Winter Term 2015/2016

VL: "Foundations of Cultural Studies"  

Professor Dr. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn

Mi 14-16 c. t ., Geb. B3 2, HS 0.03

What is meant by "culture", and why do we need to study it? At the simplest level culture encompasses the how of life lived in a society, i.e. our common pool of language use, food customs, fashion trends, architectural styles, forms of entertainment, but also of social taboos and norms, regardless of whether these are explicitly expressed or implicitly understood. If "culture" is, in this sense, a way/s of 'worldmaking', is it not also much more than that?  We can ask: Who makes these norms for us, or have they arisen from our own collective behaviour? To what extent are we agents who actively make our own 'worlds'; to what extent are we consumers of what social and cultural institutions, the media, and advertising agencies would have us believe is what the majority of us currently think/should be thinking? Cultural Studies have set themselves the agenda of trying to explain, as best as possible, why it is that we 'perform' culture in the ways that we do in the societies we inhabit.

Course material will be placed in the Semesterapparat (IB) or, if otherwise difficult to locate, will be made available online.

Participation
All lecture series material to be read in preparation for each session as scheduled; regular participation in the full lecture series; end of term written test.
Please check the TAS website under "Your Studies" for guidelines, especially on note-taking during a lecture series.

HS: "'Intertextual Performances: Derek Walcott's Pantomime

Professor Dr. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn

Mi 16-18 c. t., Geb. C5 3, Raum E 20

The Caribbean is a region particularly rich in cultural performances that have been created from the fragments, often enough, of older and/other cultural conventions. Take the example of Carnival in the plantation colonies of the West Indies. Brought over by the European Catholics who migrated there as settlers, this pre-Lentan celebration underwent several transformations before emerging as a post-Emancipation Creole bacchanalia. Since then it has been progressively changing into a more commercial type of street performance, with the result that the Carnival season is now one of the mainstays of the tourism-based economies of these islands. In his 1980 play Pantomime, Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott confronts spectators with a belated intermeshing of West Indian and British cultural traditions – and the consequences thereof. Taking as his point of departure Daniel Defoe's narrative of Robinson Crusoe and his Man Friday, Walcott exploits the intertextual potential of performance types by showing us what happens when characteristically British 'panto' (and music hall) performance modes allow themselves to be challenged by the competing conventions of the Trinidadian Carnival.

Please note: An integral part of this graduate seminar is an immersive study excursion being planned for the end of November/ beginning of December. Please let me know in advance what is most suitable for you. This will be a unique opportunity to devote attention to the exhibitions run by dedicated slavery museums in London and Liverpool: Museum of London's "Sugar and Slavery", National Maritime Museum's "Atlantic Worlds", and best of all, International Slavery Museum, Liverpool. Talks and lectures by museum curators and experts are being scheduled so that you can gain a deeper understanding of this controversial topic. We will also be looking closely at the pantomime tradition, and especially at how Robinson Crusoe has been performed on stage.

Participation
Regular attendance and active participation in all sessions; thorough acquaintance with all the material listed above before the first session; individual research on a relevant topic of your choice for short oral presentations / group work, followed by a term paper (7500 words, in MLA format) on a larger research topic.

VL:  "'In Miserable Slavery': The Slave Trade in Transcultural Perspective"                    

Professor Dr. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn

Do 14-16 c. t., Geb. B3 2, HS 0.03

In this lecture series we will be tracing the history of enslavement with reference to both the victims and the perpetrators of this system of unfree labour. Thomas Thistlewood, who arrived in Jamaica in 1750, has left us a remarkable account of the violence underpinning plantation life in his In Miserable Slavery. We will be reading this memoir alongside Mary Prince's testimony,The History of Mary Prince, since texts like these provide us with invaluable information about the inhumane conditions under which the slaves, who were transported to the Caribbean as part of the Transatlantic Slavery system as well as their 'Creole' offspring, were forced to subsist. Among more contemporary accounts we have Caryl Phillips' The Atlantic Sound,which memorably recounts his visit to the once notorious Gold Coast slave trading centre at Elmina Castle, described by him as: "If one imagines the Gold Coast to be a large shopping street, then Elmina Castle was undoubtedly its Harrods or Saks Fifth Avenue".

MAIN TEXTS:

Thomas Thistlewood. In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica 1750 – 1786. Ed. Douglas Hall. Kingston, JA: U of W. Indies, 1999. 

Mary Prince.  The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave. Ed. Sarah Salih. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. 

Caryl Phillips. The Atlantic Sound. New York: Knopf, 2000.

Course material will be placed in the Semesterapparat (IB) or, if otherwise difficult to locate, will be made available online.

Participation
All lecture series material to be read in preparation for each session as scheduled; regular participation in the full lecture series; end of term written test.
Please check the TAS website under "Your Studies" for guidelines, especially on note-taking during a lecture series.

KOLL: Do 16-18:30 s. t. - Geb. C5 3, Raum 1.20

Professor Dr. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn

For B.A., M.A. and Lehramt Candidates

All TAS students in the semi-final stages of their studies are encouraged to attend.

Those intending to take any part of their final examinations in TAS are strongly advised to participate in this colloquium a semester prior to the final run through. Those students starting out / meanwhile engaging with their written academic work, i.e. those doing an M.A. or a B.A. thesis, are also expected to attend and therewith to present their work to peer-review.

The colloquium's focus is on developing study skills while providing on-going guidance during exam preparation. Further, it provides a supportive forum for presenting theses-in-progress and mock exams, all within the frame of engaging with the application of TAS theory parameters to selected texts.

Mi 18:00 – 19:30 s.t.: Sprechstunde

PS/Ü: Introduction to Media Studies

Dr. Anna Maria Lemor

It’s both a truism and a cliché to say that we live in a media-saturated world – that we are “always connected,” that our devices are “always on,” or that there is “no escaping” the reach of technology.  These might be boring claims, but we repeat them frequently: we can’t stop talking about the media, let alone using it.  But we don’t often question how the media shapes us as individuals, how it informs our politics, or how it changes the way that we understand the world.

In this course, once we have reached an understanding of the main theoretical and analytical frameworks involved in the field of media studies, we will then concentrate on a particular topic to examine how media "works" within our society as meaning-making agents and spaces. We will indeed concentrate on British popular media texts such as films, television programmes and advertising and discuss how, over the last fifty years, they have been representing the different ethnic and racial groups inhabiting the country and examine their role in producing stereotypes and misconceptions.