Culture and Literature

Introduction to Culture and Literature

This course will introduce students to the crucial roles which literature, but also films, series and other types of narratives play in shaping the way humans think, feel and act. We will map and sometimes dismantle some of the major cultural ideas and ideals 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?

Academic Skills and Perspectives

This course introduces students to core academic skills essential for conducting research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Students will learn how to formulate research questions, locate and evaluate scholarly sources, and apply appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods. Emphasis is placed on critical thinking, academic writing, and ethical research practices. The Culture and Literature strand of the course will pick up on crucial insights from our introductory module and intensify and diversify connections between contemporary societal challenges and cultural ideas. Students will be introduced to further core topics of contemporary Cultural Studies, including narratives of displacement, (post)colonial writing, 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.

Gender in Culture and Literature

This course addresses relevant theories and methods in the field of gender studies, focusing on literature, film 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 narrative fiction? How are LGBTQ+ persons described in cultural-historical texts such as life writing, tv series and (fiction) films?

The Unfamiliar: Otherness, Strangeness, Abnormality

In everyday culture, many things can be considered “strange” or “abnormal”: Situations, beliefs, or 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, social and psychological theories as well as from a variety of literary and artistic works.

Thinking Culture

This course takes a tour through a selection of advanced theoretical approaches to analysing further literary and, more broadly, cultural representations: aesthetic, cultural-historical, reception, spatial, ethical, post-modern, postcolonial, and interdisciplinary models. Through engagement with these approaches, students further sharpen their understanding of how cultural representations can help us think about both society and the broader realm of ideas at an advanced level.

Culture and Literature Thesis Lab

This course will run in parallel to the writing of your Bachelor’s Thesis and provide you with support and feedback to bring your thesis trajectory to a successful conclusion.

At the end of the programme, students also write a Bachelor Thesis related to their profile on the topic of their choice; some examples from past topics include:

• Repression and Erotomania: Sexuality and Agency within Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things

• Once upon a Neurotransmitter. The neurological and affective Implications of Reading in Regards to Fictional Genres

• ​​Recognizing Misogyny and Sexism in TikTok Videos

• The Lights Are on but Nobody’s Home: Large Language Models as Non-Human Actors in the Human Circuit of Culture

• Absurd Theatre as a Response to Authoritarianism in Twentieth Century Spain

• Love, Lust, and Luxuries. Deconstructing the American Dream in Literature and Film - A Multifaceted Analysis of The Great Gatsby

• The Portrayal of Moral Values and Gender in Children's Films

• Communism and Children’s Literature in the GDR

• Visualizing the Invisible: Hidden Labor in the documentary movie Vista Mare

• Traversing Topographies: Into the Maze of the Kommunalka, the Creative, and the Quotidian in Russian Postmodernist Women’s Writing

• Has the Fourth Wave of Feminism Reduced Gender Bias in Fiction? A Computational Analysis of Character Presence, Occupational Framing, and Thematic Language in Goodreads Fiction Book Descriptions (1990–2020)

• “In the camp, things are not as they seem!” The Late-Soviet Pioneer Camp as a Contested Topos in Current Popular Russian Literature