In 1964, Richard Hofstadter identified a “paranoid style” as characteristic of American politics. Since then, the content and form of conspiracy thinking has undergone many changes, but its influence on public discourse has continued to grow. Today, conspiracy theories such as ‘birtherism’ or the ‘great replacement theory’ animate the political right.
In this seminar, we will dedicate one slice of our time to talk about how these conspiracy narratives make their mark on real-world politics. Most of our time, however, will be focused on the large canon of conspiracy fiction. This will allow us to ask for the cultural work that conspiracy theory and conspiracy thinking do. In the process, we will ask questions such as: What are the pleasures and appeals of conspiracy theorizing? What kinds of narratives does it enable? What are the formal features of conspiracy thinking? Do we best think of it as a mode or as a genre? What are the histories of conspiracism as a literary trope? How does this trope power negotiations of individualism and of modernization? How does it intersect with discourses of race, of class, or of gender, respectively? To engage these questions, we will work with a body of conspiracist primary texts from a range of media covering the time from the nineteenth century to the present, alongside scholarship from the large and growing body of conspiracy theory research.
- Trainer/in: Sebastian M. Herrmann