Seminar Inventing Beauty Body Image Issues in American Literature Film and Theory Do 10:30-12:00

Philosophers, artists, and scholars alike have tried to define beauty throughout the ages. If you subscribe to Plato's idea of a realm of eternal and perfect ideas, for example, you must believe that beauty is universal and changeless. Our seminar, though, will follow a different approach: we will read beauty as a form of performativity, as a social construction which is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance, as Naomi Wolf suggests in her book The Beauty Myth. A fixation on physical perfection will be discussed as a discursive matrix that is likely to trigger self-consciousness, self-rejection, and a competition that divides people from one another. Our seminar will deal with various topics in the context of body image issues: among them are race, anorexia, body shaming, social & economic power relations, and male perspectives on female beauty. A Semesterapparat with essays and theoretical texts will be available by the beginning of the semester. It will assemble texts by Judith Butler, Naomi Wolf, Lindy West, and others.   In addition to the texts on the Semesterapparat, we will also read - Laurie Penny, Meat Market: Female Flesh under Capitalism. - Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters. - Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. - Sarai Walker, Dietland. Englisch (MA, PO 2013) Universität Düsseldorf WiSe 2016/17 Dr. Schiller Georg