History is vicious thing because it changes like a
vexed image, depending on who looks, when you look, and how you look. Maybe
literature can deal with this better than history books, which seem to have to
choose one perspective. History is akin to Memory, collective or cultural
memory or re-memory (as Toni Morrison calls it), sometimes to Trauma, first-generation
or second-generation trauma aka post-memory, sometimes to the Archive,
sometimes to Textuality or Intertextuality – and sometimes of course also to
media and/or commodity culture. In this seminar we will look at six texts: one
from the Age of Reform, a sentimental history of Puritanism (Hope Leslie) and one from Southern Modernism,
a fragmented history of race and class (Absalom,
Absalom). We will read two from postmodernism: a graphic novel of post-memory
(Maus), a specular (and speculative)
history of the Kennedy murder (Libra).
And we will study two texts from the last two decades: a legal/propertied pre-history
of slavery (A Mercy) and a Turtle
Mountain history of termination (The
Night Watchman). How do these texts deal with history? How do they treat
the vexed images of historical perspectives? Why do they try? These will be
some of our questions.
- Kursverantwortliche/r: Julia Dutschke
- Kursverantwortliche/r: Martin Klepper