32205

WiSe 20/21: Delirious: American Fictions on Drugs

Tobias Alexander Jochum

Information for students

Synchronous online teaching with some on-campus sessions (optional)

Comments

The philosophical term of the pharmakon denotes a poison, remedy, and magic potion, and is furthermore associated with productivity and the figure of the scapegoat. In ethnobotany, meanwhile, psychoactive plants can take on the roles of powerful allies or foes: beneficial tools, guardians to secret knowledge, shortcuts to spiritual transcendence, or conduits to perdition. The extent to which these agents have shaped cultures and civilizations around the globe (even human evolution itself) continues to be a matter of debate; but the critical part that goods like tea, coffee, tobacco, or opium have played in the colonial making of the modern world system can hardly be overstated. Drugs, in short, are commodities and cultural artifacts of profound ambivalences. And between pre-Columbian plant cults and the Puritanical underpinnings of the U.S., these contradictions are maybe particularly evident on the North American continent, where licit and illicit drugs have engendered artistic and intellectual movements, billion-dollar industries, as well as fierce opposition and regulatory regimes, from Prohibition in the 1920s to the ongoing racist and imperialistic "War on Drugs." The aim of this seminar is to trace this history of intoxication and sobriety through the catalyst of literature and storytelling. With the trope of the pharmakon as our guiding motif, we will parse through literary explorations of quests for utopian transformations and hedonistic excess alongside cautionary tales of alienation and addiction. Primary readings will include works by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway; Walter Benjamin and Aldous Huxley; William S. Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson and Maxine Hong Kingston; Joan Didion, Philip K. Dick, Tao Lin and Michelle Tea; Leslie Jamison and Yaa Gyasi. close