Journey of a Lifetime: Stories of German Migration in a Transatlantic Context

Dozent/in:

Nicole K. Konopka

Angaben:

Proseminar, 2 SWS, ECTS: 6, Gaststudierendenverzeichnis, Studium Generale, Gender und Diversität, Kultur und Bildung, Erweiterungsbereich, Modulstudium

Termine:

Fr, 12:00 - 14:00, U5/01.17

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:

1. Module Allocation:

All modules including an advanced level seminar (Proseminar) for literary studies or cultural studies:

• BA Anglistik/Amerikanistik (Seminar 6 ECTS)
• BA Berufliche Bildung (Seminar 6 ECTS)
• Lehramt GS/HS/MS/RS/GY (Seminar Lit: 6 ECTS / Seminar Cult: 5 ECTS)
• BA Wipäd II (Seminar 6 ECTS)

>> Open for ‘Ergänzungsmodul’ literary studies and cultural studies!

2. Prerequisites for obtaining credit points:

• completion of the basic module (Basismodul)
• active participation (individual tasks and group work)
• term paper in English (following the Style Sheet)
• only Ergänzungsmodul: oral exam (see website for more information: https://www.uni-bamberg.de/en/american-studies/studies/ergaenzungsmodul/ )

3. FlexNow-Registration:

Please register for this class on FlexNow via the following section (Lehrstuhl): Professur für Amerikanistik. In case of problems contact flexnow.amerikanistik(at)uni-bamberg.de.

• Course (de)enrollment: September 01– October 31, 2023
• ECTS (de)registration: January 08–23, 2024

Guest auditors: please contact lecturer via e-mail.

Information on how to solve problems with your registration: https://www.uni-bamberg.de/anglistik-amerikanistik/studium/flexnow-info/

Für Studienortwechsler, Erasmusstudenten sowie Studierende, die den Leistungsnachweis zur baldigen Prüfungsanmeldung benötigen, werden im begrenzten Umfang Plätze freigehalten. Bei Überbuchung der Lehrveranstaltung fällt die Entscheidung über die Teilnahme in Rücksprache mit der Dozentin.

Inhalt:

This interdisciplinary course has been designed especially for North-American exchange students and German students, inviting them to study each other’s cultures together. Readings and classroom discussions will be both in English and German.

"The achievements and contributions of German-Americans have had a profound effect on making the United States the country it is today. Famous for their practical skills, thrift, hard work, interest in the arts, and enjoyment of good living they have left their mark indelibly on American culture and life. [M]any […] have played a special part in creating the German-American legacy." (Website of the U.S. Embassy in Germany)

Parts of this cultural legacy are literary texts published by and about German immigrants in the US and Canada. In this class we will analyze representations of transatlantic ties between Germany and North-America from the beginning of the 19th century until today. How did moving to America or Canada affect the identity of German emigrants? How did their new home transform their ideas and ideals? How, in turn, were the US and Canada affected by the large numbers of immigrants originating from German speaking countries? And how has this German mass migration shaped the image of the US and Canada? What role has literature played in this transatlantic exchange?

Our readings will include several novels, as well as short stories, poems, newspaper articles, photographs, and songs. This will be a VERY reading-intensive class, so students are asked to read several texts in advance, meaning: BEFORE class starts in the middle of October. The novels listed below will form the background for most of our discussions, but additional reading will be required during the semester.

Empfohlene Literatur:

Required Reading – BEFORE the beginning of the term:

• Johannes Gillhoff, Jürnjakob Swehn der Amerikafahrer (1917)
• Marj Gurasich, Letters to Oma: A Young German Girl's Account of Her First Year in Texas (1989)

Required Reading – DURING the term:

• Louise Erdrich, The Master Butcher’s Singing Club (2003)
• Jane Urquhart, The Stone Carvers (2001)
• Suzette Mayr, The Widows (1998)

Note: Make sure that you order your copy of the novels (e-book or printed) well in advance –preferably before the beginning of the term! It is important for participants to do the assigned reading, attend class regularly and contribute to class discussions. Your input will be welcome!

