Humanities (English)

The seminar will investigate in the modes and sources of urban economies in Northwestern Europe during the late Middle Ages. It will start with an introduction on urban networks and trade, then expand on socio-political structures (elites, their grasp on political processes, and the position of craft guilds in small and medium-sized towns) and move on with a discussion of the fiscal systems and the creation of urban public debt from the 13th century onwards including the way the elites geared these systems to their maximum benefit.

The seminar will be conducted in English. Sources and readings may include medieval Low-German or “Dutch” and Latin, literature also German (and Dutch, if we have readers/speakers in the seminar). However, international students, who are beginners at German, are most welcome and their respective process of learning will be taken into account.

Please note: It is absolutely essential that you read a limited number of chapters/articles before the seminar. It will circulated right after the assignment procedure. We know that is not much time and therefore restricted it an absolute minimum. But working together a compact week cannot work without a minimum of preparation from your side.
 

Questions of national identity seem to have gained a renewed relevance in public discourse in the last decade. From a historian’s perspective this may appear puzzling, given the widely accepted understanding of the historical construction of such group identities which are often based on invented traditions. This seminar will engage with the role of tradition in historical thinking, with the historical dimension of ancient constructions of identity, and with the (ab)use of ancient history in contemporary debates over identity.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) was one of the central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment and is often referred to as the “father” of economics. Without a doubt, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (first published in 1776, a fourth edition in 1786) is one of the most important works in the history of economic theory. In this seminar, we will explore central strands of Smith’s economic thought. To this end, we will read and discuss selected chapters from the – quite copious – Wealth of Nations as well as from other texts, e.g. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and his Lectures on Jurisprudence.

I see an old picture of my mother carrying me as a baby. I point to the baby on the picture: “That’s me!” But what makes me, as I am now, the same individual as that baby? What constitutes personal identity across time? What changes are compatible with still being the same individual? What changes would make me a different individual? In this seminar, we will encounter the main theories about what constitutes personal identity across time.

We will also explore the relevance of this issue for ethics. For example, does it make sense to punish someone for what he did a long time ago, when he was, in a sense, a different person? Would it benefit me to undergo a treatment that would make “me” happy, but that would also make it questionable whether the resulting person would still be me?

 

The seminar will be in English. The grade for this seminar will be based on three short essays to be written throughout the seminar. The essays can be written in English or German. The readings for each week will be made available on Ilias and should be read before the relevant seminar meeting.

 

Rule Consequentialism

 

In this seminar we will read and discuss Brad Hooker’s book Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-Consequentialist Theory of Morality (Oxford University Press, 2002). Each participant should make sure that he/she has a (digital) copy of the book before the start of the seminar. This book counts as the best defense of rule consequentialism. Hooker’s style of writing is widely appreciated as clear, accessible and pleasant to read. Consequentialism as such is one of the classical types of moral theory and rule consequentialism is about as old as consequentialism itself. Rule consequentialism has recently received new interest and gained popularity, also due to the work of Derek Parfit. Hooker’s book focuses on the question “What would be the best set of moral rules to live by?” According to rule consequentialism, an action is right if it is in accordance with such an optimific set of moral rules. Hooker explains, applies and defends rule consequentialism. He also discusses rival theories. In fact, the book provides a nice introduction to moral theory and applied ethics in general.

 

The seminar will be in English. The grade for this seminar will be based on an essay related to the book. Preparation of and participation during the seminar meetings is very important.

This course offers its participants an opportunity to experience, reflect on and apply a goal-oriented approach to intercultural learning. In addition to exploring some of the recommendations offered by researchers on facilitating intercultural communication and deepening understandings of one's own and the other's culture, the course takes on a rather hands-on approach, allowing students to perform cultural mini-dramas, view video clips as the basis for analyzing key concepts discussed, write about critical incidents and discuss evolving understandings of the nature of interaction in intercultural encounters.

The overarching aim of the course, therefore, is to develop skills and competences which facilitate an openness towards and understanding of other cultures in local as well as foreign contexts.

Please note: This course approaches the concept of Intercultural Communication from  a Cultural Studies rather than a Business Studies perspective and is, therefore, not a class on Business Communication.

Course work: Active participation, mini project presentation, written reflexion of a critical incident

Intercultural, multicultural, transcultural or crosscultural? In the context of culture and communication we come across a huge variety of terms and concepts. In this course, we take a critical look at the different definitions of these terms. We will focus on major theoretical concepts like language, identity, stereotypes, othering and racism, gender and hybridity in the broad context of inter-/multi-/transcultural communication. Furthermore, we will highlight the challenges of intercultural communication and globalization with a special focus on the internet/social media.
Along with analyzing the theoretical concepts, participants will also be involved in role play, group work, activities, and discussions on the topic. In addition, students will have the chance to reflect upon personal intercultural experiences.

By the end of the semester, participants will have a broad understanding of the variety of concepts of intercultural communication. Further, participants will be able to critically evaluate different approaches based on theoretical input and interdisciplinary perspectives. Due to the international setting of the class, participants will have their individual experiences in working and learning in an intercultural environment.

Course Work: Reading of Texts, In-Class Participation, Presentation

This course traces the development of Black and Asian British cinema against the socio-political backdrop of debates on immigration, multiculturalism and identity politics. Looking at films from the 1970s through to the 2000s, we will discuss how different modes of representation and their respective ways of negotiating identity and difference are employed to deal with questions of discrimination, marginalization, and belonging. From straightforwardly political films like Pressure (1975), we will move on to surprise box office hits like the comedy East Is East (1999), which marks the genre’s entrance to mainstream in the midst of discussions about the rebranding of British national identity in light of an increasingly pluralist society. Focusing on the ‘politics of representation’, as introduced by Stuart Hall (e.g. 1997), the course engages with key theories and approaches from cultural studies such as postcolonialism, intersectionality (including categories such as, e.g., gender, race, generation), and cultural memory. In order to get a broader picture of British cultural politics, excerpts from selected writing by BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) authors will complement our reading material and discussions.

Course Work: Reading of Texts, In-Class Participation, Presentation

Body culture studies mark an interface of different disciplines. The development of anatomy gave an internal view of the body, which changed its’ perception in philosophy and the natural sciences. The whole started to crumble, new concepts and theories were developed and a process of cultural valuation of the body was stimulated. With the establishment of cultural studies, the body became not only a projection surface for trends or social status, but also for the discussion of role models concerning gender questions.

In this seminar, we’ll have a look at the development of different body concepts (“body civilization”) during the last 200 years up to the present, with texts by Claude Levi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss or Judith Butler – including current issues (a return of the body in pop culture) and the impact of social media. We’ll also discuss the meaning of artificial bodys, i.e. the metaphorical potential of prostheses or androids and herein the limits of body. Finally, we’ll try a pracitical transfer in the analyzation of literary texts, i.e. of Elfride Jelinek or Christian Kracht.

