gb - Englisches Seminar - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

050 662 Pankratz
The Aesthetics and Pragmatics of Camp, 4 CP
2 st. do 10-12 GB 03/46
This seminar will not deal with tents and sleeping in nature. Camp, in the definition of
Susan Sontag, is a modern sensibility characterised by “love of the unnatural: of
artifice and exaggeration […,] a private code”; scholars such as Jonathan Dollimore
or Moe Myer analyse camp as signifying practice of queerness, gender performance
and anarchy. By turning things upside down, parodying the norm, revering the clichéd
and neglected, camp subverts the hetero-normative mainstream and confronts it with
an alternative, often carnivalesque alternative.
The seminar aims at unearthing the textual strategies of camp, of trashing and
kitsching things up, subverting norms, unexpectedly introducing deep emotions, and
read them against their cultural background of queer activism, queer theories, but
also pop, retro and commodification. The discussions will focus on both camp texts
(from The Rocky Horror Show to the Eurovision Song Contest) and theoretical texts
on camp (from Sontag to Butler). Depending on the possibility to produce copies,
there will be a reader available at the beginning of the semester or pdf files on
Blackboard.
Assessment/requirements: Übung: active participation and expert group; Seminar:
the above, and term paper (wissenschaftliche Hausarbeit).
050 663 Viol
1913 on British Television
2 st. fr 10-12 GB 5/37 Nord
In this class we will address popular television’s penchant for exploiting past historical
periods for exciting and marketable broadcasting content. After brief introductions to
the historical background of late-Victorian and Edwardian England as well as to the
main theoretical approaches that have been proposed to understand the workings of
cultural memory (Halbwachs, Assmann, Samuel), we will look at three particular
examples of (re)constructing pre-Great War Britain on television: Upstairs,
Downstairs (ITV, 1971-1975), The Edwardian Country House (Channel 4, 2002) and
Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010-). Our prime concern will not be so much with finding out
how the representations relate to any historical reality, but looking at what they can
tell us about the cultural constellations that have brought them forth. In what way and
why, for instance, do the 1970s representations differ from the more recent ones, in
what way do the costume drama series differ from the reality TV format in terms of
depicting and plotting Edwardian class structures, sexualities, ethnicities, and value