Courses
Complete information on course offerings can be found at Vorlesungsverzeichnis.
The website for the courses below can be found on the TUD course platform OPAL (Fakultät SLK --> Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik --> Literatur Nordamerikas).
Winter 2025/26
Black Horror Cinema (Ingwersen)
Horror film has long served as a mirror of cultural anxieties, staging collective fears in forms that are at once exaggerated and symbolic. At any given time, the cinematic construction of monsters—whether ghosts, zombies, mutants, vampires, cannibals, or psychopaths—reveals much about hegemonic norms, including what is considered desirable, what is repressed, and who or what is cast as Other. American horror film, in particular, is notorious for its reliance on racial and gendered stereotypes. More often than not, its gaze has been a White gaze, evident in portrayals of Black masculinity as an animalistic threat, depictions of Voodoo in early zombie films, and the disturbingly frequent trope that “the Black guy dies first.” At the same time, horror has provided a space for social critique, resistance, and the articulation of nonhegemonic forms of subjectivity and agency. This course takes the contemporary renaissance of Black Horror Cinema, or Black Neo-Horror—exemplified by films such as Jordan Peele’s celebrated allegory of liberal racism Get Out (2017), Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021), or Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025)—as an occasion to explore the long tradition of Black filmmakers, performers, and audiences mobilizing the horror genre to confront racial oppression, reckon with collective trauma, imagine social change, center positive portrayals of Blackness, or just have fun. We will consider “Black horror” in its multiple registers: the historical reality of Black life in America as itself a form of horror; films made by Black filmmakers who use the genre for critique or reinvention; works featuring Black actors and characters; and the significance of audience and reception—how Black viewers have interpreted, resisted, or reclaimed horror.
Through screenings of Night of the Living Dead (1968), Ganja and Hess (1973), Tales from the Hood (1995), Candyman (1992 and 2021) and Get Out (2017), the course will pair key examples of Black Horror Cinema with foundational texts in Black Studies, African American history, and Film Theory.
All films will be screened at selected cinemas in Dresden outside the regular course slot (friends invited).
"We Were Punk First:" The Cultural Politics of Indigenous Popular Music (Ingwersen)
Framed by the increasing visibility and reception of Indigenous writers, filmmakers, scholars, and artists who over the past decade have come to reclaim and transform Indigeneous presence in Canadian and American popular culture, this course will dive into the cultural politics of contemporary Indigenous popular music. Like all forms of cultural expression, popular music unfolds through a complex interplay of history, politics, aesthetics, reception, and power, playing a central role in the formation and transformation of cultural identities over time. Featuring genres and styles that include hip hop, classical music, indie rock, electronica, and punk rock, we will look at award-winning bands and artists such as Jeremy Dutcher (Wolastoqiyik), Tanya Tagaq (Inuit), Snotty Nose Rez Kids (Haisla), Black Belt Eagle Scout (Swinomish/Iñupiaq), The Halluci-Nation (Mohawk and Cayuga), and Dead Pioneers (Pyramid Lake Paiute), all of whom in different ways center Indigenous resistance, healing, and flourishing in the present against ongoing colonial imaginaries shaped by anachronistic, racist, and disempowering stereotypes. Many of the artists introduced in this course explicitly confront these stereotypes and remediate the traumatic legacies of settler-colonial oppression and forced assimilation, while revitalizing cultural traditions, and embodying the hybrid realities of contemporary Indigenous life. Drawing on insights in Indigenous Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Affect Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, we will follow an intermedial approach that considers music and lyrics alongside music videos, album art, and other paratextual and contextual material.
This course will include an (optional) field trip to the Karl-May Museum in Radebeul on October 17 and an in-person visit by Gregg Deal, a multimodal Indigenous artist and singer of the celebrated punkrock band Dead Pioneers in January.
Sommer 2025
American Dystopia (Ingwersen)
At a time when civil rights are being revoked, environmental protections dismantled, immigrants deported without due process, and tech billionaires entrusted with restructuring the government—all under the banner of saving the country from what the president has termed ‘American carnage’—this course will engage with American imaginations of dystopia. As the American historian Jill Lepore writes in 2017, we live in "a golden age for dystopian fiction."
Dystopia can be approached as a literary genre, a structure of feeling, and already lived reality for some. As one of the most popular modes of speculative fiction—particularly resonant in times of environmental crisis, right-wing resurgence, and surveillance capitalism—dystopia is deeply rooted in the modern literary tradition of political critique. Examples such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), or Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) are among the most widely read literary works of the twentieth century and readily invoked whenever authoritarianism rears its head. Dystopian fiction entertains the counter-factual as a warning: What if this happened here? What if current developments continue? What if things were (slightly) different? What if this became real? How can we avert this?
As a structure of feeling, dystopia can be mobilized for ambivalent political ends. It has been used to foment fears—frequently racialized—of an invasion, a domestic threat, or social decline to introduce authoritarian or repressive policies. It can also be used to describe the everyday experience of vulnerable populations currently living under conditions of settler colonialism, transphobia, religious fundamentalism, environmental collapse, and white supremacy. But dystopian imaginations also feature glimmers of hope and resilience—portrayals of communities and individuals who survive and resist.
Following the SF scholar Fredric Jameson, who insists that speculative fiction does not give us images of the future but serves to “defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present” (Archaeologies of the Future, 2005), this course will engage literary examples of American dystopia that may help us understand and critically reflect on developments in the contemporary moment.This is a reading-intensive course and students are required to submit regular reading responses. Our course texts include three novels:
- It Can’t Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis, depicting the rise of a fascist populist leader in the United States.
- The Future of Another Timeline (2019) by Annalee Newitz, chronicling the adventures of queer-feminist time-travelers trying to change history to save women’s rights in the present.
- Goliath (2022) by Tochi Onyebuchi, imagining diverse communities struggling to rebuild Earth’s crumbling cities amidst environmental collapse after most White people have left for space
Queerness and Radical Thought for Future Visions of America (Engelmann-Kewitz)
Issues in American Literature: Nature and Technology (Ingwersen)
From Puritan constructions of wilderness to the colonization of Mars, the North American imaginary is fundamentally shaped by ambiguous and interconnected attitudes towards nature and technology. While ideas of “Nature” have been employed to both legitimize Indigenous displacement and anchor American constructions of freedom and self-reliance, visions of technology oscillate between fantasies of techno-utopia and deep-seated anxieties around ecological catastrophe and the disruptions of humanist subjectivity. Sketching a trajectory from the early modern period to the present, this survey lecture offers a framework for understanding the intersection of environmental and technological imaginaries as central to the development of North American literature and key to historicizing the cultural conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives from ecocriticism, critical posthumanism, and speculative fiction studies, we will explore the continuities and ruptures that lead from romanticist views of the sublime to Golden Age science fiction, from the figure of the pioneer to the engineer and space cowboy, from the environmental aesthetics of modernism to cyberpunk and ecological entanglement, from the machine age to the technosphere and climate fiction, from the colonial politics of wilderness to environmental justice movements and Indigenous futurism. With examples from a broad range of genres and modes (incl. nonfiction essays, poetry, novels, short stories, film, and music), we will revisit key stages of the North American literary tradition and explore critical dialogues with decolonial and feminist critiques of North American progress narratives and poetics of environmental placemaking.
Reading Waste (Engelmann-Kewitz)
Welcome to the Wasteocene, where waste is more than just a byproduct of modern life - it shapes our world in profound ways. From overflowing landfills, crude oil spills, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the (almost) invisible spread of microplastics and toxic pollutants, waste is a constant presence in the environment, often revealing the legacies of past societies and exposing the inequities of contemporary infrastructures. But waste is not just something we throw away. Discarded materials, elements and things, as well as the undesired byproducts of consumption, are legible, readable, and ever-present in our cultural productions, from literature and film to art and theory. We will thus ask questions such as how do different literary genres tell the story of how objects become compromised in value, and how (discarded) objects and materials can tell a story about human desires and needs. Moving beyond that, we will further explore how waste functions as a lens for understanding colonialism, environmental degradation, and the toxicity embedded in our landscapes.
With the help of recent theories in environmental humanities, we will consider how waste is not just a physical problem but a cultural one, challenging us to rethink how we live with the discarded materials that define our age. In this advanced literary studies seminar, we will read a mix of theoretical texts and literary works that address waste, pollution, and the resulting environmental crises of our time. From fictional narratives to nonfiction accounts from the U.S. and beyond, we’ll explore possibilities to make sense of the ever-growing presence of waste in our world and what it means for the future of our planet.
Athmospheric ImaginAIRies: Literature and the Elements III (Ingwersen)
Breathe in. Breathe out. With every breath we inhale the world and produce atmospheres. Air envelops and suffuses us; it transmits our voice, weighs on our mood, animates our dreams, articulates our weather, and circulates our traces across the planet. While airs are always shared, they are also uneven. For some, atmospheres are toxic and oppressive, while for others they are buoyant and invigorating. The same wind that carries pollen and song birds also carries dust and chemical pollutants. How do we encounter these atmospheres? The Latin word for breath—spiritus—informs the meanings of inspiration, respiration, spirit, and conspiracy. In many literary traditions, storms are harbingers of doom, but also an animating force. As an atmospheric medium, air ceaselessly flows between between nature and culture, body and world, matter and imagination. And yet, it remains largely invisible.
In this course, we will learn to recognize air as a ubiquitous medium of cultural imaginaries—a matter of politics, material entanglements, narrative, and metaphor. As the third installment in the “Literature and the Elements” seminar series, which already featured a focus on Water (2023) and Earth (2024), this seminar will revolve around literary and cultural engagements with Air and Atmospheres. In dialogue with theoretical frameworks such as elemental ecocriticism, environmental media theory, the atmospheric humanities, and feminist materialisms, we will encounter various examples of atmospheric relations in poetry, fiction, art, and science to, ultimately, create our own Atmospheric ImaginAiries.This course requires an openness to become creative and experiment with practice-based methods and reading practices.
A key feature of this course is a conversation with the ongoing special exhibition “The Air We Share” at the German Hygiene Museum Dresden. Our semester will begin with a collective exhibition visit (in our first session) and feature several special events around the exhibition, including an artist workshop, a film screening, and public roundtables on geoengineering and atmospheric justice with interdisciplinary guests.
Winter 2024/25
Geostories: Literature and the Elements II (Earth) (Ingwersen)
This seminar includes a mandatory field trip and special events, please see dates below
This course will conclude on December 17.
In March 2024, after 15 years of intense and public deliberation, the International Union of Geological Sciences voted against the formal adoption of “the Anthropocene” as a new geological epoch that marks the irreversible human impact on planetary climate systems over the past centuries. However, the introduction of the term had struck a nerve and has become an extremely productive and influential travelling concept between the sciences and humanities to help frame human-environment relations in times of climate catastrophe, species extinction, biodiversity loss, environmental racism, and industrial resource extraction. Suddenly “humanity” was understood as an agent at geological timescales, and earth systems had become vibrant actors in the unfolding of planetary geostories.
In this seminar, we will take the convergence between the human and the geologic as a starting point to trace what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls “human-lithic enmeshments” through literature and the arts. What does it mean to become geologic? How do we tell the stories of rocks and minerals as agents in more-than-human economies, ecosystems, metabolisms, pasts and futures? How do we engage a geopoetics attuned to the timescales of mountains, stones, and plate tectonics? Can we make kin with the earth’s crust? What are the colonial geologics of extraction, transformation and distribution at work in the alchemy of petroculture and fossil capitalism? How can we find the lithic in us and the living in the stone?
As the second installment in the “Literature and the Elements” seminar series, which started with a focus on water in the winter of 2023, this course will revolve around site-specific and practice-based engagements with stories of our lithic, petric, and geologic relations. A key feature of this seminar is an interdisciplinary field trip to Lausche (Zittau Mountains) with Dr. Jörg Büchner, a geologist from the Senckenberg Museum Görlitz, and colleagues and students from the TUD geography department. This trip will take place on October 18 and is mandatory for all participants of this course. In dialogue with theoretical frameworks such as elemental ecocriticism, environmental media theory, the lithic humanities, petrocultures, Critical Indigenous Studies, and feminist materialisms, we will spend the subsequent weeks encountering selected examples of geostories in literature and the arts to, ultimately, create our own Inventory of Geostories. This course requires an openness to be creative and to experiment with various modes of artistic research creation.
To familiarize themselves with these themes, prospective students are encouraged to have a look at this curated collection of examples and quotes on “geologic subjectivity” from theory, literature, and art: Geologic Subjectivity: A Speculative Glossary of Earthly Estrangements in Theory and Fiction.
The regular course slot is Tuesday, 14:50-16:20 (see dates below), with select, mandatory special events. The number of course participants is limited. Please only enroll, if you can make it to all special events:
| Friday, Oct 18, 7:30-17:00 | Field Trip Lausche (Zittau Mountains) |
| Thursday, Nov 7, 16:00-19:00 | Student Exhibition Visit (Arts Space Wilsdrufer Str.) |
| Wednesday, Nov 13, 18:30-20:30 | Energy Humanities Roundtable (Arts Space Wilsdrufer Str.) |
The course will conclude on December 17 (no sessions in 2025).
Lecture: Issues in American Literature - Nature and Technology (Ingwersen)
From Puritan constructions of wilderness to the colonization of Mars, the North American imaginary is fundamentally shaped by ambiguous and interconnected attitudes towards nature and technology. While ideas of “Nature” have been employed to both legitimize Indigenous displacement and anchor American constructions of freedom and self-reliance, visions of technology oscillate between fantasies of techno-utopia and deep-seated anxieties around ecological catastrophe and the disruptions of humanist subjectivity. Sketching a trajectory from the early modern period to the present, this survey lecture offers a framework for understanding the intersection of environmental and technological imaginaries as central to the development of North American literature and key to historicizing the cultural conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives from ecocriticism, critical posthumanism, and speculative fiction studies, we will explore the continuities and ruptures that lead from romanticist views of the sublime to Golden Age science fiction, from the figure of the pioneer to the engineer and space cowboy, from the environmental aesthetics of modernism to cyberpunk and ecological entanglement, from the machine age to the technosphere and climate fiction, from the colonial politics of wilderness to environmental justice movements and Indigenous futurism. With examples from a broad range of genres and modes (incl. nonfiction essays, poetry, novels, short stories, film, and music), we will revisit key stages of the North American literary tradition and explore critical dialogues with decolonial and feminist critiques of North American progress narratives and poetics of environmental placemaking.
