GERST 6470 - [Post-War German Literature from 1945 to 1989]

Fall or Spring. Next Offered: 2020-2021. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Prerequisite: reading knowledge of German and graduate student status or instructor permission. Anchor course.

L. Adelson.

This seminar/anchor course will focus on German literature during the period of the cold war between 1949 and 1989, with some attention paid to both the immediate aftermath of World War II and the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The course will trace major themes, styles, and strategies of representation in German-speaking literature, East and West, in light of contemporaneous events of broad cultural and political significance. Individual texts will be examined within their specific aesthetic, historical, and geopolitical contexts, and key critical debates will also be considered concerning such topics as narrative, dramatic, and fictional representations of the immediate past; writing, media, and social change; attempts by minority and majority voices to challenge the canon; the reconstruction of a national cultural identity; gender, postmodernity, and postcolonialism. Readings will be selected from authors such as W. Borchert, H. Böll, G. Grass, U. Johnson, I. Bachmann, W. Koeppen, A. Andersch, P. Celan, P. Handke, F. Dürrenmatt, W. Hildesheimer, H. Keilson, A. Schmidt, C. Wolf, P. Weiss, H. Müller, V. Braun, C. Hein, I. Morgner, J. Becker, H. Enzensberger, A. Kluge, P. Schneider, B. Strauss, A. Duden, M. Maron, E. Özdamar, Z. Senocak, and U. Widmer.