Writing in the early 2000s, the British cultural critic Mark Fisher counts himself among a “lost generation […] who simply did not find the ‘reality’ imposed by the conquering forces of neoliberalism liveable.” In Fisher’s writing, the persistent traces of the 1980s haunt us in the shape of lost futures, resulting in the “strange simultaneity” of a timeless, spectral present (14).
In this class, we will examine how British literature from the 1980s is already full of ghosts, spectres, and pasts that destabilise any secure sense of present or future. In the first section, we will read the novel Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd (1985) as well as parts of the graphic novel From Hell by Eddie Campbell and Alan Moore (1989-1998). We will then move on to Jeanette Winterson’s novel Sexing the Cherry (1989), analysing the feminist potential of (re)turning to nonlinear histories. In the final section of the class, we will examine how selected Black British poetry and the film Twilight City (1989) conjure the violent spectre of the British Empire as always already all-too-present.
The class will have a distinct focus on improving close reading skills and developing methods to approach theory productively. Along with Fisher’s and Jacques Derrida’s concepts of hauntology, we will build a theoretical toolkit that will include work on historiographic metafiction and the spatial turn. Additionally, we will draw on trauma theory, queer temporality and phenomenology, as well as Afrofuturist and Afropessimist writing.
Please obtain copies of Hawksmoor and Sexing the Cherry. All other material will be provided in class.
(quotations from: Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. 2014. Zero Books, 2022.)
Die Veranstaltung wurde 1 mal im Vorlesungsverzeichnis SoSe 2025 gefunden:
