Aufbauseminar Detectives on the Couch Psychoanalysing Anglophone Crime Fiction Do 12:30-14:00

***September 1, 2016:         Please note that this seminar is already oversubscribed. Students subscribing from today will be included in a waiting list.   IMPORTANT!!! Please note that this seminar ends in December 2016. To make up for the January sessions there will be one additional blockseminar day on December 16th. APs are ONLY possible as ORAL EXAMS (no papers)! From its beginnings around the turn of the 20th century, psychoanalytic literary criticism as an independent methodological paradigm has been a useful complement to the mainstream schools of literary theory. From Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to Slavoj iek, many successful attempts have been made to psychoanalytically analyse the structure of literary texts. The approach's central achievement the search for the unconscious and the latencies hidden in the psyche finds a striking analogy in detective fiction: the obvious parallel between the analyst (who digs deep into the unconscious of the analysand) and the detective. iek claims that: -[...] clues can of course be detected only if we put in parentheses the scene's totality of meaning and focus our attention on details. Holmes's advise [sic] to Watson not to mind the basic impressions but to take into consideration details echoes Freud's assertion that psychoanalysis employs interpretation en detail and not en masse.- With psychoanalytic literary criticism as base, we will in this seminar aim at deciphering structural similarities and genre expectations of detective fiction at its beginnings in the 19th century and and this will be the focus on its contemporary Anglophone variant. Primary Literature (in order of being read in class): Doyle, Arthur Conan: -Silver Blaze- and -The Red-Headed League- (available on Ilias) Christie, Agatha: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. London: HarperCollins 2007. Greenwood, Kerry: Cocaine Blues. Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press 2007 [1989]. ***This novel is also sold under the title: Miss Phryne Fisher Investigates. (The first novel of the series) McCall Smith, Alexander: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. London: Abacus 2003.  Ondaatje, Michael: Anil's Ghost. London: Vintage 2011.   further novels: tbd. (preferably these editions - if you cannot obtain them, any other edition is acceptable)   Movies: Cox, Deb and Fiona Eagger: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. tbd. Australia: Every Cloud Productions 2012. Hanson, Hart: Bones. Pilot. United States: 20th Century Fox Television 2005. (excerpts)   Secondary Literature:         (in order of being read in class, available on Ilias) Cawelti, John George: Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press 1976. (Chapter 4). Schklovskij, Viktor: Die Kriminalerzählung bei Conan Doyle. In: Jochen Vogt (ed.). Der Kriminalroman I. München: Wilhelm Fink 1971. Todorov, Tzvetan: The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca (NY): Cornell Univ. Press 1977. (Chapter -The Typology of Detective Fiction-). Lacan, Jacques: -The Mirror-phase as Formative of the Function of the I.- In: Slavoj iek (ed.). Mapping Ideology. London: Verso 1994, 93-99. iek, Slavoj: Looking Awry. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press 1991 (Chapter 3 -Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire-).   further texts: tbd. Voraussetzungen The seminar is open to Bachelor-Students in their second and third year (Advanced Module) who have succesfully completed the necessary seminars. Leistungsnachweis Beteiligungsnachweise may be gained in the following way: Participation in class. Abschlussprüfungen: APs are ONLY possible as ORAL EXAMS (no papers)! Anglistik u.Amerikanistik (BA, PO 2013) Kernfach The seminar is open to Bachelor-Students in their second and third year (Advanced Module) who have succesfully completed the necessary seminars. Beteiligungsnachweise may be gained in the following way: Participation in class. Abschlussprüfungen: APs are ONLY possible as ORAL EXAMS (no papers)! Universität Düsseldorf WiSe 2016/17 Kremendahl Katja