Course Work: Active Participation

This course asks what is at stake in imagining the future. What anxieties or hopes within the present are amplified for the projection of futuristic scenarios, who is included or excluded from future worlds, and what do imaginaries of the future from the U.S., Canada, or Great Britain tell us about our moment today? In asking these questions, the course is particularly interested in exploring more recent (or more recently noted) developments in speculative fiction, such as Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, or climate fiction. For this purpose, the course will attend to authors such as Octavia Butler and Cherie Dimaline (Métis), as well as films such as Black Panther and Children of Men. In the course, we will also reflect on how some of these imaginings of the future resonate for us today, at a moment in which the notion of having a future for humanity at all has become nothing short of a political demand.

The Summer School is an excellent opportunity both for students of the University of Mannheim and students of our partner institutions. The 3-week intense program will give you the chance to explore and discuss current trends in various fields of the Humanities and learn from professors from all over the world. And if that wasn't enough already, our leisure program will provide plenty of opportunity to  get to know Mannheim and the region it is located in and to expand your international network of friends and fellow students.
For more info, check out our Summer School website.

REGISTRATION: ALL students interested in participating in the School of Humanities' Summer School need to sign-up via the online sign-up sheet on the Summer School website. Signing-up via Portal² ist NOT possible.
ANMELDUNG: Alle Studierenden, die an der Summer School der Philosophischen Fakultät teilnehmen möchten, müssen sich über das Online-Anmeldeformular auf der Summer School Website anmelden. Eine Anmeldung über Portal² ist NICHT möglich.

Course Description:
The academic content of the course is the exploration of World Theatre. As this subject is theoretically endless (as famously described by Peter Brook in his book The Empty Space), World Theatre is an introductory course that is necessarily selective – while always pointing to further horizons for students to explore on their own. The course itself is great preparation for doing so.

World Theatre examines wildly varying plays from wildly varying cultures, with a particular emphasis on the modern and contemporary. Our close reading of actual plays – presenting diverse theatrical forms, traditions, styles, and themes – is complemented with a study of their respective cultural contexts: how the two interact is at the heart of this course.

At the same time, World Theatre recognises the limits of any particular example; there is no such thing as ‘a typical Brazil play’ or ‘a typical Japanese play’ any more than there is ‘a typical German play’. Within a culture there are, however, shared histories and prevailing traditions that each of its playwrights must reckon with, even if they wish to dismantle a tradition or innovate upon it. We will explore many such crucial examples, from a wide variety of cultures.

The course begins with the biggest possible questions, such as ‘what is theatre?’ Geography structures our journey through theatrical cultures in Asia, Oceania, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, South America, and North America.

The Summer School is an excellent opportunity both for students of the University of Mannheim and students of our partner institutions. The 3-week intense program will give you the chance to explore and discuss current trends in various fields of the Humanities and learn from professors from all over the world. And if that wasn't enough already, our leisure program will provide plenty of opportunity to  get to know Mannheim and the region it is located in and to expand your international network of friends and fellow students.
For more info, check out our Summer School website.

REGISTRATION: ALL students interested in participating in the School of Humanities' Summer School need to sign-up via the online sign-up sheet on the Summer School website. Signing-up via Portal² ist NOT possible.

ANMELDUNG: Alle Studierenden, die an der Summer School der Philosophischen Fakultät teilnehmen möchten, müssen sich über das Online-Anmeldeformular auf der Summer School Website anmelden. Eine Anmeldung über Portal² ist NICHT möglich.

Course Description:
Drawing upon our own experiences of the socio-cultural importance of language, this course will explore the intricate link between language planning and language policy in different multicultural societies and contexts and endeavor to demonstrate the opportunities and challenges that emerge therefrom.
The course will describe and examine the implementation of language and/or cultural policies in various sociolinguistic contexts. Throughout the course, due consideration will be given to the application of the theoretical knowledge gained to real world situations. The course will focus on what language politics consists of, how it operates, its history, and the various ways in which it can be studied empirically and theoretically at different levels: globally, nationally and locally. Typical questions that will guide the conversations during seminars are:
How did English become a world language?
Why is English the only official language in a multilingual country like Namibia?
What does the linguistic landscape of the University of Mannheim tell us about its language policy?
Which languages do you prefer to use with family, friends, in school, when acessing public services, and on social media etc.?
What can be done to improve the visibility and sociolinguistic status of minority and endangered languages?

In addressing questions such as these, the seminars will delve into topics such as:
- the legal status of languages and language rights;
- The relations­hip between Languages of Wider Communication and Languages of Limited Communication in different sociolinguistic contexts;
- the relations­hip between language attitudes and ideologies and language policy and language planning;
- the interrelations between globalisation, nationalism, ethnicity, identity and language policy;
- linguistic ecology;
- language in education;
- language and cultural shift;
- language vitality;
- language maintenance;
- multilingualism as a resource rather than a problem;
- language minoritisation and endangerment;
- linguistic landscapes;
- linguistic markets;
- translanguaging;
- language standardization in different societies.

The Summer School is an excellent opportunity both for students of the University of Mannheim and students of our partner institutions. The 3-week intense program will give you the chance to explore and discuss current trends in various fields of the Humanities and learn from professors from all over the world. And if that wasn't enough already, our leisure program will provide plenty of opportunity to  get to know Mannheim and the region it is located in and to expand your international network of friends and fellow students.
For more info, check out our Summer School website.

REGISTRATION: ALL students interested in participating in the School of Humanities' Summer School need to sign-up via the online sign-up sheet on the Summer School website. Signing-up via Portal² ist NOT possible.
ANMELDUNG: Alle Studierenden, die an der Summer School der Philosophischen Fakultät teilnehmen möchten, müssen sich über das Online-Anmeldeformular auf der Summer School Website anmelden. Eine Anmeldung über Portal² ist NICHT möglich.

Course Description:
Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy and still worldwide stage and screen transposed. This seminar intends to explore the passage from script to screen, and to compare several film adaptations, from various periods of times (running from 1948 to 2000) and various cultural approaches (English, Italian, American, Russian).
Focusing (with a close-reading approach) on key scenes in the tragedy (the uncanny apparition of Hamlet’s father’s ghost; the enco­unter between Hamlet and Ophelia orchestrated by eavesdropping Polonius and Claudius; the ‘mousetrap’ to catch the conscience of the murderer; the confrontation between Hamlet and his ‘lustful’ mother; Ophelia’s madness and drowning; the gravediggers’ scene; the final sword fight between Hamlet and Laertes) in the films by Laurence Olivier (1948), Grigori Kozintsev (1964), Franco Zeffirelli (1990), Kenneth Branagh (1996) and Michael Almereyda (2000), this seminar will invite a
comparative approach.
Both socio-political stakes and aesthetics choices will be taken into account, so as 1) to analyse timeless notions such as dread, fratricide, regicide, revenge, intelligence, repudiation, action, sacrifice and madness, and 2) to see how film directors both adapt a play dating back to 1600 to their own cultural context and time, while still transmitting its timeless pieces of thought on human nature.

The Summer School is an excellent opportunity both for students of the University of Mannheim and students of our partner institutions. The 3-week intense program will give you the chance to explore and discuss current trends in various fields of the Humanities and learn from professors from all over the world. And if that wasn't enough already, our leisure program will provide plenty of opportunity to  get to know Mannheim and the region it is located in and to expand your international network of friends and fellow students.
For more info, check out our Summer School website.

REGISTRATION: ALL students interested in participating in the School of Humanities' Summer School need to sign-up via the online sign-up sheet on the Summer School website. Signing-up via Portal² ist NOT possible.
ANMELDUNG: Alle Studierenden, die an der Summer School der Philosophischen Fakultät teilnehmen möchten, müssen sich über das Online-Anmeldeformular auf der Summer School Website anmelden. Eine Anmeldung über Portal² ist NICHT möglich.

Course Description:
In this course, an introduction to Cognition and Perception will be provided both from the perspective of theoretical frameworks and applications and methods. The course will explore core processes in perception and cognition and will highlight some of the most prominent problems in the current research. The underlying motivation of this course is to show how external (incoming/input) information is transformed into knowledge (in the broadest sense of the word; i.e., cognitive representation). Cognitive representation will be introduced as the main theoretical concept in cognitive and perception sciences. Different types of cognitive representations will be defined and some of the theoretical and empirical discussions and controversies will be discussed.

The Summer School is an excellent opportunity both for students of the University of Mannheim and students of our partner institutions. The 3-week intense program will give you the chance to explore and discuss current trends in various fields of the Humanities and learn from professors from all over the world. And if that wasn't enough already, our leisure program will provide plenty of opportunity to  get to know Mannheim and the region it is located in and to expand your international network of friends and fellow students.
For more info, check out our Summer School website.

REGISTRATION: ALL students interested in participating in the School of Humanities' Summer School need to sign-up via the online sign-up sheet on the Summer School website. Signing-up via Portal² ist NOT possible.
ANMELDUNG: Alle Studierenden, die an der Summer School der Philosophischen Fakultät teilnehmen möchten, müssen sich über das Online-Anmeldeformular auf der Summer School Website anmelden. Eine Anmeldung über Portal² ist NICHT möglich.

Course Description:
At a time when artificial intelligence, intelligent machines, and the internet of things no longer belong to the realm of science fiction, it seems to be urgent to investigate virtual reality and how possible forms of “intelligence” or “cognition” have been imagined by writers and thinkers. As has been argued, a large amount of what science has discovered and technology has developed had already been imagined before. Thus, science fiction and other literary forms of imaginative inquiry into what is possible are important resources for thinking about what our future might look like. We will read a significant text by Jorge Luis Borges about how the world might look like if completely different premises were in force, read short stories that fictionally test how neural networks, androids, and intelligent machines in general might interact with people, and also read about possible encounters with aliens of all kinds of sorts. We will discuss science fiction stories, some of them analyzed in Steven Shaviro’s Discognition (2015), and also films such as Ex Machina,Her, Arrival, and Blade Runner.

FOR REGISTERED SUMMER SCHOOL PARTICIPANTS ONLY!
This workshop offers students the opportunity to practice their paper writing skills with a special focus on writing within the field of international cultural studies.

It covers three broad topics:

Where can I find sources and, if needed, help with my research?

What types of research papers can I write and what formalities do I have to keep in mind?

How do I come up with a topic and what kind of strategies can help me?

What strategies are there to improve my writing style?

The Phonetics Lecture focuses on the key features of English phonetics and phonology. First, the course will cover speech production and perception (the anatomy and physiology of speech, acoustic as well as auditory phonetics) and introduce key phonological concepts. We will then focus on the patterns of speech sounds found in the English language (vowels and consonants) before moving on to an analysis of phonetic and phonological variation in English around the world. In combination with the Phonetics Übung - a weekly practice session in our language lab – the lecture will help students become more aware of their own pronunciation problems in English while also teaching them to appreciate the phonological diversity of World Englishes. The course offers insights into some of the major problems German native speakers face when they learn English as a second language, thereby making it easier for future teachers to identify and, if necessary, rectify their pupils' pronunciation errors.

The Phonetics Lecture focuses on the key features of English phonetics and phonology. First, the course will cover speech production and perception (the anatomy and physiology of speech, acoustic as well as auditory phonetics) and introduce key phonological concepts. We will then focus on the patterns of speech sounds found in the English language (vowels and consonants) before moving on to an analysis of phonetic and phonological variation in English around the world. In combination with the Phonetics Übung - a weekly practice session in our language lab – the lecture will help students become more aware of their own pronunciation problems in English while also teaching them to appreciate the phonological diversity of World Englishes. The course offers insights into some of the major problems German native speakers face when they learn English as a second language, thereby making it easier for future teachers to identify and, if necessary, rectify their pupils' pronunciation errors.

This course is designed to introduce beginning students to the central topics and terms in current (English) linguistics. We will discuss

• the sound system of English
• how words are formed and modified in English and
• how words are combined to form sentences.

Or in technical terms: We will cover: phonetics, phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, major (syntactic) contrasts between English and German and occasionally glimpse at the historical development of English. We will also occasionally look at how these topics are relevant in language acquisition, language storage and processing in the human brain, and language variation over time and in society.

Note that this class will be taught as a flipped classroom, which means that you have to prepare sessions individually by reading the textbook chapter and watching video clips online BEFORE the sessions. In class your questions will be answered and tasks and problem cases solved. You will learn more about this in the first session.

First, you learn about the basics of the scientific method, research designs, data collection and why we need statistics in linguistics.

Second, we look at authentic linguistic research in the areas of Sounds, Sentences, and Words, and you learn to understand and evaluate it.

Third, we turn to analyzing empirical data with descriptive statistics and to statistical hypotheses testing. You will apply your new statistical knowledge during hands-on exercises with the use of statistical software packages.

Along the way, we consider essentials of creating and reporting research. We address key issues such as finding relevant literature, finding research questions, creating items, and working with references. All topics will be illustrated with authentic research (data) from psycho- or sociolinguistics.

First, you learn about the basics of the scientific method, research designs, data collection and why we need statistics in linguistics.

Second, we look at authentic linguistic research in the areas of Sounds, Sentences, and Words, and you learn to understand and evaluate it.

Third, we turn to analyzing empirical data with descriptive statistics and to statistical hypotheses testing. You will apply your new statistical knowledge during hands-on exercises with the use of statistical software packages.

Along the way, we consider essentials of creating and reporting research. We address key issues such as finding relevant literature, finding research questions, creating items, and working with references. All topics will be illustrated with authentic research (data) from psycho- or sociolinguistics.

We use language in order to convey meaning to others. As such, meaning is one of the most essential aspects of language. Semantics is the branch of linguistics, which, (along with pragmatics), deals with meaning in language. But what does ‘meaning’ actually mean? Are meanings dictionary definitions, objects in the world or speakers’ intentions?
This course will provide an overview of the field of linguistic Semantics. It will introduce essential concepts for understanding the ways in which meaning can be analysed in linguistics, and acquaint students with major theoretical approaches and current debates in the field. We will investigate what units of language (morphemes, words, sentences) bear meaning and what conceptual tools are used in Semantics to analyse meaning.

There are only about 60 to 70 prepositions in English. Many of them are very frequent and texts without them would not really make sense. But prepositions pose a number of challenges to linguists. Compare the meaning of the preposition about in (1) to (3).

(1) He was dashing about the house
(2) They talked about the film
(3) Jill decided about the house

In (1) the preposition about has a quite concrete meaning which is easy to mentally visualize. This is less so in example (2) and even less in (3).

In this class we will systematically look at prepositions, their meanings and syntactic behaviour and investigate their relationship to their preceding verb as these verbs usually are responsible for the different interpretations, some of these combinations forming so-called phrasal verbs which are a notoriously difficult area for learners of English. This class combines theoretical as well as practical approaches to the topic.

Language processing in the human mind and brain is extremely fast and largely automatic. In the seminar, we take a look at the mechanisms underlying this process, and discuss to what extent they may differ across different speaker groups, such as prototypical native speakers, second-language learners, and other groups of bilinguals, such as heritage speakers.

It is a universal truth that language is constantly in flux - and the English language is the best example as it has changed enormously in the course of time like almost no other language. Just take, for instance, the first lines of the Lord's Prayer:

Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come.

In Shakespeare's times, these lines looked different:
Our father which art in heauen,
hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdome come. 

Three hundred years before that, even more so:
Oure fadir that art in heuenes,
halewid be thi name; thi kyngdoom come to.  

And right at the beginning of English language history, these lines are almost unrecognizable:
ure fæder, þu þe on heofonum eardast, ...
Sy þinum weorcum halgad ...Cyme þin rice wide.

This course will help understand how the English language could change so drastically and develop into today's shape over the past centuries. It will provide a concise introduction to diachronic linguistics, which will also include an overview of the history of the English language. The course will be primarily concerned with language change on all levels of linguistic survey, and it will put key concepts which are familiar from the “Introduction to Linguistics” into a diachronic perspective. Accordingly, the main focus will be on phonological, morphological, syntactic as well as semantic and lexical change. All phenomena will be illustrated by examples taken from the English language history which spans almost sixteen centuries.

It is a universal truth that language is constantly in flux - and the English language is the best example as it has changed enormously in the course of time like almost no other language. Just take, for instance, the first lines of the Lord's Prayer:

Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come.  

In Shakespeare's times, these lines looked different:
Our father which art in heauen,
hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdome come.  

Three hundred years before that, even more so:
Oure fadir that art in heuenes,
halewid be thi name; thi kyngdoom come to.  

And right at the beginning of English language history, these lines are almost unrecognizable:
ure fæder, þu þe on heofonum eardast, ...
Sy þinum weorcum halgad ...Cyme þin rice wide.  

This course will help understand how the English language could change so drastically and develop into today's shape over the past centuries. It will provide a concise introduction to diachronic linguistics, which will also include an overview of the history of the English language. The course will be primarily concerned with language change on all levels of linguistic survey, and it will put key concepts which are familiar from the “Introduction to Linguistics” into a diachronic perspective. Accordingly, the main focus will be on phonological, morphological, syntactic as well as semantic and lexical change. All phenomena will be illustrated by examples taken from the English language history which spans almost sixteen centuries.

“I never travel without my diary. One should always  have something sensational to read in the train.”  (Oscar Wilde)

Oscar Wilde never travelled without his diary. We never travel without Heart of Darkness, Harry Potter or Mrs Dalloway. What books do you take on a train ride? Which literature do you find fascinating? And what is literature anyway? What do we love about it? Its form, its language, its stories, its topics? And how can we analyse literature, critically think about it and thereby enrich and enhance our understanding of it, going even beyond our initial love of books?
This course, which is designed to introduce beginners to central approaches to the study of British and American literature, will tackle issues like these. It will start by answering the question what literature and the study of literature actually are and then provide an introduction to the three main genres of literature written in English (prose, drama and poetry). In discussing these genres, we will have a closer look at key theoretical concepts and tools for the analysis of literary texts. Besides, we will also identify important periods in the history of British and American literature.

The course will be taught in English and will partly take the form of an inverted class room (see requirements), which will allow you to make the best of the time spent in class practicing literary analysis.

Short fiction, and the short story in particular, is no doubt one of the most prolific genres in Irish literature; vice versa, some of the most renowned authors of short fiction are Irish. To the average reader, short stories also appear easier to read than a novel, but this is deceptive: “Poised between poetry and prose, concentrated and intense, short stories are very easy to read and very hard to read well.” (Dillon 236)
    In this seminar, we will read Irish short stories from the 20th and 21st century - and we will try to read them well :-). Our focus will be a close reading of the stories, but we will also embed them in their historical, cultural, and literary context, teasing out key aesthetic, social and political issues of their respective time. Authors will include James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Seán O’Fáolain, Frank O’Connor, William Trevor, Edna O’Brien, Colm Tóibín, and others. In this way, this seminar will simultaneously serve as an introduction to the history of Irish literature and culture.

Poetry is often considered a notoriously difficult and antiquated literary genre. This seminar aims to refute both claims, familiarising students with the means to grasp some of the most renowned poems in the English literary tradition and to decode their meaning. Thus, you will be acquainted with a set of tools helpful in the analysis of poetry as well as with major literary periods. Apart from learning how to tell the difference between a Petrarchan and a Shakespearian sonnet, blank verse and free verse, allegory and alliteration, you will gain a deeper understanding of the history of English literature and a rich contextual knowledge. First and foremost, however, you will be encouraged to develop your own ideas and interpretations of the poems discussed. We will proceed chronologically and begin the semester with Elizabethan poetry, closing it with contemporary spoken word poetry. As the latter in particular challenges assumptions of cultural value or transgresses the established boundaries of poetic texts, further critical discussions will revolve around the issue of canonicity and the question of what constitutes a poem in the first place.

Eight of Shakespeare’s history plays present a continuous narrative that covers roughly 100 years of English history up to the beginning of the Tudor reign under Henry VII in 1485 and spans the reigns of the kings Richard II, Henry IV, V, VI, and Richard III. This sequence is subdivided in to two tetralogies (which, however, were written in reverse order): the Lancaster (or second) tetralogy (Richard II, 1 & 2 Henry IV, Henry V) and the York (or first) tetralogy (1,2,3 Henry VI and Richard III). In this seminar, we will focus on the Lancaster-tetralogy and address (among other things) questions concerning the relation of history and literature, the contemporary context in which the plays were first performed, general political implications as well as and Shakespeare’s famous ambiguity which (especially so in the case of Henry V and the film versions of Olivier and Branagh) has given rise to a number of conflicting interpretations.

This course investigates how African American literary expression examines the meaning of African American identity, the individual’s relationship with its community, and the oftentimes complex relationship of the author to the White American mainstream. In an attempt to comprehend the complex history of race in the United States and its effects on the individual, we will analyze the self-portrayal of Black identity in selected works of American literature of the past 60 years.

In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a law that established “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the United States, replacing the slogan “E Pluribus Unum” which had been approved by Congress in 1782. This step was met with little resistance at the time, and the fact that the motto is still in place today only confirms the ongoing influence (Protestant) Christian religion has exerted on US politics and identity. President Trump’s threat to bomb cultural sites in Iran is the most recent testimony thereto; having his voters and influential Evangelical sponsors in mind, he stylizes the conflict between the US and Iran as a war between Christian and Islamic cultures. In spite of all this, US culture has always been and is still growing to be spiritually diverse. For example, Judaism, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and a wide variety of indigenous religions have shaped US society, often as a counterfoil to and/or in conflict with the dominant (Protestant) Christian belief, feeding particularly into the cosmology of the countercultures of the 1950s and 1960s (the Beat Generation and the Hippies).
This class focuses on selected works of American literature in order to investigate how the beliefs, practices, and underlying cosmologies of various spiritual traditions have shaped US-American culture, politics, and society. We will – among other things – examine and deliberate how key elements of Puritan faith are expressed in Anne Bradstreet’s poetry, how Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and Henry David Thoreau’s Transcendentalism builds on the Bhagavad Gita, how Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums introduced Mahayana Buddhism to a wider US-American audience, how elements of indigenous spiritual cosmology unfold in the poetry of Muscogee writer Joy Harjo, and how Ezra Furman’s 2018 album Transangelic Exodus negotiates the seeming incompatibility of queer identity and a Jewish faith founded on the Old Testament. A key concept we will be concerned with is Diane di Prima’s notion of the “hidden religions,” a line of thought that elucidates how US-American culture has continuously been molded by the conflict between orthodox (Judeo-Christian) belief systems and heterodox spiritualities, said “hidden religions,” among them strands of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christian mysticism, and indigenous belief systems.

The Romantic period can be argued to have produced the first truly American literature. However, while some Romantics embraced individualism, subjectivity and emotion in a hopeful, light, manner, trusting in the inherent goodness of nature, other authors harbored a darker, more ambivalent vision of these notions. (One question this seminar will answer is what the romantic candlelight dinner we have with our significant other has in common with their (equally romantic) murder and mutilation) The texts we will be reading concern themselves with the dark underbelly of Romanticism and America.
Prepare for madness, gruesome murder, dark secrets, and drug-fueled hallucinations in gloomy mansions, deep dungeons, the high seas, and the dark woods of North America.
In this class, we will be reading selected short stories, poems, and novellas by three central figures of American Dark Romanticism: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.
We will discuss key tropes and ideas of Dark Romanticism and critically read our primary literature within contexts such as American history, misogyny, racism, and democracy.

(Trigger warning: As the title implies, these texts are dark. This means you will repeatedly encounter graphic descriptions of violence and murder as well as allusions to incest and drug-abuse.)

From a western European perspective being bi- or multilingual seems special; from a global perspective it is not. The world over many more speakers are multilingual than “monolingual”. We start this course by looking at what makes a society or an individual multilingual. We look at bi- and multilingual first language acquisition, code-switching and what researchers know about the bi- and multilingual mind. Moving on to recent research findings there will be room for your own interests in the field.

English is the current global lingua franca. However, English as spoken and written throughout the world varies tremendously. The academic field dedicated to the study of this variation is called “World Englishes”. The unusual presence of a plural form in this context highlights that there are multiple forms of English rather than a single form of world-wide English. In this course, we will look at how and why the English language varies in terms of form (accent, grammar, lexis) as well as function (native language, second language, foreign language).

We will begin by looking at the historical spread of English and how this led to the development of distinct varieties of English. Following this, we will look at how linguistic features (accent, grammar, lexis) vary across World Englishes. We will also discuss the various models that have been proposed to explain this variation. The course ends with a project phase in which you have the opportunity to apply the acquired knowledge in a hands-on manner by analysing authentic language data from varieties of English and presenting your results.

Marketing communication and research heavily rely on language. Advertisers use language to convince consumers to buy a certain product. Market researchers ask consumers what they think about a product or what kind of product consumers think they need. Obviously, the success of such marketing efforts depends on linguistic and psycholinguistic processes.
The application of psycholinguistic theory to marketing communication has become a topic of great prominence in consumer research. The use of certain linguistic structures triggers psychological reactions such as attention, emotion and memory. In this course, we build up psycholinguistic background knowledge and simultaneously analyze recent language-related consumer behavior research. Selected topics are:

• Interfaces between language, cognition and consumer behavior
• How principles of sound symbolism and human word recognition can inform brand name construction
• How needs, expectations and ethics determine the potentials and limits of subliminal advertising
• How linguistic framing manipulates consumer decision-making
• How exploiting semantic relations provides structure for consumer learning
• How flouting the Maximes of Conversation influences persuasive communication
• How conceptual metaphors influence marketing communication
• How bilingual language processing affects cognitive and emotional consumer reactions
• How narrative structure in commercials affects consumers’ emotions and memory

The course uses a practical approach and continuously shows how theory and research evidence are relevant to analyze and criticize authentic examples from marketing practice. Moreover, we work on three extensive case studies that allow students to integrate and productively apply the course content. The cases involve developing a brand name for a pharmaceutical product, building an awareness campaign for a non-profit organization and creating a story for a crowd-sourcing campaign of a start-up company. The cases simulate agency pitches, where students work in small teams, present and peer-vote to select the best campaign.

A central part of the course is that student teams conduct their own research project building on previous research discussed in class.

This course will address various aspects of bilingualism from the psycholinguistic perspective. It will be initiated with a discussion of what it means to be bilingual for an individual as well as society. Also, ways of studying bilingual people in experimental settings will be discussed. Next bilingual speech comprehension and production will be of major focus. Furthermore, aspects of bilingual reading, writing, as well as language acquisition will be tackled, before discussing bilingual memory, emotions cognitive effects of bilingualism and creativity.

Each week a different element will be discussed based on the core reading, i.e. a chapter from the course textbook or a selected article. Also, each week a group of students will give a presentation on a chosen research paper referring to a currently discussed topic.

This course is designed to extend students’ knowledge in the topics in current (English) linguistics. Topics to be dealt with include processing of sounds, words, and sentences, acquisition of sounds, words, and sentences by children as well as impaired access to these three areas of linguistic information in case of different language disorders.

Narrative (novels, short stories, films etc.) have always been in contact with and been influenced by other logics of signification, for example play, ritual, spectacle, data etc. In this seminar we will explore
some of the overlaps, border zones, and distinctions between narrative and non-narrative forms by engaging the theoretical concept of 'liminality' to conceptualize the ways in which narrative transgresses, morphs into, and productively engages with such other modes of meaning-making. We will look at the forms, aesthetics as well as the cultural work and politics of narrative liminality by looking into such diverse examples as gamebooks, detective fiction, action movies, cosplay etc.

Dubbed ‘the Gilded Age’ (Mark Twain / Charles Dudley) to highlight the dark underside of a precious-seeming surface, the closing decades of the 19th century in U.S. history were marked by change and contradiction: Rapid technological advances, the consolidation of industrial capitalism, scientific revolutions, and the U.S.’ ascent to an ‘official’ colonial power, occurred alongside a growing divide between rich and poor, mass immigration, urbanization, and rising discontent with Victorian gender norms. Contemporary Americans perceived their contemporary moment as ‘modern’ and crisis-ridden, and many of them felt that the agency of the individual (understood as white, male, and middle-class) had come under threat. The dominant strands of American literature produced at the time, Realism and Naturalism, reflect and comment on these transformations, and do so in a style that radically diverges from the sentimental or Romantic style of writing prevalent in the first half of the 19th century. While Realism placed primacy on creating fictional worlds that closely resembled the ‘real’ world and fashioning literary characters with rich psychologies that face ethical dilemmas, Naturalism largely created a gloomy vision of the human condition, espousing the belief that human beings are incapable of change and at the mercy of forces and structures beyond their control.

The Caribbean's distinctive historical, cultural and geographical situation has turned its literature inte the articulation of complex experiences. Caribbean writers deal with a variety of issues, ranging from the experience of colonial violence and slavery to decolonization and Post WW II geopolitics, from African heritage and diaspora to representations of postcolonial subjectivity, from revolution and resistance to a distinctive artistic self-expression. This course will focus on novels by Claude McKay, Paule Marshall, Marlon James and Junot Díaz.

In centring on some of the most recently published novels, this seminar explores what is going on in British and Irish literature now. What perspectives do British and Irish novels published in 2019 provide on our day and age? What topics and current issues do they address? What literary techniques do they employ? And what, last but not least, are the benefits of literature as a medium for cultural self-reflection and social criticism?
      In this seminar, we will discuss two English and two Irish novels which go together remarkably well. Jeannette Winterson’s Frankissstein provides a new take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) by interweaving two different plots. One is set in the early 19th century and focusses on Shelley writing her novel; the other takes place in the 21st century, where a transgender physician reflects on the issues addressed in Frankenstein from the new points of view provided by robotics and artificial intelligence. In this regard, Frankissstein is strikingly similar to Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, a “dystopian vision of humanoid robots in a counterfactual 1982 Britain” (Theroux), which depicts the complex relationship between a man, a woman and an android. On the Irish side, Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier tells the life stories of two quirky ageing Irish criminals looking back on their past while they spend a night in the Spanish port of Algeciras. If this set-up is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), Mary Costello’s The River Capture takes its cue from another Irish classic, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Paying homage to Joyce on various levels of the narrative, it tells the story of its protagonist in “an audacious act of literary ventriloquism” (Harrison). In one way or the other, all these texts investigate the questions of what it means to live, love and be alive.

Sherlock Holmes is not just one of the most famous literary characters ever created but also a cultural icon, familiar even to those who have never read a single line of Conan Doyle’s four novels and fifty-six stories devoted to the master sleuth. This is not least due to the fact that the Holmes adventures have been extensively adapted in films, TV-series and otherwise (e.g. in advertising). For this reason, our seminar will have a double focus: we will do close readings of a selection of novels and stories but also take a look at contemporary adaptations (predominantly, of course, the BBC’s recent series Sherlock). In addition to figuring out what has made Holmes so popular, we will also – in a way that is not entirely dissimilar to Holmes’ own work of detection – unearth implicit assumptions and evaluations that can easily elude a superficial approach to reading or watching the stories. Our discussion will also consider a range of different interpretations of the Holmes adventures and locate them within the cultural context of their original inception as well as that of their 21st century adaptations.

Diese Veranstaltung wird bei allen LAG Abschlussprüfungen in der Amerikanistik als Überblickswissen vorausgesetzt.

This introductory lecture course will present a survey of the history of American literature and culture from its beginnings to the present. Although contextual information will be provided, the main emphasis will be on the interpretation of individual works (novels, poems, films, other texts). The focus will be on Puritanism, the Declaration of Independence, Transcendentalism and Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. While literature will be in the center, the lecture will also discuss film, art, and music and locate the developments in the arts within wider political, social, as well as scientific and technological developments.

Taught in collaboration with two Canadian universities – Guelph and Waterloo –, this course will explore a wide range of core topics that define the Canadian experience, ranging from concepts of Canadian multi-culturalism and ethnicity to representations of Canadian landscapes and environments.

We will not approach these topics in a traditional teacher-centred/classroom-centred way; instead, Mannheim students will be paired off with Canadian students from Guelph and Waterloo and will then explore a chosen topic (selected in the first week of class) together. Using a number of tools at your disposal – chat rooms, skype, twitter, blogs etc – you will exchange ideas online and lay the groundwork for a presentation on your chosen topic in the second half of term. In your interactive sessions, your Canadian peers will answer questions you have devised to shed light on your chosen topic; in turn, you will answer questions about German culture and society devised by your Canadian counterparts (all of which are German studies students). In this way, you will not only gain unique insights into what it means to be Canadian but also improve your English language skills and help second-language learners of German gain a sense of what it means to grow up and live in Germany.

Please note: Since we will be discussing the key features of the course in our first session, it is vital you come to our first lesson!

This course is divided into three sections: the development of the British system of government, the British system of government today, and contemporary British poilitics.
The first section deals with British history with particular emphasis on events relating to the development of the system of government.
The second section looks into the role of Britain's political institutions as they are today. The functions of both houses of parliament are examined, as are the roles played by institutions such as the monarch, government and cabinet. Electoral procedure is also analysed.
The third section looks into the political parties of the UK and their manifestoes. The policies of various post-war governments are examined and important political issues of the day are discussed. Particular emphasis will be given to current developments after the recent referendum on the UK's future outside the EU.

This course is an introduction to Ireland and is divided into two parts. The first part looks at the history of Ireland concentrating on the background to the Troubles. The second part deals with Irish culture and society today. Participants are expected to chose subjects for this part; which they will present to the class. The history of Ireland is presented in a reader, which will be distributed at the beginning of the term.

Donald Trump won the US presidency with the slogan, “Make America Great Again” – a phrase almost identical to Ronald Reagan’s campaign slogan in 1980 of “Let’s Make America Great Again.” While Reagan was referring to the 1950’s and early 60’s, Trump’s nostalgic yearning is calling upon the 1980’s. What was going in the 1980’s that make this time period worthy of repeating?

 

By learning about the politics, pop culture and economics in this era, the course will attempt to locate the 80’s and its influence on American culture today.  Topics will include the rise of the yuppie and Reaganomics, heralding an age of new conservatism that is even evident in TV shows like Dynasty or Dallas where the idea of ‘power dressing’ is introduced and big shoulder pads, big hair and opulent lifestyles were flaunted before Americans on a weekly basis.
The 80’s also saw the rise of Madonna, New Wave, heavy metal bands like Guns’n’Roses, while trends like hardcore punk and hip hop have everyone sporting Doc Martens and spandex, or Addidas sneakers and track suits. MTV was born and with it, pop stars became household names.

The blockbuster film emerged with classic family fare like Indiana Jones, E.T., Star Wars, Back to the Future. Teen angst (Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink) was portrayed in movies and books (Bright Lights, Big City) that show what happens when money buys everything - coke, parties, fast cars and depression. In the 1980's, art goes corporate and banks invest in Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons and Julian Schnabel. AIDs takes its toll on the artistic community (Keith Haring, Cookie Mueller) causing many to creep back in their safe shells. What was going on in this boom time and what happened when the party was over?

What is the difference between sound and noise? In our daily environments, we are immersed in soundscapes of place, technology, nature and art. The concept of soundscape is intrinsically linked to histories of mediation and changing technologies that enable us to listen to particular sounds or to tune them out. Historical developments in architecture such as the amphitheater / concert halls make listening to particular types of sounds possible and amplifiers electronically enlarge sounds past natural limits. We encounter and make sense of soundscapes without always pausing to consider their meanings - we are emerged in our aural world, and sometimes actively try to control it with our  ever present earphones.

Soundscapes can be formed from musical communities keeping the beats of the flows of migration and the movements of machines. Soundscapes can emerge from urban life evoking a particular sense of place so that a city is transcribed into a 'sound' - Detroit's Motown, Atlanta Hip Hop, Chicago Blues, Seattle's Grunge, NYC Jazz. Sound events such as Woodstock or Lollapalooza can even define a generation.  

Historical events like the Vietnam War are said to have a soundtrack - the background upon which the action can be displayed and experienced. The soundtrack in films give life and meaning and motion to the story, pulling our emotions to feel with the characters. Emotional soundtracks are used in video gaming making the digital experience  an affective one. Sometimes our real and virtual worlds sound too fast and loud and we can conceive of ( and perhaps long for) empty places or emotions as having the sound of silence.

This class will attempt to hear 'America singing,' sputtering, moaning, wailing, rapping, groaning, and screeching to get at the meanings of these soundscapes. We will listen to each other's interpretations of our weekly topics and the buzzing of our discussions should form a particular soundscape that may just be conducive to considering culture not only with our eyes, but also with our ears.

This course traces the history of what is perhaps the most distinctive region in the USA from its colonization to the present. Topics to be covered include the initial problematic encounters between Europeans and Native Americans, black-white race relations from slavery onward, and the evolution of many if not all the styles of American popular music. Additionally, there will be a survey of aspects of the literature, religion, and language of the South.

Fantasy and Science Fiction are typically ridiculed as escapist dreams produced for teenagers. Indeed, they are often seen as the ”lowbrow, popular, pulp, childish and lightweight poor relation of more highbrow, grownup and serious forms based on the realist (mimetic) arts.” (Jacqueline Furby and Claire Hines) In recent years, however, with the upsurge of interest in the fantasy film, a number of academic studies that deal with a wide range of issues rooted in the fantasy and science fiction genres have documented a shift in academic perception. In keeping with this shift, this course will offer an in-depth look at both genres, supplying theoretical and contextual approaches with the help of which the complex imagery of the science fiction and fantasy film can be decoded. We will then use these insights to analyse popular science fiction and fantasy films (Star Wars, the Harry Potter films, The Lord of the Rings trilogy etc.), treating them not as entities devoid of social commentary (hence the title of the course, Other Worlds?) but as products of dominant values, beliefs and fears and thus as cultural products deeply rooted in our world.


Course requirements will be discussed in our first session.

Die Veranstaltung findet wöchentlich Di 12.00-13.30 h in
B6, 30-32, Bauteil E-F, Raum 406 statt.

This seminar is a methods course which brings together the two notions of corpora and linguistics. A corpus is a large collection of 'texts', which is searchable for several linguistic phenomena via a number of tools. With the methodology of corpus linguistics we study language based on examples of authentic language use.

The course will introduce the notion of corpora, which types there are and what they can be used for. We will work extensively with the corpora available at the Brigham Young University (BYU).
We will also touch on topics such as productivity, frequency and statistics.

Before the course begins, think about a small-scale topic you want to investigate. Send it to me before the first session.

Please register here: https://www.english-corpora.org/profile_new.asp?n=y
Should the registration not work or the access is denied, contact me as early as possible!

