Moodle.UP

Dinosaurs are a relatively recent species: they hit the scene only in 1842, when British paleontologist Richard Owen coined that name as an umbrella to bring together a group of mysterious fossil findings that could not be assigned to any known animal species. The dinomania that soon hit Victorian Britain, culminating in the 1852 construction of a full fledged dinosaur park around the Crystal Palace, was only the first in a series of dinosaur booms in Western culture up to our own immediate present. The dinosaur, writes cultural theorist W.J.T. Mitchell, is much more important as a cultural object than as a scientific entity: it “changes its appearance and meaning in relation to transformations in modern political economies and to changes in scientific and technological paradigms”. As we will see in the course of the semester, the icon of the dinosaur often serves as a collective symbol through which the problem of progress and modernity is negotiated. 

Guided mainly by fiction, we will in our seminar reconstruct a couple of crucial transformations that the dinosaur as a cultural icon has undergone. Our corpus will range from extracts of the first (long forgotten) novels with dinosaurs in them to Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, from Conan Doyle’s The Lost World to its postcolonial rewriting in Mahasweta Devi’s haunting story of the inexplicable appearance of a pterodactyl in the hinterlands of central India.

The earth, the planet, the globe: does it matter what name we give to the world (already a fourth term!) we inhabit? Over the past twenty years or so, the awareness of living for better or worse in a globally interconnected world has intensified and become ubiquitous. Yet while globalization around the turn of the millennium seemed to promise the emergence of a borderless world-wide cosmopolis, today’s geopolitics is busy erecting new walls and militarizing old borders across the fault lines of poverty, race, citizenship and religion. The only phenomena that are still global seem to be transnational finance capital and the universal risks of climate change, melting pole caps, large-scale deforestation, rising sea levels and pandemics. Bleak prospects indeed that call for rigorous critique that may, hopefully, generate some alternate perspectives. In our seminar we will read and discuss a number of critical and creative, theoretical and artistic interventions that contribute to the ongoing construction of ‘the world’ – as planet, as globe, as earth, as …

We will read theoretical and activist texts by writers like Bruce Robbins, Rob Nixon, Gayatri Spivak, Naomi Klein, Hito Steyerl and Pheng Cheah, among others. Our literary corpus will include a story collection (Rana Dasgupta, Tokyo Cancelled), a novel (Mohsin Hamid, Exit West), and a piece of performance poetry (Kay Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos). 

Moodle-Kurs zur Absprache und Gestaltung der schulpraktischen Studien im Fach Englisch