Semesterprogramm 2016
(Post-)Doktorand_innen-Ringvorlesung des GCSC
"How to do Literary and Cultural Studies: Methods of Analysis"
SoSe 2016
Leitung: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hallet und Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning
Mi 12-14 Uhr, A3
It is a truth universally acknowledged that academic insights are based on methodologically regulated practices. However, students of literary and cultural studies are often unaware of the theoretical frameworks and analytical methods at their disposal. Therefore, this GCSC lecture series is devoted to questions of methodology and appropriate methodological choices. The main objective of the lecture series is to familiarize students with disciplinary and interdisciplinary methodological theories, approaches and reflections, and to break down methods of literary and cultural analysis step by step, so that participants are equipped with a ‘toolbox’ for analysing literary and cultural artefacts – be it a novel, a film, a picture, or any other object of study. Every lecture is given by a different doctoral, postdoctoral or senior scholar who will explain a method of studying and analysing literary and/or cultural artefacts with the help of concrete examples, such as case studies drawn from their own research.
The goal of this lecture series is to introduce students to a range of methods that are available in literary and cultural studies, to create an awareness of how methods enable and structure research and to provide students with methodologies in various areas of interest or research, particularly in connection with their own specialisations or term and exam papers. Ideally, students should be able to create research questions of their own and make appropriate methodological choices when working in their own field of interest.
13.04. Einführung (Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning)
20.04. Race and Gender in Film Noir: Methods for Analysing 'Whiteness' in Worlds of Darkness
'Film noir' – the name of the genre itself already suggests the bleakness of the worlds in movies such as Murder, My Sweet (1944), The Killers (1946) or Night and the City (1950). The noir universe is peopled by femme fatales and weary/wary men caught up in a world of corruption. Critics have paid much attention to the role that gender and race play in these dark visions of life. Taking my cue from these research debates, I will provide an introduction to methods for analysing filmic representations of gender and race by drawing on critical whiteness studies. I will proceed in two steps. First, I will discuss the ideological construction of ‘whiteness’ in Western cultures, thereby paying special attention to gender differences. This part of the lecture includes a sketch of how critical whiteness studies emerged from the field of critical race theory and how its research agenda informs contemporary literary and cultural studies. Participants will be familiarized with key concepts and theories from the field of critical whiteness studies. Second, I will then discuss methods for analysing visual representations of whiteness (e.g. lighting techniques in film) and demonstrate how these may be used for developing nuanced interpretations of popular film noirs, such as Double Indemnity (1944) and The Letter (1940).
Recommended reading:
Eric Lott, "The Whiteness of Film Noir", in: Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. by Mike Hill. New York/London: New York UP, pp. 81-101.
Elizabeth Cowie, "Film Noir and Women", in: Shades of Noir: A Reader, ed. by Joan Copjec. London/New York: Verso, pp. 121-166.
Richard Dyer, White, London/New York: Routledge, 1997.
E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London: BFI, 1978.
Dr. Stella Butter is Acting Professor for English Studies at the University of Koblenz-Landau. Previously, she worked as the Teaching Centre Coordinator at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture. Her current research project is concerned with the politics of home in contemporary literature and film. She is author of Literatur als Medium kultureller Selbstreflexion (2007) and Kontingenz und Literatur im Prozess der Modernisierung (2013).
27.04. What’s in a Context? How Do We Contextualize Texts?
The common practice of reading literary texts often implies the exclusion of the cultural dimension of the text. The latter is more or less treated as an extra-textual phenomenon (‘context’) and reduced to factual information provided in annotations. This lecture argues that the ‘context’ is in the text and that any close reading of a text requires strategies of reading the context in the text. With reference to cultural-historicist, new historicist, interdiscursive, intertextual and intermedial approaches it is therefore suggested that a literary text can only be contextualized by textualizing the context. While co-reading other texts in the literary text ('wide reading'), the reader will be able to understand and interpret the literary text ('close reading') by discovering parallels and correspondences, allusions and recurrences, discursive, ideational and themartic traces as well as references to the same cultural discourses, issues or a situation at large. Using literary examples, the lecture will present models and methods of interrelating the literary and the ‘cultural text’.