Marketing communication and research heavily rely on language. Advertisers use language to convince consumers to buy a certain product. Market researchers ask consumers what they think about a product or what kind of product consumers think they need. Obviously, the success of such marketing efforts depends on linguistic and psycholinguistic processes.
The application of psycholinguistic theory to marketing communication has become a topic of great prominence in consumer research. The use of certain linguistic structures triggers psychological reactions such as attention, emotion and memory. In this course, we build up psycholinguistic background knowledge and simultaneously analyze recent language-related consumer behavior research. Selected topics are:

• Interfaces between language, cognition and consumer behavior
• How principles of sound symbolism and human word recognition can inform brand name construction
• How needs, expectations and ethics determine the potentials and limits of subliminal advertising
• How linguistic framing manipulates consumer decision-making
• How exploiting semantic relations provides structure for consumer learning
• How flouting the Maximes of Conversation influences persuasive communication
• How conceptual metaphors influence marketing communication
• How bilingual language processing affects cognitive and emotional consumer reactions
• How narrative structure in commercials affects consumers’ emotions and memory

The course uses a practical approach and continuously shows how theory and research evidence are relevant to analyze and criticize authentic examples from marketing practice. Moreover, we work on three extensive case studies that allow students to integrate and productively apply the course content. The cases involve developing a brand name for a pharmaceutical product, building an awareness campaign for a non-profit organization and creating a story for a crowd-sourcing campaign of a start-up company. The cases simulate agency pitches, where students work in small teams, present and peer-vote to select the best campaign.

A central part of the course is that student teams conduct their own research project building on previous research discussed in class.

In 1990, James Nicoll, an alleged Usenet personality, stated that “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary” (Nicoll, James (1990-05-15). “The King’s English”. rec.arts.sf-lovers)
What the author quite boldly states here is that English has been heavily influenced by contact with other languages which is likely to have changed the language to a considerable degree. This is why we will investigate these two phenomen­a–language contact and language change–in depth. We will take a look at what can change in a language (lexicon, phonology, morphology, morphosyntax, syntax, semantics, information structure) as well as the internal and external factors that explain changes. We will also deal with a number of models and theories to explain both phenomena.

Through language we, as speakers and writers, create social and institutional realities, i.e. we can “change the world via words” (Yule 1996:53). This is most obvious in situations such as wedding ceremonies, where one’s status changes from being single to being married because a person legitimized to do so made a statement to that effect, or in legal courts, where presumed innocence is replaced by “guilty” because a jury or judge “said so”. Whatever is said may have important, though not always legal, consequences, such as discussions among physicians trying to agree on a diagnosis or treatment, board meetings, or managers formulating a performance appraisal, which usually causes consequences for people or organizations. Clearly, language is crucial in negotiations, with the outcome dependent on the rhetorical and persuasive strategies of those involved, not to forget translators and interpreters if more than one language is involved.
This interdisciplinary seminar brings together linguistic and organizational theories (represented by the two instructors) in order to investigate the role of discourse strategies (i.e. lexical choice, speech acts, presuppositions, implicature, framing, narratives, style) in the context of organizational communication. But we will also take into account so-called “risk communication” (for instance cockpit communication) and legal language, both requiring a high degree of clarity, for obvious reasons, rather than face-saving strategies, which are called for in other communicative contexts in order to reach a consensual outcome.

“We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.” (Margaret Atwood) To explore the question why women are still underrepresented in leading positions in corporate America, we will read texts from the social sciences and economics, but we will also focus on the cultural presuppositions underlying the difficulties for women to reach the top. One central stereotype is that assertiveness is still mainly attributed to men and nurturance to women. The topic will also be investigated by reading the following novels - Martha McPhee's Dear Money (2010), Jack Dougherty's Corporate America (2013), and Jillian Medoff's This Could Hurt (2018). In addition, some movies and documentaries concerning the topic will be discussed.
The seminar depends on the active participation of the students and will explore alternative formats such as workshop, possibly an invited speaker, and self-organized sessions.

“Plant studies” is a very recent branch of critical inquiry in literary and cultural studies which entered public discourse in 2013 with Michael Pollan's article “The Intelligent Plant” (The New Yorker). Pollan is one among several critics who deplore our “plant-blindness”.” They argue that plants make up ninety-nine percent of the biomass on earth and are the source of all life. Interestingly, plants have only played a minor role in Western literature and art, serving mostly as symbols or decoration. Plants, however, are not only “a what but also a who” (Michael Marder) whose ontology is radically different from that of humans or animals. They, too, so scholars argue, have senses, communicate among each other, can remember, make choices - but in amazingly strange ways.
In this seminar we will explore various approaches to plants in Western (mostly American) literature and ask how a revised understanding of plants may contribute to a new conception of our place in the natural environment. We will investigate literature that depicts plants beyond their symbolic function and analyze so-called “killer plants” in science fiction (Wyndham Lewis, The Day of the Triffids); agricultural plants and the issue of genetic engineering (Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation); and the amazing life of trees (Richard Powers, The Overstory).

Fancy English drama? Addicted to contemporary performance? Crave a peep behind the scenes? Love to immerse yourself in the magic that is live theatre? Whether theatre junkie or not, if any of the aforementioned questions apply to you -- then you are completely right here, in this seminar!
The project seminar “Uni Meets Theatre” will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for you. You won't just discuss drama as a literary text. You will experience it live, taking part in a collaboration with what has become an institution of Mannheim's artistic scene: the biannual theatre festival HEREANDNOW!
In days like these, in times of looming Brexit, in which European borders have become ever more visible, and nations as well as societies internally split, it is more important than ever to surmount national divides and bridge institutional chasms. This is what the theater/haus G7 hosts of the 2020 HEREANDNOW festival do when they -- despite all political odds -- fervently stick to inviting UK artists to Germany. And this is what you, a participant of this project seminar, will do when you leave the ivory tower of the Mannheim Palace to go out there and immerse yourself in the world of contemporary performance.
If you need any questions answered prior to our first meeting, please drop by my office or write an e-mail to c.schwanecke@uni-mannheim.de. But, please, always remember one crucial theatre wisdom famously put forth in Shakespeare in Love (1998):
“HENSLOWE: The natural condition [of making theatre] is one of unsurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Believe me, to be closed by the plague is a bagatelle in the ups and downs of owning a theatre.
FENNYMAN: So what do we do?
HENSLOWE: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
FENNYMAN: How?
HENSLOWE: I don't know. It's a mystery.”

Die Veranstaltung findet in EW 167 statt.

This seminar will only take place until the end of March. There will be weekly class sessions combined with weekly online sessions/assignments.

Narrative (novels, short stories, films etc.) have always been in contact with and been influenced by other logics of signification, for example play, ritual, spectacle, data etc. In this seminar we will explore
some of the overlaps, border zones, and distinctions between narrative and non-narrative forms by engaging the theoretical concept of 'liminality' to conceptualize the ways in which narrative transgresses, morphs into, and productively engages with such other modes of meaning-making. We will look at the forms, aesthetics as well as the cultural work and politics of narrative liminality by looking into such diverse examples as gamebooks, detective fiction, action movies, cosplay etc.

How do businesses react to the changing global political landscape - the emerging limits to globalisation? This course examines the relationship between businesses and society in advanced industrial economies and Asia - focussing on key issues and recent developments.