Lecture (LEC)

• Topic:

GER-G 503¿Introduction to Theories and Methodologies in the Study of German Literature and Culture. Spring 2025 (# 30329) Course Description: Beginning with a close reading of Anna Seghers¿ stark, amazing Aufstand der Fischer, we will start the semester with ¿common sense¿ features of literary analysis¿ambiguity, metaphor, elegy, mood, trope, tense, aspect, connotation and denotation, figuration, focalization, humor, tragedy. From there we¿ll move to categories less immanent in a reading: canon, genre, medium. And from there into schools of critical thought: semiotics, deconstruction, hermeneutics, structuralism, reader-response theory, media theory, cultural studies, and critical race and gender theory. Among our considerations will be the relationship between aesthetics and politics, text and context, and word and world. With that overview of approaches in place, the second part of the course will turn to the question of what is current in the methodologies of literary studies today. For this part of the course, each participant will be tasked with identifying an academic article published in an English- or German-language journal in the last 5 years (give or take a year) that either stands out as powerful and provocative or that has influenced discussions in the field more broadly (we will also work together in class on identifying these texts). By the conclusion of the course, we will have oriented ourselves in both the basic methodologies and the current trends in our field, achieving a firm intellectual grounding for academic professionalization in the humanities (as well as for attractive and provocative cultural readings). As for workload, besides our weekly readings (not onerous), we will spread out three 4-5 page essays over the course of the semester, developing our methodological inquiries as well as applying them to cultural objects and contexts.