Teaching
VL: Survey of Literature and Culture: New English Literatures
Postcolonial Studies is an interdisciplinary field of research that combines and connects research questions from history, sociology, anthropology and ethnology, among others. While ‘post-colonial’ (with a hyphen) denotes a period that chronologically begins ‘after’ colonialism and thus implies that history unfolds in clearly distinguishable phases from pre- to post-colonial, the term ‘postcolonial’ (without a hyphen), as also used by today’s Postcolonial Studies, sets a broader framework. Postcolonial Studies assumes the simultaneity of colonialism and postcolonialism; consequently, it focuses on the experiences of colonialism and its past and present effects. This is also the argument by Elizabeth Bronfen, Benjamin Marius and Therese Steffen: Postcolonialism is expanded into a comprehensive concept of culture as a “conflict […] between representations of the world, the subject, history, etc.” It is precisely this “conflict” that leads to a critique of models of contemporary thought, including, for example, models of identity, the nation or the concept of a global order. Binarisms, with which world orders are both described and constructed (such as self/other, identity/alterity, black/white, Occident/Orient, nature/culture, etc.) are criticized; in addition, new figures of thought are often developed, some of which are accompanied by their own terms – such as ‘hybridity’, ‘third space’ or ‘diaspora’. In this lecture, we will read key texts of Postcolonial Studies (Edward Said: Orientalism; Homi Bhabha: The Location of Culture; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Can the Subaltern Speak; Stuart Hall: Familiar Stranger) that have changed perspectives in Literary Studies; we will also look at selected texts from New English Literatures and theories of postcolonial writing. This lecture will continue the series of surveys in literary and cultural history. It is explicitly designed to prepare students for the state exam.
OS: Literatur- und Kulturtheorie
Das Oberseminar richtet sich an fortgeschrittene Studierende in der Examensphase, Doktoranden und Postdoktoranden aus dem Bereich Anglistische Kultur- und Literaturwissenschaft. Es bietet allen Teilnehmenden ein Forum für die Präsentation, Diskussion und Weiterentwicklung von Qualifikations- und Forschungsprojekten. Darüber hinaus dient es der kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit aktuellen Forschungsthemen und -texten, die in die gemeinsame Vorbereitung des “Researcher in Residence”-Formats einmünden.
HS: Salman Rushdie
“I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time.” Salman Rushdie begins his novel Midnight’s Children (1981) with a fairytale-like tone. The temporal indeterminacy of the first sentence is immediately juxtaposed with a concrete and historically significant date that marks a double event: At midnight on August 15, 1947, a child and a nation were born. The child, the first-person narrator Saleem Sinai, came into the world and the former British Crown Colony of India gained its independence. From this point on, the two events are intertwined in the narrative: From Sinai’s perspective, India’s past and present unfolds, combining biographical and historical developments that span a period from the late colonial era to the 1980s, touching on pivotal events such as the Amritsar Massacre, Gandhi’s non-violent resistance movement, and the excesses of the India-Pakistan conflict in the Kashmir Wars. The collective hopes and disappointments associated with the young nation’s independence find an echo in a family chronicle; the narrator’s imagination and memory, which are full of gaps but also a wealth of stories, successively create a revisionist (colonial) history of the Indian subcontinent. “India,” as Jawaharlal Nehru once wrote, “is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive.” This description of India can also be applied in many ways to Rushdie’s novel, in which myth and reality, dream and vision overlap in the narrative mode of magical realism. In other words, narrative techniques are used that we also find in the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Ben Okri and Günter Grass, among others. In this seminar, we will explore Rushdie’s nuanced, multifaceted text, which contains numerous references to Sanskrit epics, tales from the Thousand and One Nights, Jonathan Swift’s satires, Jane Austen’s “portraits of brilliant women,” Charles Dickens’ “great, rotting, Bombay-like city,” as well as the metaliterary forms of international postmodernism. Rushdie is still considered one of the main representatives of postcolonial literature today. His Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children offers numerous opportunities to deepen our knowledge of Postcolonial Studies and Anglo-Indian literature. We will also read short stories from East, West and a selection of essayistic texts (including Imaginary Homelands and Knife), in which Rushdie raises fundamental questions about postcolonial/global authorship.