When the Levees Broke 8211 Cultural Images of New Orleans

Did you know that heading from Houston you have to drive through Siegen to get to New Orleans? Correspondingly, in Siegen you are not only able to visit The Louisiana, but you also can frequent New Orleans. Though when thinking about Louisiana (the actual state) and New Orleans (the actual city), should we just think of the small statues of black men playing trombones and horns in the windows of our city's pubs? With the aim of showing you how to conduct analysis of intermediality and also how to look at texts within certain contexts, this course will examine cultural texts that convey representations of New Orleans. The texts we will be analyzing range from Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire, John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, Mike Artell's Petite Rouge to John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces and Walker Percy's The Moviegoer to films such as Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and Dennis Hopper's tragic hippie film Easy Rider. Aside from these more traditional media we will also be looking at a 2006 blog from New Orleanian and author John Biguenet, the folk song House of the Rising Sun, as well as local, national, and international media coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Some say the new New Orleans will never again be like the old, pre-Katrina New Orleans, that something has gone forever lost. With the settings in the French Quarter, Toole's book warns us of the debauchery of modern society while Percy's The Moviegoer shows us how we can lose ourselves in the everyday monotony of life; Griffin, in contrast, passes as an -African American- and aims to shed light on 1960s race relations while Hopper's Easy Rider takes us on a perilous journey in search of freedom to the Big Easy in time for our last Mardi Gras. Whether New Orleans is forever lost can be debated for ages and this course will not center itself on this debate. Instead we will be focusing our efforts on analyzing the ubiquitous images and narratives that try to mediate to each and every one of us our very own New Orleans, be it a memory of a hot and muggy day or a plaster Jazz musician in a Siegen pub window. To supplement our cultural texts we will also be reading theoretical texts from fields such as cultural and literature studies to history and political science. With the exception of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire, all texts will be available for download via Moodle. You need to acquire a copy of both The Moviegoer and A Streetcar Named Desire. Anglistik - Amerikanistik Competent and lively participation in class discussions expert session & handout short paper of ca. 12 pages: Poor attendance or class participation will negatively affect your final grade! Universität Siegen WiSe 2010/11 M.A. Hulse Seth Thomas M.A