PS "These fragments I have shored against my ruins": Strange Bodies and Strange Minds in British and German Modernism

Dozent/in:

Robert Craig

Angaben:

Proseminar, 2 SWS, benoteter Schein, ECTS: 6, Studium Generale, Gender und Diversität

Termine:

Di, 16:00 - 18:00, LU19/00.08
Please note that the seminar does not begin until Week 2 of the semester!

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:

Modulzuordnung und Zugangsvoraussetzung / Part of modules resp. courses of study:
BA Anglistik/Amerikanistik:
Aufbaumodul Literaturwissenschaft: Seminar 6 ECTS;
Aufbaumodul Britische und Amerikanische Kulturwissenschaft: Seminar Kulturwissenschaft 6 ECTS; Ergänzungsmodul (ab WS 2014/15; je nach Belegung des Faches 6, 4 oder 3 ECTS)

BA Berufliche Bildung:
Aufbaumodul Literaturwissenschaft/Aufbaumodul Kulturwissenschaft: Seminar 6 ECTS

LA GS/MS/RS/BS:
Aufbaumodul Englische und Amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft: Seminar 6 ECTS

LA GY:
Aufbaumodul Englische und Amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft: Seminar 6 ECTS
Aufbaumodul Kulturwissenschaft: Seminar 5 ECTS

M.A. WiPäd:
Aufbaumodul Kulturwissenschaft (thematisches Seminar 6 ECTS)

Erasmus and other visiting students:
Seminar (6 ECTS)

Voraussetzungen für Punktevergabe / Prerequisites for obtaining credit points:
active participation
presentation (30 minutes)
term paper in English, 3.000-4.000 words

An- und Abmeldung Lehrveranstaltung / Enrollment:
September 1 until October 31, 2023

via FlexNow "Professur für Anglistische und Amerikanistische Kulturwissenschaft" (Students without access to FlexNow (Erasmus) please send an email to robert.craig(at)uni-bamberg.de or carmen.zink(at)uni-bamberg.de.)

Für Studienortwechsler, Erasmusstudenten sowie Studierende, die den Leistungsnachweis zur baldigen Prüfungsanmeldung benötigen, werden im begrenzten Umfang Plätze freigehalten. Bei Überbuchung des Seminars fällt die Entscheidung über die Teilnahme in Rücksprache mit der Dozentin/dem Dozenten.

Studierende, die an der Lehrveranstaltung als Gäste teilnehmen wollen, melden sich bitte nicht über FlexNow! sondern per Email an und erscheinen zur ersten Sitzung; erst dann kann endgültig geklärt werden, ob Gäste aufgenommen werden können.

Inhalt:

“Das Ich ist nicht Herr im eigenen Haus.” Sigmund Freud’s famous dictum first appeared in his 1917 essay, ‘Eine Schwierigkeit in der Psychoanalyse’. The quotation itself neatly encapsulated the burgeoning science of psychoanalysis, whose mission it was to investigate the unconscious, irrational and sexual dimensions to human existence. However, it also spoke to a broader and messier crisis of identity and selfhood in modernity. In the wake of Darwin and Nietzsche, it was clear that reason and rationality had lost its sovereignty over the body: human beings were both descended from the animal kingdom, and – despite a thin veneer of civilization – intimately entangled with it. Above all, the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century witnessed significant scientific and cultural challenges to the ideal (and ideology) of a stable and unified ‘self’. Literary writers were becoming more preoccupied than ever before with the irresolvable tensions between soul and body, mind and matter, and gender and sexuality.

In this seminar, we’ll be examining (re-)conceptions and portrayals of the body – in relationship to the mind – in fin-de-siècle and modernist literature, in English and German. The course will begin with an overview of the cultural and historical contexts; and against that backdrop, we’ll read a small selection of Freud’s psychoanalytic writings. Our discussions of the literary texts will then take a thematic approach. Beginning with ‘Bodies and Ghosts’, we shall read Henry James’s spine-tingling ghost story, The Turn of the Screw (1899) as a negotiation between the natural and the supernatural, the ‘mad’ and the ‘sane’. We will then consider transformed, alienated, and animalized bodies in Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (1915) and ‘Ein Hungerkünstler’ (1922). The fraught relationship between female sexuality and society will come into focus – with striking relevance to the age of ‘Me Too’ – in Arthur Schnitzler’s ground-breaking stream-of-conscious novella, Fräulein Else (1924). Finally, we turn to the great British modernist Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary historical fiction Orlando: A Biography, from 1928. Dedicated to Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West, this short novel is an ode to the queer and the ‘trans’ body in history: a playful and insightful meditation on the slipperiness of gender roles and identities in modernity.

