32201
Seminar
SoSe 14: Unspeakable Humanity: The Grotesque 1950s
Sonja Schillings
Comments
The seminar focuses on satirical and grotesque elements in U.S. American literature between 1946 and 1963. This period is characterized by a whole range of overlapping anxieties in American culture: the recent impact of the World Wars, the return of war veterans and the increasing awareness of the scope of the Holocaust, America's new role as a superpower, the nuclear threat, the rise of international human rights, the early Cold War and McCarthyism, conflicting impulses of individualist consumerism versus various forms of traditionalism, social tension in black and immigrant communities, emerging youth movements.
In a period further characterized by a fundamental and distrustful reassessment of language as a potentially manipulative and distortive tool, the writers discussed in this seminar used satirical and grotesque elements in their fiction to help renegotiate conventionalized literary categories and forms of expression, and to find new forms of addressing the nature of virtue and the value of human life in the face of emerging paradigm shifts in American culture.
The syllabus includes the discussion of works by Sherwood Anderson, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley, Kurt Vonnegut and Nathanael West.
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14 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Tue, 2014-04-15 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2014-04-22 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2014-04-29 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2014-05-06 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2014-05-13 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2014-05-20 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2014-05-27 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2014-06-03 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2014-06-10 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2014-06-17 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2014-06-24 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2014-07-01 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2014-07-08 12:00 - 14:00
Tue, 2014-07-15 12:00 - 14:00