Critical Disney (Gatermann)
-- Block Seminar: 28.10. 3.DS (11:10-12:40); 04.11. 3.DS–5.DS (11:10-16:20); 05.11. 3.DS-5.DS (11:10-16:20); 18.11. 3.DS-5.DS (11:10-16:20); 19.11. 3.DS–5.DS (11:10-16:20)
It is almost impossible to clearly delineate what we mean when we say “Disney” – the iconic signature that might appear in our mind’s eye is evocative of so many things all at once: the man, Walt, an embodiment of the American dream with his ‘from-rags-to riches’ story; the Studios that have produced many generations worth of cultural imagination; theme parks that claim to be “the happiest places on earth”; a canon of popular films with immense mass cultural impact; an ideology that has global reach. Disney’s mythology and cultural capital is dependent on and imbricated in all these manifestations and more, establishing “Disney” almost as a metonym for “America”.
Disney is especially associated with adapting well-known fairy tales and developing their own “Disney version.” But rather than contributing to a diverse and ever-growing body of fairy tale adaptations, many critics feel that Disney films dominate the form in such a way that their renditions take over and rewrite the source text and any other versions. Considering their global reach of audiences, this has immense mass cultural implications. In this seminar, we will take a look at a range of Disney movies across time from the earlier classics to more contemporary reimaginings and explore their ideological charge, reading them both against earlier versions as well as against a selection of key texts in critical theory: How do these Disney films imagine gender roles, how do they represent race? How do they use aesthetics and music to guide our emotional experiences? What imaginative spaces do they open up, and what do they make us hope and dream for? And how have these things changed over time?
"Pioneers! O Pioneers!" Imaginations of the Frontier in American Culture from the late 19th to the 21st century (Engelmann-Kewitz)
In this seminar, we will investigate what shaped and continues to shape cultural imaginations of the Frontier in North America. Why is the imagination of the Frontier so closely linked to ideas of wilderness and what constitutes a stereotypical pioneer? What gets misrepresented and left out of those imaginations? How has the idea of the Frontier changed and developed over time and how – if so – is it relevant for contemporary culture? What does it imply to speak of something or someplace as “the last Frontier”? And, most important of all, how can we critically engage with these ideas in American Cultural Studies?
Starting in the late 19th century with we will cover a wide range of textual and visual examples from both settler colonial (e.g. Jack London, Willa Cather, Owen Wister, John Steinbeck, Aritha van Herk) and Indigenous (e.g. Getrude Bonin, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, Trevino L. Brings Plenty) viewpoints. Looking at different means and modes of narration and interpretation, we will identify patterns and divergences. Furthermore, we will explore how we can link these ideas together and relate them to issues of migration, climate crises and even “space cowboys”. As the seminar progresses, we will hence trace how pioneers and the Frontier are no longer only associated with wilderness, but also with questions of energy supplies, global shipping routes and, increasingly, technological revolutions, ideas of space exploration and terraforming.
Summer 2023
Critical Worldbuilding | Kritische Weltbildung (Ingwersen)
-- An interdisciplinary Project Seminar (Co-taught with: Nicole Raschke, Anke Schwarz)
Funded by TUD Environment Commission
Confronted with an escalating environmental crisis, an imperative to move away from fossil fuels, and persistent systems of social inequity, we need to find ways of building different worlds. This is a challenge for our imagination and for the ways we learn, think, and teach about human-world relations. How do we envision futures anchored in social justice and the transition toward cultural and ecological sustainability? What skillsets and modes of critical perception are required to increase our sense of environmental and social interdependence? How do we develop an embodied and situated understanding of systemic entanglements and consequences? And what does this mean for the disciplines we study, the values we cherish, and the unconscious patterns that drive our everyday behavior?
This seminar is designed as an experiment and a collaboration between the Chairs of North American Literature|Critical Future Studies, Human Geography, and Geography Education. Incorporating methods and critical concepts from the environmental humanities, speculative fiction, cultural geography, and transformative education, students will collaboratively imagine, develop, and test out a series of experimental activities that could foster eco-systemic awareness and critical world-building capacities in the context of higher education. Funded by the TU Dresden Sustainability Initiative, the seminar will take place in several block session (dates below) and is structured as a series of interactive workshops with external guests, presentation/discussion periods, and independent group work. Openness to reading texts in English, willingness to engage in creative group work with other students, and attendance at all workshop sessions (see dates below) is required. Selected results of this seminar will be presented at the annual conference of the Science Fiction Research Association and the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung at TU Dresden in August 2023.
