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SoSe 23: Confession in American Literature After WW2

Sonja Pyykkö

Kommentar

Today we live in a confessional culture in which intimate self-disclosure has become the norm, scholars from Michel Foucault to Peter Brooks have been arguing with increasing urgency since the 1970s. The purpose of this seminar is to develop a critical understanding of confession in American literature from 1945 to the present by reading poems, memoirs, short stories, novels, and (lyric) essays by well-known authors, including James Baldwin, Robert Lowell, Vladimir Nabokov, Maggie Nelson, Sylvia Plath, Claudia Rankine, and Richard Wright. Recognizing that the notion of confession is itself highly equivocal and prone to misunderstandings, the seminar includes a lecture that will expand on a lay understanding of the term and provide students with a toolkit for identifying confessions and for analyzing the most important confessional discourses that they will encounter in the readings. While the focus of the seminar itself is on developing students’ ability to identify, analyze, and discuss confessions in works of literature, the texts included in the syllabus also provide a lens through which to examine the culture of confession that begins to take shape in the US during the second half of the twentieth century: Through the readings, which address topics such as racial discrimination, addiction, mental health, and homosexual and queer desire, students will witness how the boundaries of the public and the private are repeatedly redrawn when “taboo" subjects that can initially be only voiced as confessions enter the public sphere, where they eventually become drivers of societal and political change. On the other hand, by engaging with how literary authors respond to the ever expanding "obligation to confess” (Foucault) particularly as we begin nearing the millennium, we will also register the need for more critical approaches to confession. The syllabus is intentionally structured in a way that expands the canonic understanding of confessional literature by featuring groundbreaking confessional and post-confessional texts by Black and queer authors. Schließen

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SoSe 23: Confession in American Literature After WW2

Sonja Pyykkö

Kommentar

13 Termine

Freie Universität Berlin

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