82-008-L-ANG04-V-S-SE2-0512.20252.001

Literary and Cultural History II (Amerikanistik): Love Me Tender, Love Me Cruel: Transgressive Aesthetics in American Literature

Seminar (präsent)

Englisch

20.10.2025 - 06.02.2026

Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät

Dietrich, René

Semesterbegleitende Prüfung

Hausarbeit

25 unbegrenzt

How does literature affect us? What does literature do to us? How does every reading of literature enter us, and either overcome or overstep, transcend or transgress our boundaries - and leave us a little bit changed afterwards? How might literature and our reactions even encompass contradictory states - such as kindness and cruelty - in ways that do not cancel each other out but become, in Edward Albee’s words, “the teaching emotion”? And how might this be even more the case, or reveal itself quite specifically, when the literary text itself embodies a transgressive aesthetic - such as the play from which Albee’s quote is taken?
These are the questions this course is interested in. We will explore them together reading texts of various genres from the beginning of the 20th century to today which push against limits, challenge conventions, and overwrite boundaries in terms of form, subject matter, and cultural norms. Doing so, these texts deliberately disrupt our own, often comfortably distant position as readers. But instead of judging them just as strange or upsetting for the sake of shock value, what happens when we see them as open and vulnerable by merging violence and tenderness in their aesthetics and in the ways they affect us as readers? This view would ask us to be open in our response, too - an openness dismissing nothing strange or unfamiliar or uncomfortable or even abject and disgusting just as an “other.” And in our course, we will look for ways to invite and navigate this openness.
By looking at texts from Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Edward Albee and Allen Ginsberg, from Frank Bidart to Denis Johnson, from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah to Casey Plett, and from Carmen Maria Machado to Ottessa Moshfegh, we will ask: What does modern American literary history look like through the lens of transgressive aesthetics? What do these texts say about, against, and beyond their cultural moment? And what can they teach us about literature’s affective force and its own form of love: is it tender or violent, kind or cruel, or maybe all of these at once?

Please purchase in advance: Denis Johnson. -Angels-, Vintage, 2003 [1977]
All other literature will be made available via ILIAS.

23.09.2025 -

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