Alicia E. Ellis

Black Germany

This course is an exploration of the cultural, political, and literary production and development of Black Germans from the 19th century to the present. This history will be articulated though close readings of fiction and non-fiction, history, and film. Embedded in literature and cultural studies, we will explore questions about identity: ethnicity and nation, (in)equality and power, gender and sexuality, class and race, and immigration and citizenship. Also addressed will be the issue of who determines which stories matter, and which stories are told about the enduring presence of Black people in Germany. As we develop an understanding of Black Germany, we will also acquire and practice the skills necessary for effective literary analysis.

Women’s Literary, Cultural, and Visual Production

In this interdisciplinary course, we will concern ourselves with the intellectual production and development of women working in the German and Austrian contexts. Designed to explore the role of women, gender and representation, we will examine their artistic activities through historical, literary, and social movement frames. We will read women’s writing, view their art, and watch their films. Topics include the development of a public female aesthetic that encompasses Afro-German women as writers, historians, and filmmakers; Expressionist artists such as Kollwitz and Modersohn-Becker. Authors include Ingeborg Bachmann, May Ayim, Emine Özdamar, Christa Wolf, and Yoko Tawada.

Weird Fictions

This seminar explores the construction of the genre of science fiction (broadly defined). We will read texts that range from the 19th century to the present – short prose and novels. Our intellectual concerns: what constitutes science fiction; how do we classify those works of science fiction that have no science; what are the parameters of the form and its style; what kinds of historical, ethical, cultural and philosophical questions and themes emerge from close readings of weird fictions and how are they different from, or similar to, those arising in competing fictional modes; and how does mainstream literary scholarship make sense of science fiction? In addition, we will read texts that function as hybrid and complementary permutations of science fiction such as magical realism, speculative fiction and utopian/dystopian fictions. Authors include Jorge Luis Borges, Erna Brodber, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Franz Kafka, Juan Rulfo, and Bram Stoker.

Disturbing the Peace: Baldwin, Morrison, and a Black Literary Tradition

This seminar serves as an introduction to the works of two of the most influential and prolific African American thinkers of the post-civil rights era: James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. We will explore their fiction and non-fiction as frames in which to think through representation and presentation. As social critics and novelists, both engage concepts such as structural racism, religion, trauma, sexuality, politics and history in a way that calls attention to the state of writing and narrativity as an endlessly creative act. This class will actively consider selected novels, essays and short prose of Baldwin and Morrison in order to formulate a set of intellectual problems around ethics and aesthetics, the relation between literature and politics, and the theorization of race, gender, class, sexual difference and nation in post-war American culture and in the 21st century.

The Idea of Europe: Readings in the 20th Century Novel

Readings in the works of 20th century authors, who, in very different ways, challenge the conventional ways in which Europe is identified and understood by its constituents. Particular attention is paid to a sense of a shared transnational European identity, the theorization of political, cultural and sexual spaces, themes of historical memory, postcolonial legacies and the negotiation of multiculturalism. In addition, we will explore the relationship between the margin and the center, the layered structure of violence and the articulation of a unique European self whose boundaries are fluid, defiant and contested. Focus will be on close readings of text supplemented by theoretical essays. Authors may include but are not limited to Samuel Selvon, Andrea Levy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Elfriede Jelinek, W.G. Sebald, and Orhan Pamuk.

Animals, Hybrids, and Machines: Franz Kafka and the Non-Human

Often taken for granted is that the things with which we commune are just like us. We go about our business as if the world were intact, knowable, and reliable as if we are on the correct path to true discernment. The belief exists that something called “we” is uniform, tangible, and appropriate for its intended use. But what is “we”? Does anyone know what is walking in front of them? What if the silhouette just ahead is that of a distressed mole, a dead hunter, or even a metallic automaton? This course explores ambivalent forms: the headless torso, the singing mouse, and the hunger artist. Readings will be taken primarily from the works of Franz Kafka and other fiction, essays, poems, and films from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Fictional Systems: Narrative Frustration

This seminar is concerned with the peculiarities of narrative worlds that refuse to reveal their secrets. Our reading strategies and storehouse of rhetorical techniques for revealing meaning often fail us as we are outdone by a fictional world that will not allow for “interpretation”. We are unmade when our narrative resources cannot keep pace with the project of textual interpretation. How do we cope with the refusal of the text to reveal itself – even to the most adequate of readers? What happens to the act of reading when a text overwhelms its readers with information? How do we manage those types of incorrigible texts? What are the stakes in the ‘not-understanding’ of difficult texts? We will look at mixed genres in this seminar: texts that seemed to be marked as ambiguous, texts that upset readerly expectations, and texts that posit the impossible and the incomprehensible.