Lecture: Topics in American Literature - Nature and Technology (Ingwersen)
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Disrupt! Resist! Activism in Fiction, Fiction as Activism (Gatermann)
The war in Ukraine, the overturning of Roe v Wade, the pandemic, the climate catastrophe – our present time seems rife with disruption. With its capacity to throw us into uncertainty and chaos, disruption seems like a destructive force, a threat to our way of life. But a look at the status quo – an ever-growing inequality between the economic classes, a continued oppression of women and queer people, systemic racism, and climate injustice, to name but a few – seems to demand drastic change. But what does it take to implement such change? Where does activism start? Is peaceful protest enough? What are the ethical limitations of civil disobedience? How to rewrite the history of the future?
In this course, we’ll take a look at how cultural production is negotiating these questions that are heatedly debated in current public discourse. Starting out with real-life issues and documentary footage, we will then turn towards science-fictional imaginaries to explore the utopian impulse in political activism. With its unique capacity to imagine otherwise, SF has the power to cut through our everyday reality and to radically disrupt what is thinkable. Operating outside of the limitations of mimetic realism, SF – via an estrangement of our perception, a slight shifting of the angle – can show us aspects of our social reality that previously seemed given, unshakable, unalterable and reveals their arbitrary nature. Thus, SF can be an agent against systemic oppression itself, empowering its readers, subverting the hegemonic narrative.
This course will take an intersectional approach and discuss issues of race, gender and sexuality. In this, we will explore different literary modes of resistance such as Indigenous Futurisms and Afrofuturism and draw on a variety of theoretical fields such as Postcolonial Studies, Black Feminism, and Critical Race Studies.
1973|2023: Age of Radical Uncertainty (Mehl)
50 years ago American future imaginaries were characterized by the looming threat of nuclear war, environmental collapse, social disruption, inflation, and an energy crisis. Doesn’t this sound all too familiar? Are we in a wormhole?In this seminar we ask if history just repeats itself or if in fact we never arrived in the future. Full speed ahead we’ll travel back to 1973. At the height of the environmental movement and counterculture, amidst cold war politics, the vietnam war and oil crisis; at the dawn of the information age and the end of the industrial age, this year is emblematic of the politics that profit from the condition that Alvin Toffler called future shock: “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” We will examine American postmodernist and techno-ecological art, design, architecture, literature, and film around the year 1973 to critically engage with the complex histories and roots of contemporary social transformation processes and the future imaginaries that shape them. From eco-fiction stories of forests in space to ecological cyborgs and architectural proposals of inflatable spaceships, we will analyze imagined strategies of surviving in a problematic world and the perception of threats they respond to.
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Winter 2022/23
Elemental Readings I: Water (Ingwersen)
This course is the first part of a series of seminars on the elements—water, earth, air, fire—in the literary and cultural imagination. In times of global heating and the increasing frequency and severity of droughts, wildfires, hurricanes and other extreme weather events, it becomes apparent that elemental forces do not reside in a pastoral background of our imagination but are vibrant and sometimes violent co-creators of planetary life-worlds. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of elemental ecocriticism, environmental media theory, the blue humanities, and feminist materialisms, we will engage literary texts that imagine worlds, bodies, aesthetics, politics, and futures shaped by water and fluid media. Alongside canonical climate fiction examples, the selection of texts will include Indigenous, Black, and queer-feminist perspectives on ways to reclaim, revision, and estrange relationships with water, ocean, flooding, and fluidity. Spaces of water are multiple. From rivers and oceans, to ponds, puddles, tears, and rain, water is a medium of life but also of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Its depths harbor an archive of toxins, merfolk, and octopi. It can be both monstrous and healing, highly symbolic and utterly strange. In this course we will explore this slipperiness and dive into genres of the watery imagination that include poetry, short stories, novels, and theory.
PLEASE NOTE: This course is supported by the TUD Diversity-Sensitive Teaching Award and is designed in dialogue with guest visits by speculative fiction author Rivers Solomon and the Indigenous writer and filmmaker Drew Hayden Taylor. The final list of has been posted on OPAL.
Winter 2022/23
Indigenous Horror (Ingwersen)
While Germany is wrapped up in debates about a new installation of Winnetou, Canada is reeling from the recent discovery of unmarked mass graves on the sites of former colonial residential schools and North American Indigenous writers continue to produce some of the best horror, gothic, and science fiction writing of the 21st century. This course will introduce students to award-winning examples of contemporary horror fiction by Indigenous writers from Canada and the U.S. who forcefully write against ongoing histories of settler-colonial violence and representational erasure. While the gothic and horror imaginary of both Canada and the U.S. is notorious for mobilizing Indigeneity as a clichéd trope in the service of white supremacy and colonial anxieties around otherness (from “savages” who inhabit the dark forest to the mysterious specters of “Indian Burial Grounds” or “shamanic” communication with the dead), horror fiction by Indigenous writers frequently builds on non-Western cosmologies to imagine colonialism as the ultimate site of the monstrous and negotiates contexts that range from resource extraction to residential school, and species extinction. With a focus on works that include Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild (2017), Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians (2020), Nathan Nigaan Noodin Adler’s Wrist (2016), and Jeff Barnaby’s zombie film Blood Quantum (2019), this course will engage Indigenous horror fiction as a versatile medium for a critical engagement with the colonial history of North American gothic traditions and current frameworks in Indigenous studies and post/de-colonial theory.
PLEASE NOTE: This course is supported by the TUD Diversity-Sensitive Teaching Award and will feature several virtual guest lectures and class visits from Indigenous scholars and authors (including the SF writer Drew Hayden Taylor, the horror author Nathan Adler, and the literary scholar Michele Lacombe). The final list of readings will be made available in the first session.
Imagining Reproductive Futures: Negotiating Fears, Injustices, and Paradoxes in North American Literature (Gatermann)
Reproductive rights are a highly contested ground for ideological battles. With the US Supreme Court’s ruling of June 24 of this year to overturn its own landmark decision Roe v Wade from 1973 which secured the constitutional right to abortion for 50 years, jurisdiction for its restriction is now once more within each State’s individual purview, thereby severely cutting into the autonomy of people with a uterus. Another less debated facet of reproductive rights is the subjugation and control of the reproductive bodies especially of women of color that has a long history in the United States where forced sterilization was practiced as late as 1975 (cf. Madrigal v Quilligan). Furthermore, new reproductive technologies have generated new cultural and political anxieties, resulting in an increasing use of technology to monitor and police women's bodies. Taken outside of the 'natural', normative procreative context, with the technological possibilities of cloning and genetic engineering, what will the future of the human species look like and who will control it?
Starting out with the status quo of the real-life situation of reproductive justice in the United States, we will, over the course of the semester, go on to explore the above questions by looking at science-fictional negotiations of societal fears surrounding this debate as well as the injustices that have been brought to bear on reproductive bodies. In her 1986 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood imagines a dystopian scenario where women’s bodies are strictly regulated and treated as state property – a contribution to the debate that is still highly relevant. Annalee Newitz’ novel The History of Another Timeline (2019) adds an intersectional perspective to the fight for women’s rights by bringing in queer and ethnically diverse points of view, and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017) imagines the fight for bodily and political autonomy from an Indigenous perspective. Finally, we will explore Afrofuturist takes on these questions with Octavia Butler’s short story “Bloodchild” (1984) and Nnedi Okorafor’s “Mother of Invention” (2018). Using these examples, we will take an intersectional approach and discuss issues of race, gender and sexuality within reproductive justice, for which we will draw on a variety of fields such as feminism, Black feminism, and critical posthumanism.
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SUMMER 2022
Ghosts in the Machine: Cultural Narratives of Artificial Intelligence (Ingwersen)
In the age of gendered voice assistants, machine learning, neuronal networks, predictive policing, and self-driving vehicles, the rhetoric of AI is virtually inescapable. Perhaps not suprisingly, the dream of intelligent machines has animated the imagination of artists, philosophers, writers, inventors, and scientists for millennia. From the Greek myth of Pygmalion and the figure of the Golem in Jewish Folklore, to the mechanical automatons in Victorian sideshows, Frankenstein’s creature, disembodied minds in cyberpunk, and visions of the robot as both apocalyptic menace and obedient servant, the specter of artificial intelligence informs some of the most iconic and productive narratives of modern culture. AI has always been a site where philosophy, science, and literature ceaselessly overlap, raising fundamental questions about intelligence and consciousness, autonomy and control, moral agency and responsibility, personhood and embodiment. Yet, the popular discourse around so-called “artificial intelligence” oftentimes obscures the material, environmental, and socio-political realities of large-scale computing infrastructures. AI narratives are haunted not only by visions of enigmatic minds and spirits inhabiting the machine but by the structures of oppression, exclusion, exploitation, and extraction that fundamentally shape the real-life consequences, mechanisms, and histories of AI systems.
Establishing a dialogue between science fiction texts and recent scholarship on AI in relation to race, gender, ecology, identity, and ethics, the aim of this course is to explore the continuities, tensions, gaps, and transformative potentials at the intersection of literary visions and social-political realities of AI. With a focus on American literature, we will revisit both key texts in the history of AI fiction and theory as well as recent innovative interventions in the genre that showcase mundane, absurd, queer, Indigenous, utopian, and disruptive conceptions of AI in order to critically examine some of the recurring themes and tropes that have come to shape the way we talk about the relationship between humans and “intelligent” machines.
