Throughout American history, to be black has meant to be considered as different, and, as

W.E.B. DuBois has famously observed in The Souls of Black Folk, it often meant to be seen

as a problem. Orators, slave narrators, novelists, playwrights and performers have found different ways of dealing with the racialized environments and racial hierarchies of their times, sometimes by strategic adaptation, sometimes by openly voiced protest and radical opposition. Against this background this course asks how black writers from the 18th to the 21st century have addressed blackness and voiced protest against racial injustice in pamphlets, speeches, poems, and narratives. Discussing texts by black intellectuals, poets and authors of fiction we will explore different positions and visions concerning the situation of being black in America.

This course will start on April 11

 


Semester: SoSe 2023

This course situates the study of American cultural production in the context of the American hemisphere rather than the nation state. We will investigate how the possibilities for the study of American literature open up when “America” is understood not as a synonym for an isolated United States but as a network of historical and cultural connections that have extended across the hemisphere from the period of colonization to the present. We will read theoretical texts from the fields of inter-American and border studies as well as novels, stories, plays and other texts that articulate the intercultural relationships between the United States and Latin America, Canada and the Caribbean.

This course will start on April 12.


Semester: SoSe 2023

Moodle Begleitkurs zum selbstverantwortlichen Gedankenaustausch und Ergänzen der Mitschriften zu der Vorlesung "Literatur der USA" bei Prof. Dr. Anne Koenen.

Semester: WiSe 2013/14