American Studies

This interdisciplinary course explores the place of the supernatural in American history and culture from the beginnings of English settlement in North America through the current era. It explores the ways in which the “original sins” of American history, such as the enslavement of African-Americans and the dispossession of Native Americans, have been understood through the figures of ghosts, monsters, and spirits, and how the recurrence of such figures over centuries reflects the novelist William Faulkner’s claim that “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.” 

This course examines the scope and impact of American media. It looks at the relationship between US media industries and the stories people consume. It surveys multiple forms and formats, including cinema, television, radio, podcasts, literature, and social media. Students will be encouraged to examine their own media habits and practices, as well as understand how the US projects an image of itself through its media industries.

This lecture series seeks to analyze North America via the analytical lens of movement/movements. Whether one follows cable news coverage on Latin American refugees, learns about supply chain disruptions due to COVID-lockdowns in newspapers, or follow BLM protests on social media accounts: on a daily basis people are witnessing various forms of “movement.” These range from people on the move, items being shipped to humans joining forces in order to pursue common goals. Admittedly, these are not recent phenomena. Migration, international trade, and political advocacy by social movements have been with us – and shaped our societies – for centuries. Yet, looking at those seemingly distinct events and phenomena from a multidisciplinary angle provides fruitful new insights. The lectures hence address the issue of “movement” from various theoretical and disciplinary angles. Ranging from historical accounts of the labor movement to podcasts as an “audiomovement,” this series intends to make sense of the multi-faceted nature of movement/movements.

This seminar first develops a brief overview of the form and theory of the essay as a literary genre. Primarily, however, the course reads and analyzes essays North American women writers who, in particular from the 1960s onwards, appropriated and henceforth shaped the form and tradition of the essay. To understand the profound aesthetic and social influence and the cultural work of women authors after World War II, the course devotes some time to canonical authors such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. Not least because of the very cultural authority of these writers and their early and pivotal periods of production in the era of counterculture and the women's movement in the United States, the Cold War and accelerating globalization, the course explores how these - and other - women essayists wrote about the Other, about the world. Frequently, in the essay itself and in research on it, the "I," the introspection of the writer, takes center stage. While this is highly relevant to an understanding of the genre, the course wants to venture a shift of perspective and ask: What forms of observation and description, what ethics of regarding the Other (or lack thereof) can be found in these texts? What imagery, cultural valences, and political implications can be distilled from the essays? In addition, the course pays special attention to works by African American women writers such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and June Jordan. African American writers in particular used the essay as a medium of political self-authorization, social critique, and literary renegotiation of cultural knowledge and female and minority subjectivity. Which distinct aesthetics of factual writing did they develop, how did they inscribe themselves in canonical essay traditions, yet how did they also perform productive fractures and critiques of these and develop alternative forms of essayistic thinking and writing?