This course starts on April 12 and will include a visit to the current exhibition on Artificial Intelligence at the German Hygiene Museum
Futures from the Margins: Diverse Perspectives in North American Speculative Fiction (Gatermann)
Science and technology shape our lives in fundamental ways, both on the large scale of global economies and public cultures and on the more intimate level of our individual interactions. SF not only provides us with the language to grapple with our extensive entanglements with technoculture, it also is a site of production, via utopian or dystopian imaginaries, of our visions of the future – in this way, it as much helps create reality it as it reflects it. Historically, SF has a heritage in colonial ideology, it’s narratives of exploration and scientific progress deeply interwoven with those of imperialist expansion and resource extraction. Arguably, though, one of the great strengths of this genre is its capacity to critically reflect on its own history and challenge and subvert its own hegemonic underpinnings. In recent years, production in speculative fiction has seen a veritable surge of non-Western perspectives that innovate the genre and infuse it with new life. In this course, we will explore a selection of such works: In her Binti trilogy, for example, Nnedi Okorafor challenges the Western bias against African countries that are often viewed as inferior in terms of technological innovation and scientific progress. Her Africanfuturist fictional world (a concept similar to Afrofuturism) blends African cultural heritage and tradition with a technologically saturated future. Another text we will examine for its critical potential is Larissa Lai’s novel The Tiger Flu (2018). In her imagining of a genetically engineered future posthuman species, clearly coded along racial lines as Asian, she subversively employs techno-Orientalist tropes in a way that implodes stereotypes and opens up a space for more inclusive counter-narratives.
Using these examples, supplemented by short stories, we will take an intersectional approach and discuss issues of race, gender and sexuality in contemporary North American culture. In this, we will draw on a variety of fields such as Postcolonial Studies, Black Feminism, and Critical Posthumanism.
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WINTER 2021/22
Global Weirding: Human-Environment Estrangement in Literature, Art and Theory (Ingwersen)
co-taught with Alison Sperling (TU Berlin)
Angela Merkel recently called the flashfloods that ravaged southwestern Germany in July 2021 “surreal and ghostly,” noting that the German language is at a lack for words to describe the disruptive impact of these climate events. Amidst extreme weather conditions, unpredictable wildfires and heat waves, torrential rainstorms, historic droughts, species extinction and the loss of biodiversity, acidifying oceans, microbial mutations, contaminated soils, and emergent superstorms, “the environment” or “nature” has become perhaps stranger than ever. The varying and often incomprehensible scales of the effects of climate change create disruptions of time and place that can be difficult to comprehend especially in the traditional registers of Euro-American nature-culture distinctions. The challenges of the climate crisis are also challenges of representation, language, epistemology, affect, and aesthetic experience. This course will engage these estrangements of human-environment relations as “global weirding,” a term coined in 2010 as an alternative to “global warming” to foreground the highly variable, site-specific, and erratic effects of climate change and environmental transformation.
In literary and cultural criticism, the concept of global weirding has found particular resonance in the study of “Weird fiction,” a subgenre at the intersection of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and surrealism with a long history in imagining estranged human-environment relations. While early writers of the weird have frequently derived their imagination of supernatural horror from xenophobic, racist, and misogynist tropes (most notably, H.P. Lovecraft), contemporary authors affiliated with what has been called “The New Weird” critically respond to the genre’s politically questionable roots and frequently engage the climate crisis in conjunction with questions of social justice. Drawing on a diverse range of examples from literature, art, and theory, students will be introduced to “the Weird” as an artistic-conceptual mode that holds potential for the development of ecological awareness by defamiliarizing views of the environment as controllable, passive, and separable from the human. “Global Weirding” signifies the erosion of boundaries and unsettlement of the human on a multiplicity of scales, which we will trace from the cosmic to the microscopic. Discussions of art and literature will be supplemented with readings from cultural theory on global weirding, the anthropocene, climate change, ecohorror, and the posthuman. The course aims to show how ecological weirdness in artistic practice, literary style, filmic mode, and theory works to estrange the self from so-called nature while simultaneously encouraging new forms of engagement with post- and more-than-human worlds.
International Format: This course will be co-taught by Moritz Ingwersen (TUD) and Alison Sperling (TU Berlin, ICI Berlin, AKV St. Joost, NL), an American scholar of speculative fiction, feminist theory, and the weird. It integrates a series of workshops with 5 North American experts on global weirding who will offer public guest lectures complementary to the seminar and engage in Q&A sessions with the students. This course may furthermore provide opportunities for virtual international dialogues with art and design students of the course “Ecology Futures” taught by Alison Sperling at St. Joost School of Art and Design, NL.
Crossing Lines in the Sundown Town: Afrofuturist SF as a Site of Resistance in Lovecraft Country (Gatermann)
Just returned home from the Korean War, young Black veteran Atticus has to go search for his father who has gone missing. Worried, he and his family embark on a road trip across a 1950s Jim Crow America bound for a small town in white supremacist “Lovecraft Country” where the horror of the Cthulhu-esque monsters is only surpassed by the lethal racism they encounter. In his 2016 novel, Matt Ruff negotiates science fiction’s racist past. While historically people of color, women and other ‘minorities’ have been marginalized and erased from – if not straight out vilified in - the genre, Ruff decenters the white perspective and uses generic tropes to reveal the horrors of structural racism that continue to threaten the lives of people of color in the US to this very day. In her acclaimed 2020 tv adaptation for HBO, Misha Green picks up Ruff’s objective and adds a resolutely intersectional perspective to it, tackling a wider array of issues of race, gender, sexuality, as well as weaving in rich intertexts that, in Afrofuturist manner, connect the past, present and the future to give voice to African American imaginings of a vision of a more inclusive future.
