17387

HS-Negotiating Gender: Queering the Sublime

Jennifer Wawrzinek

Kommentar

In the eighteenth century, William Wordsworth proclaimed the sublime as the most important experience that one could have. At its heart was a confrontation with, and an overcoming of enormous power. It was a process that left one with a heightened sense of self in opposition to the world, and moreover, an awareness of the divine capabilities of one’s own mind. The sublime was, then, a process of empowerment. It gave the self a sense of agency and a clear sense of opposition to the material world. It was also a process that was gendered distinctly masculine and that delimited women and the feminine to the realm of the beautiful and the domestic. In the twentieth century, the events of the holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, provided what seemed to some as the horrific culmination of earlier attempts to transcend the world. Rather than discard the sublime as unethical, however, postmodern models of the sublime shift the focus from a fixed transcendental order to one that is contingent and plural, emphasizing an ethical relationality rather than dispossession and overcoming. The transport of earlier accounts is harnessed as a means of transformation, but without the reinstitution of the boundaries that delineate gendered (and other) differences.

This course examines the ways in which postmodern writers, thinkers and performers have rearticulated the binary oppositions of the traditional sublime as a form of queering, thus allowing different gendered and sexual identities to co-exist in ethical relation. Students will be asked to consider how these various revisions of the sublime, together with their resituating of the body/mind relation, affect conceptions of the political and the ethical, and how they engage with questions surrounding otherness, silence, presence, absence. They will be asked to consider how these texts reimagine selves engaging with the world, and with others in that world.

NB: This subject is run in conjunction with MA-Ü 17388. Students are required to enrol in both parts of the module.

Set Texts:

Brossard, Nicole. Mauve Desert.
Yasbincek, Morgan. liv.

A course reader will be made available on Blackboard prior to the commencement of semester.

Schließen

12 Termine

Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung

Mo, 12:00 - 14:00 12 Termine

Mo, 14.04.2025 12:00 - 14:00

Dozenten:
Prof. Dr. Jennifer Wawrzinek