We’ll be discussing the English-language texts in English, and the German-language texts in German.

Empfohlene Literatur:

Primary Literature:
Please buy the texts in the editions stated below (either in hard copy or via Kindle); and read at least The Turn of the Screw by the start of the third session of the semester.

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by T. J. Lustig (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008).

Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999).

Arthur Schnitzer, Fräulein Else (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2014).

Virginia Woolf, Orlando, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Michael H. Whitworth (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2015).

Secondary Literature:

Recommended secondary literature will be made available, whether on the VC or in a TB4 Semesterapparat, from the beginning of the semester onwards.

PS 'Interculturality' and 'Transculturality' in Recent & Contemporary Anglo-American Literature and Culture

Dozent/in:

Robert Craig

Angaben:

Proseminar, 2 SWS, benoteter Schein, ECTS: 6, Studium Generale, Gender und Diversität

Termine:

Mo, 9:00 - 11:00, U7/01.05
Please note that the seminar does not begin until Week 2 of the semester!

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:

Modulzuordnung und Zugangsvoraussetzung / Part of modules resp. courses of study:
BA Anglistik/Amerikanistik:
Aufbaumodul Literaturwissenschaft: Seminar 6 ECTS;
Aufbaumodul Britische und Amerikanische Kulturwissenschaft: Seminar Kulturwissenschaft 6 ECTS; Ergänzungsmodul (ab WS 2014/15; je nach Belegung des Faches 6, 4 oder 3 ECTS)

BA Berufliche Bildung:
Aufbaumodul Literaturwissenschaft/Aufbaumodul Kulturwissenschaft: Seminar 6 ECTS

LA GS/MS/RS/BS:
Aufbaumodul Englische und Amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft: Seminar 6 ECTS

LA GY:
Aufbaumodul Englische und Amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft: Seminar 6 ECTS
Aufbaumodul Kulturwissenschaft: Seminar 5 ECTS

M.A. WiPäd:
Aufbaumodul Kulturwissenschaft (thematisches Seminar 6 ECTS)

Erasmus and other visiting students:
Seminar (6 ECTS)

Voraussetzungen für Punktevergabe / Prerequisites for obtaining credit points:
active participation
presentation (30 minutes)
term paper in English, 3.000-4.000 words

An- und Abmeldung Lehrveranstaltung / Enrollment:
September 1 until October 31, 2023

via FlexNow "Professur für Anglistische und Amerikanistische Kulturwissenschaft" (Students without access to FlexNow (Erasmus) please send an email to robert.craig(at)uni-bamberg.de or carmen.zink(at)uni-bamberg.de.)

Für Studienortwechsler, Erasmusstudenten sowie Studierende, die den Leistungsnachweis zur baldigen Prüfungsanmeldung benötigen, werden im begrenzten Umfang Plätze freigehalten. Bei Überbuchung des Seminars fällt die Entscheidung über die Teilnahme in Rücksprache mit der Dozentin/dem Dozenten.

Studierende, die an der Lehrveranstaltung als Gäste teilnehmen wollen, melden sich bitte nicht über FlexNow! sondern per Email an und erscheinen zur ersten Sitzung; erst dann kann endgültig geklärt werden, ob Gäste aufgenommen werden können.

Inhalt:

“My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories.” This is how the celebrated British writer, Hanif Kureishi, kicks open his picaresque novel of identities lost and re-forged, The Buddha of Suburbia: a state-of-the-nation snapshot of 1970s Britain, but also a deeply irreverent – often uproarious – portrait of the myriad challenges of location and adaptation faced by first- and second-generation migrants in a majority white culture and society that was often actively hostile towards them.