In this online seminar, we will explore the potential of science fiction to shed a critical light on our contemporary condition by shifting our perspective ever so slightly, thereby making our present look strange to us, opening up new angles to look from. Through this lens, we will discuss structural violence and issues of race, gender and sexuality – and how they intersect – in contemporary US culture. In this endeavor, we will take an interdisciplinary approach and explore concepts from a variety of fields such as Critical Race Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, and Black Feminism. Each of the primary texts, Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th, Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror film Get Out, Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country as well as Misha Green’s tv series of the same name, rely on unique representational modes, aesthetics, and techniques specific to their respective medium that help realize their affective impact that we will explore and consider.
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SUMMER 2021
North American Petrocultures (Ingwersen)
co-taught with Brent R. Bellamy (Trent University, ON) and Rachel W. Jekanowski (Memorial University, NL)
Seminar, Tuesdays, 16:40-18:10
The twentieth century has been called the American century and the American century was built on oil. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are confronted with the ecological repercussions of a modernity that was based on carbon energy and it has become imperative to envision a future beyond oil and fossil fuels. With a focus on North American literature (U.S., Canada, and Indigenous Nations), this course will introduce students to the cultural traces of petromodernity. More often than not, oil hides in plain sight. From road movies to plastic bags, oil products are ubiquitous in North American consumer culture. Yet, oil usually only enters public consciousness when it stops flowing or when it spills. Oil may be understood as the life blood of capitalist industry, the lubricant of the American way of life, and the fuel of ongoing settler-colonial land policies in Canada and the United States. It has also produced some of the most iconic and painful images of ecological devastation, imperialism, and environmental injustice. Petrocultures produce their own aesthetics—from burning oil fields, to gleaming chrome fenders, landscapes of extraction, and Indigenous pipeline protests. Against the backdrop of the global climate emergency and the dire need to imagine alternative energy futures, this course enables students to reflect on the impact of oil on their own life and to develop an awareness of how to look for the “energy unconscious” in art, culture, and politics. With an emphasis on works of literary fiction, we will engage with a wide variety of cultural texts, from science fiction, to graphic narratives, nonfiction film, and photography. Key theoretical readings will come from the emerging fields of the Energy Humanities and highlight themes such as environmental justice, petromodernity, petro-horror, slow violence, the post-apocalypse, Indigenous activism, and ecotopia.
This course will take place online. Attendance at synchronous weekly discussion sessions is optional but recommended. All mandatory credits can be fulfilled asynchronously. This is a reading-intensive seminar and students will be required to submit regular reading responses. This course will be co-facilitated with Dr. Rachel Webb Jekanowski and Dr. Brent Ryan Bellamy, two international experts in the field of petrocultures from Canada.
Issues in Canadian Literature: From Survival to Decolonization (Ingwersen)
Proseminar, Mondays, 16:40-18:10
Under the heading “Singular Plurality,” Canada is scheduled to be the Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2021. We will take this opportunity to spotlight Canadian literature with a focus on two central themes that link the beginnings of CanLit to the contemporary moment: survival and decolonization. Famously introduced by Margaret Atwood in 1972 as the leitmotif of the Canadian imagination, “survival” invokes the formation of Canadian identity as fundamentally shaped by confrontations with a hostile natural environment, resistance against American influence, and the challenges of competing internal nationalisms. Especially the past decade has seen an increased reckoning with Canada’s settler-colonial history and the amplification of First Nations, Metis, and Inuit voices in the negotiation of Canada’s cultural identity. Political rhetoric of reconciliation between the Canadian state and Indigenous Nations is increasingly met with wide-ranging calls for “decolonization” that address the ongoing structures of settler-colonial violence and institutional injustices against Canada’s Indigenous population. With a particular attention to feminist and decolonial voices, we will trace these related themes from constructions of the Canadian wilderness gothic to contemporary fiction by Indigenous writers who celebrate Indigenous resurgence, resistance, and futurity. The aim is to develop a nuanced, critical, and complex picture of contemporary Canadian literature beyond pop-cultural stereotypes. Discussions of literary texts will be complemented with considerations of painting, contemporary music, and recent governmental documents on the traumatic legacy of Canada’s residential school system.
This course will take place online. Attendance at synchronous weekly discussion sessions is optional but recommended. All mandatory credits can be fulfilled asynchronously. This is a reading-intensive seminar and students will be required to submit regular reading responses. The content of this course may complement but will not overlap with the Übung “Survey of Canadian Culture” offered by Prof. Dr. Georgi-Findlay.