32201

WiSe 20/21: Aesthetics of Intimacy in Recent American Fiction

Fabian Eggers

Information for students

In-person teaching: Only students registered on campusmanagement can participate.

Comments

"We were the only two left. Just the two of us, you and me.” These concluding lines of Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007) seem to address the reader of the novel directly. Similarly, Jennifer Egan’s sci-fi spy story “Black Box” (2012) can be seen to speak to the reader when it states: “You are an ordinary person undertaking an extraordinary task.” These two examples contain a palpable acknowledgement of an ‘other’ beyond the respective text, but also hint at a desire for community, mutual recognition and approval. This outreaching rhetoric and a topical attention to the difficulties of sincere and meaningful exchanges delineate “aesthetics of intimacy” in recent American fiction. Whether this relational longing is fulfilled remains to be seen in each case, but it is the very desire for intimacy that is of interest in this BA course. Because much of today’s communication feels corrupted, true intimacy seems impossible to achieve (not only in literary texts). This course seeks to explore the reasons for this disappointment through the transformations of private and professional lives in recent decades. Alongside literary and social theory, we will read fiction by Tao Lin, Jennifer Egan, Ottessa Moshfegh and David Foster Wallace. In addition to studying how the literary texts discuss (and perhaps create) intimacy, we will place them in the literary history ‘after postmodernism,’ explore the relationship to their media-saturated environment and look for connections to the growing importance of affect and emotion in professional contexts. close

15 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Mon, 14:00 - 16:00 15 Class schedule

Mon, 2020-11-02 14:00 - 16:00

Lecturers:
Fabian Eggers