The Buddha of Suburbia was released to immediate acclaim in 1990, at the start of a decade which saw significant positive changes both in public attitudes towards ethnic and cultural minorities, and in the conceptual vocabularies deployed to think and write about multiculturalism, interculturality, and transculturality. After an overview of the emergence of multicultural Britain in the postwar period, we will turn to a survey of some of these theories, including Wolfgang Welsch’s notion of ‘transculturality’, Stewart Hall’s and Homi K. Bhabha’s related conceptions of ‘hybridity’, and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s controversial yet enduringly influential theory of intersectionality. We’ll be using this eclectic theoretical ‘prism’ to discuss a small selection of seminal literary texts which have grappled with both the fraught and fruitful coexistence of cultural identities within recent and contemporary British and US-American societies. After discussing Kureishi’s masterpiece, we will turn our attention to the much-celebrated literary debut, The Namesake (2003), by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri. We will finish the course by travelling with Bernadine Evaristo on her extraordinary fictional journey through the lives of sixteen women of colour in contemporary Britain, the Booker Prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other (2019).

Empfohlene Literatur:

Primärliteratur:

Please buy and read all the novels in the exact editions stated here. If you buy Kindle versions, or the like, you need to make sure that they include the exact (corresponding) page numbers.

Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (London: Penguin, 2020).

Stuart Hall, ‘Culture, Community, Nation’ (1993), and ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ (1990).

Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber & Faber, 1999).

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (New York: HarperPerennial, 2004).

Wolfgang Welsch, ‘Transculturality: The Changing Form of Cultures Today’, Filozofski vestnik, Letnik/Vol. XXII.2 (2001), 59-86.

Essays by Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and Wolfgang Welsch will be made available on the VC.

PS 'Wild' Highlanders and 'Civilised' Lowlanders - Sir Walter Scott's Romantic Novels from a Cultural Studies Perspective

Dozent/in:

Mario Ebest

Angaben:

Proseminar, 2 SWS, benoteter Schein, ECTS: 6

Termine:

Einzeltermin am 19.1.2024, 10:00 - 17:00, U5/00.24
Einzeltermin am 26.1.2024, Einzeltermin am 2.2.2024, Einzeltermin am 9.2.2024, 10:00 - 17:00, MG1/02.05
Die Veranstaltung findet als Blockseminar statt.

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:

Modulzuordnung und Zugangsvoraussetzung / Part of modules resp. courses of study:
BA Anglistik/Amerikanistik:
Aufbaumodul Literaturwissenschaft: Seminar 6 ECTS;
Aufbaumodul Britische und Amerikanische Kulturwissenschaft: Seminar Kulturwissenschaft 6 ECTS; Ergänzungsmodul (ab WS 2014/15; je nach Belegung des Faches 6, 4 oder 3 ECTS)

BA Berufliche Bildung:
Aufbaumodul Literaturwissenschaft/Aufbaumodul Kulturwissenschaft: Seminar 6 ECTS

LA GS/MS/RS/BS:
Aufbaumodul Englische und Amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft: Seminar 6 ECTS

LA GY:
Aufbaumodul Englische und Amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft: Seminar 6 ECTS
Aufbaumodul Kulturwissenschaft: Seminar 5 ECTS

M.A. WiPäd:
Aufbaumodul Kulturwissenschaft (thematisches Seminar 6 ECTS)

Erasmus and other visiting students:
Seminar (6 ECTS)

Voraussetzungen für Punktevergabe / Prerequisites for obtaining credit points:
active participation
presentation (30 minutes)
term paper in English, 3.000-4.000 words

An- und Abmeldung Lehrveranstaltung / Enrollment:
September 1 until October 31, 2023

via FlexNow "Professur für Anglistische und Amerikanistische Kulturwissenschaft" (Students without access to FlexNow (Erasmus) please send an email to pascal.fischer(at)uni-bamberg.de or carmen.zink(at)uni-bamberg.de.)

Für Studienortwechsler, Erasmusstudenten sowie Studierende, die den Leistungsnachweis zur baldigen Prüfungsanmeldung benötigen, werden im begrenzten Umfang Plätze freigehalten. Bei Überbuchung des Seminars fällt die Entscheidung über die Teilnahme in Rücksprache mit der Dozentin/dem Dozenten.

Studierende, die an der Lehrveranstaltung als Gäste teilnehmen wollen, melden sich bitte nicht über FlexNow! sondern per Email an und erscheinen zur ersten Sitzung; erst dann kann endgültig geklärt werden, ob Gäste aufgenommen werden können.

