Englisches Seminar - Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Seminar
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Migration and the Global Horizon of Contemporary American Fiction, 5 CP
2 st. mi 16-18 GB 5/39 Nord
(vgl. Vorl.-Nr. 050 693)
In 2008, the USA elected as its president Barack Obama, the son of a man from
Kenya. This event is a reminder that the American self-image as a “land of
opportunity” and a “nation of immigrants” still has genuine political force and popular
appeal. Of course, “immigration” today hardly means what it did back in 1886, when
the Statue of Liberty first announced to the world the USA’s intention to take in the
world’s “poor,” “tired,” “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Technological
advances—cell phones, the internet, GPS—and changing sociopolitical realities—the
end of the Cold War, the advent of fully globalized capitalism, the war on terror—
have transformed Americans’ sense of themselves and their place in the world. In
this class, we will be exploring cases in which American writers have looked outward
in an effort to understand their identity. How can attending to the transnational
movement of peoples—as tourists, as refugees, as laborers—help one better
understand nation-formation? Can American exceptionalism survive into the twentyfirst
century? We will be reading a selection of short stories and prose pieces by
authors such as David Eggers, Jhumpa Lahiri, and George Saunders as well as one
novel, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007).
LN: Übung: attendance, participation, written assignments
LN: Seminar: requirements for Übung and 10-page paper.
Übung
050 665 Steinhoff
Bodies in the making: the human body in theory, literature and visual culture, 3 CP
2 st. do 12-14 GB 6/137 Nord
In recent years the human body has become a key site of investigation in Cultural
Studies. According to this new ‘body theory’ or ‘body criticism’ the body is not an
essential and fixed entity but a cultural construct, i.e. a complex and contested site