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hallet is Professor of Teaching English as a Foreign Language and member of the Executive Board of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture and Head of its Teaching Centre at Justus Liebig University Giessen. In foreign language teaching his research and publications, including several monographs, comprise study of culture-based theories of teaching literature and culture, cognition and literature, and literary competence. In literary studies he has published on contemporary novels (including a monograph on Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, 2008) and narratology, the spatial turn in literary studies, the contextualization of literary texts, intermedial methodology and the multimodal novel. Homepage: http://www.uni-giessen.de/cms/hallet
4.05. Reading with Context: An Introduction to Historicism
This lecture will introduce the basic principles of historicist criticism, as well as outlining some of the key differences between traditional and ‘new’ historicism. In short, historicism denotes the practice of using historical contexts to elucidate literary texts. The lecture will address the theory underlying this method, by asking how we identify pertinent sources and use them to construct an understanding of the past. It will be structured around a close reading of one of William Wordsworth’s most famous poems, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798”. As many critics have noted, the date buried in the long version of this title is significant: July 13 is the eve of Bastille Day, on which the French Revolutionaries had stormed the Bastille just nine years before Wordsworth wrote. Having briefly outlined the Revolutionary context of the poem, including Wordsworth’s own experiences in France, the lecture will proceed to consider various historicist readings of “Tintern Abbey”.
Historicist critics have debated whether Wordsworth’s poem ignores the war, famine, and injustice which was unfolding in 1798, or whether the strict censorship imposed by the British government forced him to approach these topics indirectly. This lecture will engage with these various critical interpretations, by adding layer upon layer of historical depth to its reading of “Tintern Abbey”. There will also be the chance to examine contemporary images of the landscape around the real Abbey. Thus, we will consider to what extent historicist approaches can be applied to other media, e.g. images and films. Having demonstrated the principles of historicist criticism in action, the lecture will break down the method in detail, showing how students can apply it to their own work and make better us
of the explanatory notes in critical editions. At the end, there will be the opportunity to open up a wider discussion about the relationship between literature and history, as well as the potential benefits and risks of reading literary texts as windows on past ages.
Dr. Tom Clucas is a Research Team Postdoc at the GCSC, working on the intersection between character and economics in nineteenth-century literature. Previously, he completed his D.Phil. in English Literature at the University of Oxford, with a thesis entitled ‘Romantic Reclusion in the Works of Cowper and Wordsworth’.e
11.05. Evaluation as a Method in Classroom-Based Research
The term “evaluation” refers to different processes of generating feedback in research and learning contexts. Evaluations can be used as means of obtaining qualitative and quantitative data for classroom-based research or reception analysis, as well as to reflect upon one’s own position as a researcher when doing field research.
Taking the example of field research in classroom contexts, we will discuss the implications, usage and methods of evaluation. After a reflexion on the reasons, characteristics, challenges and benefits of evaluation in the study of culture, an overview of strategies for designing questionnaires for classroom-based research will round out the session.
Finally, the lecture will conclude with short exemplary “problem cases” of evaluation that the students can discuss in groups. The lecturers will then present their two problem-solving approaches, which do not necessarily correspond. This enables a critical reflexion on aspects like objectivity, reliability and validity, and shows that even among researchers in the field positions can differ and contrast.
Nevena Stamenković holds a B.A. and a M.A. degree in English and Spanish Philology as well as Pedagogy from the Freie Universität Berlin. Before she was awarded a PhD scholarship at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), she had worked as a high school teacher for two years. In her dissertation, she examines how multilingual Latin American literature can be used in the foreign language classroom. Her research interests focus on multilingualism and transcultural learning with specific emphasis on teaching literature.
Katja Wehde studied English, German and Education at the University of Dresden as well as Cultural Studies during a DAAD-funded stay at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, India. After her B.A., she completed a Master’s degree in Transcultural Studies at the University of Heidelberg. In 2014, Katja Wehde has been awarded a doctoral scholarship from the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen, where she is currently working on her doctoral project entitled "Translating Transcultural Objects: Narratives of Otherness in Educational Measures of Ethnographic Museums in Germany and Great Britain."
18.05. Close Reading with Bourdieu: How to Combine Narratological Methods and Relational Sociology
When sociological theories and concepts are applied to literary criticism, literature usually serves as an object of sociological investigation that ultimately targets the facts of social life. In this lecture, I want to introduce methods of narrative analysis that point in the overall opposite direction. Instead of asking “how does literature help us understand social reality?” the question that spawns the methods I will propose here is “how do sociological ideas help us read and understand narrative?” For this purpose, I will adduce the concepts of relational sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in particular his notions of habitus and symbolic violence. I will demonstrate how to combine these concepts with, and make them useful for, a narratological analysis of novels by Henry James and Toni Morrison.
One of the main challenges for this form of literary criticism that I wish to address lies in finding and/or developing methods of analysis that allow us to reveal and decipher the connotation framework of a text or a particular passage without misusing that text as a mere expedient for a predetermined line of argument that takes as a fact what it set out to investigate in the first place. Narratological methods, and specifically strategies of close reading, seem ideally suited to help us avoid stepping in the trap of such foregone conclusions, since few other disciplines in literary criticism are as strongly characterized by a constant self-conscious questioning of their own methodologies as narratology.
