Textual Spaces - Spatialised Texts
Autumn Semester 2011-2012

Space is an intrinsic ingredient to any narrative, and yet the power it exerts on the way in which we read texts remains often unnoticed. This seminar ventures a typology of textual spaces in literary and visual narratives, exploring how the action can assign functionalities to space, how space can be gendered, brought to externalise a character's thinking, or be the very force that makes a narrative cohere. Texts include novels such as J. G. Ballard's novel High Rise, films like David Cronenberg's Spider or Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, and are examined through frameworks like David Bordwell's cognitive approach to narratives. At the end of the seminar, texts will be considered in terms of their own spatial configuration. What is at stake here is the collaboration of juxtaposed spaces, be it on the page or screen, intertextuality or hypertexts.

Copy - Paste
Autumn Semester 2010-2011

The ambivalent notion of copy-paste plays a crucial role in artistic developments of the 20th century. Its trajectory can be traced from the readymade, montage, cut-up techniques and collage up to the postmodern proclamation of the end of originality.
In these various guises, copy-paste emerges as inextricably linked to the conditions and economies of meaning. The seminar will approach this issue through productions in various media with a particular focus on contextualisation and the reading process brought to assembled objects. The sources will reach from Duchamp's readymades over Dos Passos' literary techniques up to photographic productions by Sherrie Levine.
No prior reading is required for the seminar, and all texts will be available in a reader at the beginning of the autumn semester.

Showing is Telling: The Spectator in Filmic Narratives
Spring Semester 2008-2009

In the last few decades, the medium of film has assumed an increasingly important role in literary criticism and theory. This seminar offers an introduction to visual narratives and helps students develop the analytical and critical skills and vocabulary required for reading films. Through the writings of Bordwell, Bazin and Deleuze, accompanied by close readings of filmic material, we will first explore the possibilities of the medium as well as its affinities and contrasts with written narratives. The second part of the seminar focuses more particularly on the active role of the spectator in the construction of a filmic work through the study of films by directors such as Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey), David Lynch (Mulholland Dr.)and Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window).

The Death of the Author
Autumn Semester 2007-2008

In 1967, Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author. This provocative statement has been qualified and elaborated in many ways since the 1960s. Nevertheless, Barthes' revolutionary manifesto heralded some far-reaching transformations in the notions of literature, artistic production, and critical activity.
This seminar uses various contemporary texts in order to explore the concept of the death of the author and its various ramifications through angles such as authorial voice, the artistic function of the work of art, agency and creativity. Among the works examined are Paul Auster's "City of Glass," John Banville's The Book of Evidence, Julio Cortázar's 'Blowup', and Todd Solondz' film Storytelling.
The theoretical framework will be based on writings by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Stanley Fish, William K. Wimsatt Jr., and Monroe Beardsley.

Time Travel and Narrative in 20th Century Literature
Autumn Semester 2006-2007

The notion of time travel underwent radical changes in the 20th century. Whereas earlier stories of time travel propelled their travellers into the future or the past for the purposes of witnessing human progress, 20th century literature on this subject questions the very nature of time and the status of the neutral observer. Several paradoxes arise from the characters' active intervention in historical times which are not their own, situations which destabilise some of the intrinsic traits of narrative: logic and causality.
This seminar will study narratives of time travel in the last century through novels, short stories and films, by authors such as H.G. Wells (The Time Machine), Michael Crichton (Timeline), Robert A. Heinlein ("All You Zombies"), and Chris Marker (La jetée).

The Literature of Photography
Autumn Semester 2005-2006

The image has become a major force not only in representing the modern world, but in constructing it as well. This seminar will explore the cultural phenomenon of photography through literature, which here assumes a double meaning: our reading will consist of both theoretical writings on photography (Barthes, Benjamin, Kracauer, Sontag and others), and works of literature and film in which photography figures as an integral part of the narrative (from Dos Passos to DeLillo and from Antonioni to Marker, respectively).

Vampires in the 19th Century
Autumn Semester 2004-2005

Nosferatu, Vampire, Dracula, the Un-Dead - in whatever name or shape this character appeared, it terrified people all over the world, and even today is among the most enduring monsters in an otherwise quickly shifting literary and cinematographic landscape. But how did this character become so famous in the first place, why are people as fascinated as they are horrified by it, and what is it that makes the vampire literally, as well as litterarily, immortal?
This seminar focuses on the first appearance of vampirism in the British literary scene and traces it from John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) to Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1871) and to Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). On this road through the nineteenth century, we will deal with various genres, with the society of Victorian England, and with a challenge of the notion of literature itself. Furthermore, we will have a look at several critical approaches, which try to capture the essence of Nosferatu's immortality.