Culture and Literature

The profile Culture and Literature offers a unique and cutting edge teaching programme that connects the study of societal real-life challenges with literature, films, series and other types of cultural narratives.

C&L A: Text & Context
This course will introduce students to the crucial roles which literature, but also films, series and other types of narratives have played, and continue to play, in shaping the way humans think, feel and act. We will map and sometimes dismantle some of the major narratives and myths we live by, such as investment in knowledge, individualism or romantic love. In this process, our focus will lie on aspects of morality: How do narratives affect our sense of right and wrong? What impact do they have on our changing ideas of  good and evil in a world of relativity and uncertainty? And what dilemmas arise from our involvement with villains and antiheroes?

C&L B: Culture & Context
This course will pick up on crucial insights from C&L A, and intensify and diversify connections between contemporary societal challenges and cultural narratives.  Students will be introduced to further core topics of contemporary cultural studies, including racism and discrimination, inequality and inequity, gender, and artificial intelligence, many of which will be deepened in the further course of the profile. We will continue to use literature and other types of cultural narratives as sources of knowledge and of critical discussion about these matters.

Culture, Climate, Anthropocene (Year 1)
“They paved paradise, put up a parking lot / With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin' hot spot / Don't it always seem to go / That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone”

-- half a century after Joni Mitchell sounded this warning, humanity finds itself in a spot which is getting hotter by the minute: anthropogenic climate change has become the most urgent challenge for the human imagination. This course invites students to explore how culture and literature and the environmental humanities at large can contribute to developing what Anna Tsing calls “the arts of living on a damaged planet.” Through discussion of thought-provoking works ranging from cli-fi to eco-thrillers as well as visionary critical discourses and self-reflexive creative critical practices, we will study the mutually transformative relationship between human cultures and more-than-human lifeworlds.

Empirical Approaches (Year 2)
How do literature and fictional narrative affect societal debates on inclusion and exclusion? How can they shape plans for the place of the ‘foreign’? How can we study and measure these effects? In this course, particular attention will be paid to the role of literature in shaping the debate on criminality and exclusion in the European realm, for example in the criminalization of the immigrant. In the course, students will apply specific methodologies, in particular interviews and focus groups, for the empirical study of the effects of literature, and they will learn to present their results in a variety of forms: debates, presentations and written assignments.

Gendering Culture (Year 2)
This course addresses  relevant theories and methods in the field of gender studies, focusing on literature and cultural-historical context in the 20th and 21st centuries. Key questions are: Which factors and relations determine gender in the humanities? How is gender reflected in literary texts? How are LGBTQ+ persons described in cultural-historical texts such as life writing, tv-series and (fiction) films?

Otherness, Strangeness, Abnormality (Year 2)
In everyday culture, many things can be considered “strange” or “abnormal”: Situations, beliefs, behaviors… In this course, we will analyze such judgments in order to understand underlying idea(l)s of cultural “sameness”, normality and normativity, drawing from a range of cultural and social theories as well as from literary and artistic works.

Racism, Discrimination, Inequality (Year 2)
Encompassing regions such as Latin America, Africa, (Eastern) Europe, and the United States, this course addresses cultural responses to colonialism, race, inequality, and discrimination. Through examining a variety of works of theory, fiction, art, and cinema, we explore topics such as white privilege, cultural appropriation, questions of implication and solidarity, feminist and decolonial responses to coloniality, the decolonization of museums, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Imagining Europe’s Tomorrow (Year 2)
“Imagine there's no countries / It isn't hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for…”. Thus John Lennon exhorted his listeners in 1971, equating a world without nation-states with the absence of conflict. The reality of contemporary Europe shows otherwise. The multi-faceted nature of identities and histories persists and engenders crises, productive or otherwise, even in the purportedly unified space of Europe. Utopian and dystopian visions proliferate and colonise our life-worlds in the current climate of uncertainty and risk. In the creative space of this course, students will engage with and envision their own narratives of European unity and diversity that will be fundamental to shaping Europe’s Tomorrow! You will explore and experience the co-operative and adversarial dimensions of identity construction through pioneering role-play and film-making, and thereby map the fine line dividing utopian and dystopian visions of Europe’s future. Come if you dare to imagine!

Intergenerational Conversation (Year 3)
In this course, we discuss how we talk to and about people from different generations. From power grannies to annoying baby brothers, this course focuses on the role of media (from literature to film to video games) in the perpetuation of cultural norms and the socialisation of the children who consume it. We’ll analyse media like films, novels, poetry and multimodal texts like picture books and comics as pedagogical and ideological texts that reflect and shape the cultures that they are produced in. In 2023-2024, this course is a part of a VIS project with the University of Florida.

Thinking Culture (Year 3)
This course takes a tour through a selection of advanced theoretical approaches to analysing literary and, more broadly, cultural representations: aesthetic, cultural-historical, reception, narratological, spatial, ethical, post-modern, postcolonial, and interdisciplinary approaches. Through engagement with different approaches, students get a sense of how cultural representations can help us think about both society and the broader realm of ideas at an advanced level.

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Staff list Chair group Culture and Literature