This lecture presents exemplary analyses of rather short passages from two novels. The narrative technique I want to focus on is that of free indirect style, or “narrated monologue,” as Dorrit Cohn termed it. I will demonstrate how free indirect style occupies a hybrid position between character perspective and the narrator’s view, and how this in-between form makes it particularly useful to reveal mechanisms of violence and domination that work beyond the awareness of the characters involved. In order to tease out the concealed structures of oppression hidden within the texts, as well as the social realities they represent, we will see how it may help to zoom in on the micro level of narrative.
Wibke Schniedermann is Teaching Centre Coordinator at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and is currently working on her postdoctoral research project on representations of homelessness in American culture. She received her PhD from Goethe University Frankfurt in 2015 and has been working in a research project on poverty in contemporary American culture at Freiburg University between 2012 and 2015. She has organized two conferences on narratives of inequality in 2013 and social class in film and television in 2014. She has co-edited (with Sieglinde Lemke) a volume on class divisions in serial television (forthcoming with Palgrave in 2016) and has published on the American Western, Henry James, and relational sociology in literary criticism. Her PhD thesis on symbolic domination in Henry James’s novels is being prepared for publication in 2016.
25.05. Are Literary Scholars Bound to Literature? Methodological Approaches to an Analysis of the British Monarchy on TV
This lecture will trace the methodological considerations for a qualitative analysis of media representations by drawing on the special case of factual depictions of the British monarchy. We will tackle the question of if and why methods from literary studies are not limited to fictional stories, but are also applicable to non-fictional representations like the TV coverage of (media) events. Students will get to know central theories concerning the analysis of factual ‘stories’ presented in audio-visual sources. Furthermore, categories which are useful in observing and analysing this special material that transcends the traditional notion of a text will be delineated. Having acquired this methodological knowledge, we will look into a case study regarding the recent British monarchy – an institution upholding a symbiotic relationship with media in order to tell a long-term story and continually producing new narratives.
Christina Jordan studied British literatures and cultures, children’s literature as well as cultural anthropology at Goethe University Frankfurt. She currently holds a position as research assistant at the department of English literatures and cultures and is a member of The International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and the International PhD Programme (IPP). Her dissertation project is concerned with the active production of future memories in the realm of Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden and Diamond Crown Jubilee.
1.06. “William weds Kate in front of the camera”: How to approach a media event from a narratological perspective
This lecture will take the example of Prince William and Catherine Middleton’s royal wedding as a starting point to discuss how to analyse news media. The aim is to delineate the selection process of narrowing down the source material available. The methodological perspective applied will focus on the media event from a narratological standpoint. Therefore, the lecture will address how news media create, construct, and constitute events. In this way, the categories of “event” and “eventfulness”, lying at the centre of stories as well as of news value theory, will be scrutinised.
An exemplary analysis will conclude the lecture in order to demonstrate how to transfer the approach into practice. To this end, short extracts of both newspaper articles and the TV coverage of William and Catherine’s royal wedding will be shown and analysed by applying the presented methodological tools.
Imke Polland received her M.A. in “Studies in European Culture” from the University of Konstanz. She holds a PhD scholarship at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and the International PhD Programme Literary and Cultural Studies (IPP) at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. In her dissertation, she focuses on the role of the heirs to the throne for the future of the British monarchy as discussed in the media representations of the royal weddings 2005 and 2011.
8.06. (Re-)Positioning the Scholar: Situatedness and Practices of Reading
My current research on subjectivity, knowledge, and freedom in American modern dance, requires me to triangulate a variety of methods. I perform close readings of autobiographies, essays, and choreographies, and use literary and cultural theory to support my readings and to develop larger arguments. In addition, because I investigate corporeal ways of knowing and understanding, it is necessary for me to study dance techniques not only intellectually but also through my own body; I conducted participatory research and learned a particular dance technique myself. My experience necessarily shapes my ways of thinking—I am involved not only intellectually but also affectively—and I need to reflect on my involvement.
When we read literary texts, we also have to be aware of our own position and situation, which is why I want to problematize the notions of objectivity and subjectivity in my lecture. Tracing the concept of “situated knowledge” (Haraway) in feminist theory and epistemology and delineating the practice of autoethnography in anthropology, I will to discuss how we may use our “gut feeling” I our reading practices in order to find and to develop analytical arguments.
