Academic Orientation of the Chair

The goal of teaching in the department of English Literary Studies is to move beyond an excellent knowledge of primary texts as well as proficiencies in literary and cultural history in order to highlight connections and discursive intersections between Literary Studies on the one hand and Cultural, Media, and Gender Studies, as well as Philosophy and Aesthetics on the other. In doing so, the interdependence and the 'intertwinedness' of the various disciplines is gradually elucidated (after all, Literary Studies always invariably includes aspects of Cultural and Media Studies, Semiotics and Linguistics). Our teaching, thus, favours an approach based on a broad media concept, which functions as a bridge between the disciplines, and on a deconstructivist view on writing. This approach asks how literary texts (and the arts in their totality) produce a particular brand of knowledge.

The Chair of English Literary Studies supports and teaches narratological/structuralist, discourse-analytical, semiotic, socio-historical/contextual, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, constructivist/deconstructivist/post-structuralist, phenomenological, media-theoretical and film-theoretical concepts and approaches, as well as gender and masculinity studies.

On the one hand, this allows students to acquire a profound knowledge of methods and the ability to reflect on the same; on the other hand, it allows them to deduce more general, universally applicable findings from the results of their studies. This is facilitated by the fact that our research topics include not only canonised texts but also increasingly neglected or marginalised literature, popular culture, as well as functional texts which are indicative of paradigms of thought, discourses and sets of values common to a certain historical era. These forms of texts delineate how everyday life outside fictionally described realities is shaped and experienced.