Seminar: American Modernist Short Stories - Vertiefungsmodul - Details

Seminar: American Modernist Short Stories - Vertiefungsmodul - Details

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Veranstaltungsname Seminar: American Modernist Short Stories - Vertiefungsmodul
Veranstaltungsnummer ANG.04630.02
Semester WiSe 2024/25
Aktuelle Anzahl der Teilnehmenden 17
erwartete Teilnehmendenanzahl 25
Heimat-Einrichtung Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Veranstaltungstyp Seminar in der Kategorie Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
Erster Termin Dienstag, 08.10.2024 14:15 - 15:45, Ort: Seminarraum 19 (Raum1.40) [LuWu 2]
Lehrsprache(n) Deutsch
Studiengänge (für) ANG.04630.02 für Current Developments in the American Short Story
SWS 2

Modulzuordnungen

Kommentar/Beschreibung

In the highly influential study on modern culture, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982), Marshall Berman defines modernity as the experience of incessant metamorphosis: “To be modern,” he states, “is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air” (345). Berman draws a dialectical relationship between the unfolding modernization (“progress”) of a primarily urban environment and the development of modernist art and thought. He claims that the greatest accomplishment of modernist artists was to make the vital interplay between opposing values such as permanence and perpetual change visible in their experimental work.
In this course, we will approach the Modernist era through the lens of American short stories. Our starting point for the first two sessions will be Tim Armstrong’s classic study Modernism: A Cultural History (2005), which provides an excellent overview of cultural developments in ‘modern’ America (and Europe), before we will explore a variety of authors and their short stories in relation to significant theoretical concepts: e.g., Sherwood Anderson (the short story cycle), Ernest Hemingway (initiation story, trauma, and concepts of time) Zora Neale Hurston (Critical Race Theory, American Dream), William Faulkner (the ‘global’ American South), and Flannery O’Connor (disability studies; divine grace and violence in a secular world). Our journey into American modernist fiction will provide us with interesting insights into important works of the short story genre and will address many relevant issues and theoretical concepts.

This course is “staatsexamensrelevant”.

The course material will be made available on the ILIAS platform.