Dr. Johanna Heil is Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin (postdoc) at the American Studies division of the Department of English and American Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg. She wrote her dissertation on concepts of knowing in Richard Powers’s fiction and is now working on her second book project, tentatively titled “Fluid Materialities: The Construction of Subjectivity and Freedom in American Modern Dance.” She was a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the summers of 2010 and 2012. From June 2015 through March 2016, she conducted participatory research at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance in New York City and was a visiting scholar at The New School.
15.6. Large Categories as Resources: The Example of Human Dignity in American Literature
In academic argument, researchers frequently use very general and conventionalized terms (e.g. “discourse,” “institution”, “freedom”…) that can be interpreted in a variety of ways, up to the point of substantiating completely contradictory perspectives. Categories like these may indeed encompass so many potential definitions that they are often only used for superficial signposting. They can, however, be made useful as starting points for developing genuinely original perspectives on a given topic. This lecture focuses on methods that help students of literary and cultural studies approach large categories as resources, using the example of human dignity in American literature.
Dr. Sonja Schillings is a postdoctoral researcher in American Studies. She has worked as a researcher and assistant graduate studies executive with the GCSC (JLU Giessen) since 2014. Her book Enemies of All Humankind: On the Narrative Construction of Legitimate Violence (Dartmouth College Press) is forthcoming in late 2016. She is currently working on a project on human dignity in the U.S. American short story of the 1940s and 50s.
22.6. Reading Masculinities: Film Analysis in Gender Studies
What insights into U.S. culture can be gained when focusing on notions of gender within the field of American cultural studies? How do we “read” audio-visual objects? In what way are form and content of a film intertwined in the representation and negotiation of masculinities?
In lieu of an answer, this talk analyzes Delmer Daves’ 1957 Western 3:10 to Yuma to explore popular culture’s ambivalent relation to representations of masculinity. Introducing concepts from Marxism and sociology, the lecture discusses 3:10 to Yuma against its historical background of post-WWII U.S. society to interrogate the function of narrative film in the construction and perpetuation of gender norms. Methodologically, this talk engages in close readings of selected scenes, highlighting signifying elements of film such as mise en scène or cinematography, to familiarize students with the basics of film analysis.
Dr. Ahu Tanrisever is assistant professor in the American Studies Department of Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. Having studied at the University of Mannheim and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she conducted her doctoral research on post-9/11 intersections of masculinity and heroism at the Graduate School of North American Studies of the JFK-Institute at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include gender studies, class and social mobility, 19th- and 20th-century literature, cultural history, narrative film, and representations of 9/11.
29.6. “Disobedient” Concepts: Postcolonial African Literature and the New Historicist Approach
The aim of this lecture is to discuss ways to identify, describe, and critically analyse concepts which, having originated in the West, “disobey” their established definitions once they are emplotted in postcolonial African literature. The example to be discussed in this lecture is the concept of the nation-state as portrayed in a postcolonial African literary text, Chinua Achebe’s 1960 novel No Longer at Ease. Developing considerably differently in postcolonial African contexts than in the context of its origin, the concept of the nation-state calls for an act of historicising in order to be understood in all its specificity. Hence, this lecture is designed to present and test methods of literary analysis made available by New Historicism in order to tackle “disobedient” concepts in literature.
Snežana Vuletić is a Ph.D. student at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Giessen/Germany under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ansgar Nünning and at the University of Stockholm/Sweden under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Stefan Helgesson. She is also a research assistant in the English Department at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. She teaches undergraduate courses related to West African literatures. Her research interests primarily focus on Nigerian Anglophone literature and African diaspora studies, with particular emphasis on identity construction.
6.07. Literary Studies as Media Culture Studies
The question of how to do literary studies is not just a matter of personal choice in the sense of finding the appropriate theoretical framework and methodology for one’s own research problem. This lecture introduces students to the general idea behind extending literary studies into media culture studies. It surveys moreover the most important strategies behind this reformulation, i.e., the theoretical and methodological designs that have served as a catalyst for such newly emerging approaches in the fields of literary and cultural studies as Critical Ethical Narratology, to give but one example of an extension of classical narratology. Responding to the question of whether new media require new methods, this lecture uses Mark Bowden’s hypertext Blackhawk Down (1997) as an example for a hybrid medium and equips participants with a toolbox for analysing such media.
Dr. Nora Berning is a postdoctoral researcher at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. She is the author of Towards a Critical Ethical Narratology: Analyzing Value Construction in Literary Non-Fiction across Media (2013) and Narrative Means to Journalistic Ends: A Narratological Analysis of Selected Journalistic Reportages (2010). Her main research interests include interdisciplinary approaches to the study of narrative, genre theory, travel literature, and the politics of aesthetics.