THEORY AND IDEOLOGY

This year's lecture series has two central aims. To begin with, we want to provide an overview of literary and cultural theories and approaches: what they are, how they have developed, and how we use them. This is an area that students often express an interest in, but where it can be difficult to figure out where to begin. We don't just want to leave it at that, though. Theory can seem dry and abstract, devoid of emotion – or, to put it in a different light, cool, distant, and objective. We don't want to take theory's absolute objectivity for granted though. In this lecture series, we will look at each of the theories and methodologies presented in the context of ideology as well.

Some theories have a certain ideology very obviously at their core – think for instance of feminist or Marxist scholarship. But what about formalism, poststructuralism, or narratology? Are there inherent ideological baselines to reader-response criticism or distant reading? There are questions which will stay with us throughout the semester. Should academic research, and therefore theory and academic approaches, be objective? Is that even possible? What are the risks of ideological approaches – and what are those of presumably non-ideological ones? Which ideologies may be tucked away within scientific methodologies? Hopefully, as the semester progresses, we will be able to add more facets and viewpoints to our discussion – to which you will be invited to contribute for half an hour at the end of each individual lecture.

As always, this will be a joint venture featuring different members of the English Department in individual sessions. This means that you will benefit not only from expertise in different subsections of literary history, theory and methodology, but also from different voices and points of view every week.

Organisation: Annika Elstermann