American Guest Professor in Bamberg

In April 2013, American scholar and writer Tom Whalen will join our institute as international guest professor. In order to find out more about Tom Whalen, please see 

• his personal website http://www.tomwhalen.com/
• or his staff page at the institute website.

Dr. Whalen will teach 4 seminars (PS/ HS) on American literature and culture that are open to all students in our BA, MA and Lehramt programs. For more details on reading materials, please consult Univis (SoSe 2013).

Germany Through the American Cinematic Eye (PS Cult)

Time and Place: Wed 12:00 - 16:00, U9/01.11

In this course we will examine films that reflect on Germany during the era of National Socialism by such American directors as Borzage, Hitchcock, Welles, and Peckinpah, as well as directors from the German diaspora including Lubitsch, Lang, and Wilder. Careful attention will be given to the relationship between a film’s cinematic elements and its themes.

American Noir Fiction, Female Style (HS Lit or Cult)

Time and Place: Tue 18:00 - 20:00, MG1/02.06

Pulp crime fiction during the first two decades after WWII wasn’t limited to male writers, and not every femme was fatale. This course will examine five crime novels by women (Dorothy Hughes, Margaret Millar, Evelyn Piper, Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith), their takes on postwar America and the cultural issues associated with pulp fiction.

Major Issues in American Cultural Thought: Hermann Melville's "Benito Cereno" and Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man (HS Lit or Cult)

Time and Place: Wed 8:00 - 10:00, U5/00.24

The issue of race in American culture, specifically African American culture (from slavery to Brer Rabbit to American jazz), will be explored through a close study of these two essential texts of American thought.

Paranoid in the 1950s and 1960s: Novelists and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era (HS Lit or Cult)

Block seminar: May 24/25 and June 14/15. Time and Room t.b.a.

As David Cochran notes in his study America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era, in the 1950s and 60s modernism's oppositional tendencies were quickly co-opted by the cultural arbiters, that is, "the servants of the state." As a consequence, many of the significant writers and directors of the period went underground, into the disreputable genres of crime, science fiction, and horror.

This course focuses on four novels (The Killer Inside Me - Thompson, Beast in View Millar, The Crying of Lot 49 Pynchon, It Happened in Boston? Greenan) and four films (Angel Face Preminger, Bigger than Life Ray, Kiss Me Deadly Aldrich, The Birds Hitchcock) from a time "steeped in paranoia with humans at the mercy of vast forces beyond their control [. . .] a world both recognizable and frighteningly unfamiliar."