Inhalt:

Sir Walter Scott is often seen as a major contributor to (or perhaps the founding father of) the literary genre of the modern historical novel. While those of his characters who stem from the lower classes often seem very vivid and round, his more aristocratic figures appear to be rather flat and stiff. In addition, many of his works are set in a Scotland divided between 'underdeveloped' Highlands and 'civilised' Lowlands (see Rob Roy, Old Mortality or Waverley). His novel Quentin Durward has a different geographical setting but integrates a relevant Scottish context. In this seminar, we will be looking into these (and other) characteristics of his novels from the perspective of Cultural Studies, paying special attention to phenomena such as Caledonian Antisyzygy, Highlandism and Jacobitism. Note: Before our seminar starts, please make sure that you have read at least two out of the four novels mentioned above.

PS American Food Cultures

Dozent/in:

Simone Linz

Angaben:

Proseminar, 2 SWS, benoteter Schein, ECTS: 6

Termine:

Einzeltermin am 17.10.2023, 19:00 - 21:00, Online-Meeting
Einzeltermin am 4.11.2023, Einzeltermin am 16.12.2023, Einzeltermin am 13.1.2024, Einzeltermin am 3.2.2024, 10:30 - 17:30, U5/02.17
Die Lehrveranstaltung findet als Blockseminar statt. Die Vorbesprechung/Einführungsveranstaltung am 17. Oktober 2023 wird online abgehalten.

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:

Modulzuordnung und Zugangsvoraussetzung / Part of modules resp. courses of study:
BA Anglistik/Amerikanistik:
Aufbaumodul Britische und Amerikanische Kulturwissenschaft: Seminar Kulturwissenschaft 6 ECTS;
Ergänzungsmodul (ab WS 2014/15; je nach Belegung des Faches 6, 4 oder 3 ECTS)

LA GY:
Aufbaumodul Kulturwissenschaft: Seminar 5 ECTS

M.A. WiPäd:
Aufbaumodul Kulturwissenschaft (thematisches Seminar 6 ECTS)

Erasmus and other visiting students:
Seminar (6 ECTS)

Voraussetzungen für Punktevergabe / Prerequisites for obtaining credit points:
active participation
presentation (30 minutes)
term paper in English, 3.000-4.000 words

An- und Abmeldung Lehrveranstaltung / Enrollment:
September 1 until October 31, 2023

via FlexNow "Professur für Anglistische und Amerikanistische Kulturwissenschaft" (Students without access to FlexNow (Erasmus) please send an email to pascal.fischer(at)uni-bamberg.de or carmen.zink(at)uni-bamberg.de.)

Für Studienortwechsler, Erasmusstudenten sowie Studierende, die den Leistungsnachweis zur baldigen Prüfungsanmeldung benötigen, werden im begrenzten Umfang Plätze freigehalten. Bei Überbuchung des Seminars fällt die Entscheidung über die Teilnahme in Rücksprache mit der Dozentin/dem Dozenten.

Studierende, die an der Lehrveranstaltung als Gäste teilnehmen wollen, melden sich bitte nicht über FlexNow! sondern per Email an und erscheinen zur ersten Sitzung; erst dann kann endgültig geklärt werden, ob Gäste aufgenommen werden können.

Inhalt:

If you want to spark a discussion, simply ask the question, "What is American food culture?" Answers range from the assertion that the United States has no food culture to the claim that a culinary tradition such as barbecue is a uniquely American cultural product that conveys a multiethnic history and a local and regional identity. Others claim that New England culinary traditions form the culinary roots of American cuisine. Still others point to McDonalds, Burger King, and similar fast-food establishments known for selling burgers and fries as the epitome of American taste, presentation, and capitalist expansionism. Someone might also argue that the United States is a melting pot of cuisines brought by immigrants old and new. In this seminar, we will consider how we might define American food and how American food defines Americans. We will also talk about culinary traditions (like 4th of July barbecues, Thanksgiving dinners, and Christmas Day meals), approach the topic literarily, and take a closer look at concepts such as food and gender or food and power.

Empfohlene Literatur:

Elizabeth Acevedo, With the Fire on High (2019)

Please acquire a copy of this novel before the semester starts! Further secondary literature will be made available via the VC.