Seminar (2 SWS; 4 LP)
Lektürekurs (1 SWS; 4 LP)
This course will enquire into different methodologies of reading and what has been construed as one of the major clashes in literary criticism in the past 30 years regarding formalist reading and supposedly more political forms of interpretation in the vein of postcolonial and gender studies. Thus, the seminar will focus on just three novels and provide an in-depth discussion of how to approach these texts by employing different literary methodologies, such as close reading, contrapuntal reading and surface reading, and discuss their respective “ethical” merits. We will begin by revisiting central textual gaps, such as the supposed “awful” silence on slavery in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in the wake of Edward Said’s famous reading of the novel as well as the highly gendered debate on the textual elision of Lucy’s rape in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace to discuss the ethics of representing violence in the context of colonial and postcolonial entanglements. We will also discuss Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the ensuing scandal on “blasphemy” versus “freedom of speech” to try to understand how to “read” literary texts that are politically over-determined.
Die Veranstaltung wurde 3 mal im Vorlesungsverzeichnis SoSe 2025 gefunden:
