Over the past decades, 'sleep studies' have become a major field of interdisciplinary research. Via an analysis of literary representations of sleep(lessness) and the sleeping/sleepless body, this seminar offers an approach to 'sleep studies' from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. Walt Whitman's poetry, Djuna Barnes's and Shelley Jackson's novels, as well as shorter pieces by Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald will serve as points of reference to ask ourselves some of the following questions:
What is sleep? What can literature tell us about sleep? Which metaphors are used in connection to sleep? How can we deal with what Nathaniel Wallace has called the "fundamental antagonism between sleep and narrative"? How is sleep controlled by external forces? Which social and cultural (sleep) norms are depicted in our texts? How are these norms constructed, deconstructed, questioned, and reconstructed in literature? Is there a transgressive potential to sleep? What do literary representations of sleep tell us about culturally and politically important categories like, e.g. the nation, the body, and sexuality? How do these meanings change from 19th-century early capitalism to 21st-century neo-liberalism?
Please buy and read the following books before the semester starts:
- Djuna Barnes Nightwood (1936) -
edition: Faber & Faber 2007, ISBN: 978-0571235285
(includes an introduction by Jeanette Winterson)
- Shelley Jackson Half Life (2006) -
edition: Harper Perennial 2007, ISBN: 978-0060882365
Further readings:
A course reader including Walt Whitman's poem "The Sleepers," shorter fiction, and theoretical texts on sleep and sleeplessness will be made available for purchase.
Course requirements: Regular attendance, active participation, reading and writing assignments, short oral presentation, graded term paper/ final written exam (depending on your Studienordnung). |
