gb - Englisches Seminar - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

050 655 Müller, M.
The African American Detective, 3 CP
2 st. di 8-10 GABF 04/613 Süd
Over the last fifty or sixty years, detective fiction has emerged as a literary field
worthy of academic attention and, more recently, ethnic detective novels have
become an accepted subgenre of detective fiction. Global/ethnic detective novels
address issues of personal and social identity that point out the importance of the
ethnic community for the individual detective, and often also focus on gender by
featuring a female detective. In this class we will investigate - with the help of
secondary literature on detection theory - how ethnicity and detection are intertwined
in African American detective novels and how ethnic/gender identity is constituted in
these novels.
Please buy your own copies of Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure Man Dies, Chester
Himes’s Cotton Comes to Harlem and Pamela Thomas Graham’s Orange Crushed:
An Ivy League Mystery. Additional primary and secondary texts will be made
available on Moodle.
Assessment/requirements: attendance and active participation, presentation, written
assignment(s).
050 656 Kindinger/Steinhoff
Writing Women and Women’s Writing in the Late Nineteenth Century, 3 CP
2 st. mi 10-12 GB 03/46
The late nineteenth century in American culture and society is understood as a time
of great upheaval. Due to changes in the political, economic, social and domestic
spheres, after the Civil War and at the dawn of the twentieth century, new power
structures were negotiated. In this class, students will be introduced to literary and
cultural debates about gender in late nineteenth-century writing by women and about
women. Questions we will raise include: How was womanhood constructed? Were
women confined to the domestic sphere only? And how did representations of gender
intersect with race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality? We will address different ideals of
womanhood as created for instance in cookbooks, advice books, and women’s
magazines. Next to that, we will be reading texts by Louisa May Alcott, Alice Dunbar
Nelson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, and Kate Chopin.