledge? How does literature relate to other discourses of knowledge, e.g. the sciences and philosophy most notably, but also to more informal areas such as commonsensical world- or life-knowledge? And what’s the upshot of all these questions for our self-conception as scholars and students of literature?
The aim of this lecture is to provide students with a fairly broad survey of theories within literary and cultural studies that attend to the multifaceted relations of literature and knowledge, a topic that is arguably becoming increasingly important in our contemporary Wissensgesellschaft. The lecture will cover a wide range of theories, reaching from philosophically oriented approaches to the question of truth and knowledge in literature to cultural-historical approaches such as new historicism/poetics of culture and more recent trends, e.g. the idea of “literary studies as life-sciences” (Ottmar Ette).
Michael Basseler was awarded his PhD from JLU Giessen in 2008. He is an associate member of the International 
Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and assistant professor in
‘Old’ vs. ‘New Negro’: The Harlem Renaissance as a Key Topic in American Studies
Daniel A. Holder
Alain Locke’s concept of the ‘New Negro’ came to epitomise what is commonly referred to as the ‘Harlem’ or ‘New Negro Renaissance’, a flowering of African American cultural production during the 1920s in New York City’s Harlem, which was at the time the so-called ‘mecca’ of the Afro-diasporic world. This lecture will give students a broad overview of the phenomenon and will look at different fields of African American cultural production. It will provide the historical reasons for such a ‘Renaissance’ and will investigate artists, intellectuals and political figures central to the Harlem Renaissance, focusing on differing and conflicting notions of African American identity. Moreover, this lecture will put forth a broader and more inclusive cultural history of the phenomenon, re-reading it as a postcolonial, Afro-diasporic ‘New Negro Renaissance’ covering not only
Daniel A. Holder, geboren 1980 in Köln, studierte Regionalwissenschaften Nordamerika, Politische Wissenschaft u
nd Anglo-Amerikanische Geschichte an den Universitäten Bonn und Köln sowie African American Studies an der University of Florida in Gainesville/USA. Seit Herbst 2009 promoviert er als Stipendiat am InternationalGraduateCenter for the Study of Culture (GCSC) zu dem Thema “Rewriting-Un-Americaness: African American Intellectuals, Post World War II Political Radicalism and McCarthyism“. Zusammen mit Marie Lottmann ist er Sprecher der GGK-Sektion 2: Literatur- und Kulturtheorien.
Telling the Untellable: Narration, Cognition and the Vietnam War Experience
Christina Mohr
How can you relate something that you, yourself, can hardly understand? Despite the fact that extreme experiences seem ‘hard to tell’, they have at the same time always been an influential source of authorial creativity. The question of ‘tellability’ directly pertains to the core problem of Vietnam War veterans. For one thing, they fought in a war that lacked interpretability from its very beginnings and ultimately damaged collective identity. For another, they had to cope with personal experiences which were hard to convey to outsiders, even more so after the system of collective narratives maintained by the media had undergone fundamental change. This lecture examines the consequences of the Vietnam War (1959-1975) via a cognitive analysis of selected representations of the war, thereby providing an overview of several authorial strategies of telling ‘untellable’ experiences.
Christina Mohr is a member of the International PhD Programme in “Literary and Cultural Studies” 
and works for the English Department at JLU. She has studied in Gießen,
Time in the Novel: Theories, Concepts and Methods for the Analysis of the Representation of Time
Nina Lange
Undoubtedly, time plays a central role in our everyday life, but it is also of crucial importance in literature, where it serves both as a topic, and, due to the work’s temporal structure, as a constitutive category. Because of its relevance, the analysis of the narrative representation of time will become a very familiar one for students of English and American literatures. Though we are all well-acquainted with the phenomenon of time from our own experience, it is not sufficient to rely on one’s own intuition for the purpose of academic work. Instead, what is called for here is a sound theoretical framework and precise categories. The goal of this lecture is therefore to present different theories, concepts and methods for the analysis of time in the novel, but at the same time to examine them critically and adapt them to the object of analysis. The applicability of the theories will be shown using examples of modernist novels written by familiar authors – such as Virginia Woolf – as well as by lesser-known novelists deserving of more interest.
Nina Lange studied English, Mathematics and Music for a teaching degree at the Universities of Giessen 
and Sheffield (U.K.). After having completed her state exam in October 2009, she joined the International PhD Programme (IPP) “Literary and Cultural Studies”and is currently working on her dissertation on the narrative representation of time in modernist literature. Since January 2010, she has been working as a research assistant at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC).
Die Medialisierung des Erzählens. Genres, Trends und neue theoretische Ansätze in der Erzähltheorie
Sabrina Kusche
Die Medialisierung des Erzählens ist in den letzten Jahren zu einem zentralen Schlüsselthema der anglistischen und amerikanistischen Literaturwissenschaft avanciert. Der Einfluss der neuen Medien auf das Erzählen wird zum einen durch das Aufkommen neuer literarischer Erzählgenres, wie E-Mail- und Pop-Romanen, als auch durch das permanente Entstehen neuer narrativer Formate im Internet selbst deutlich. Um solche neuen Genreausprägungen und narrativen Formate im Netz sowie deren kulturelle Relevanz untersuchen zu können, ist ein sicherer Umgang mit den Begriffen, Konzepten und Werkzeugen der trans- und intermedialen Erzähltheorie ein notwendiges Muss für die literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit diesen zeitgenössischen Texten. Die Vorlesung verfolgt daher drei Ziele: Zunächst sollen neue Genres und neue narrative Formate im Internet vorgestellt werden, um auf diese Weise einen Überblick über die Medialisierungstendenzen in der Literatur ermöglichen zu können. Zweitens sollen in einem theoretischen Rahmen die Begriffe und Werkzeuge der trans- und intermedialen Erzähltheorie erläutert werden, bevor diese dann drittens an ausgewählten Beispielen im E-Mail-Roman zur Anwendung kommen.
Sabrina Kusche studierte Anglistik und Germanistik an der JLU und der University of Sheffield. Im Februar 2009 schloss sie ihr Studium ab (Magister Artium) und begann die Promotion zum E-Mail-Roman an der JLU und der Stockholm University. 
Seit März 2009 hat sie ein Stipendium im LOEWE-Schwerpunkt (Landes-Offensive zur Entwicklung wissenschaftlich ökonomischer Exzellenz) „Kulturtechniken und ihre Medialisierung“. Sie ist Doktorandin im International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), wo sie zudem eine Stelle als wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft ausübt, im International PhD Programme (IPP) “Literary and Cultural Studies” und im European PhD Network (PhDnet).
