Interdisciplinary Approaches to German Literature and Culture: Undersurveillance: Literature and Visual Culture

Catalog description

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Previous topics include, Women's Narratives on Modern Migrancy, Exile, and Diasporas; Nation and Identity in Post-War Austria. Current topic description: This course investigates different cultures of hyper-visibility and shifting notions of the power of the gaze and spectatorship as tied to techniques of social observation and control. Starting in the eighteenth century, physiognomy emerges not only as a technique of reading faces, but as a popular pastime whose sinister afterlife becomes a foundation for Nazi racial science. Haunting tales from Romantic and Gothic authors invoke a supernatural surveillance that gives rise to compelling genres and allow readers to visualize a modern, uncertain depth of subjectivity and nature of reality. Towards the beginning of the twentieth century, the flaneur's ambulatory gaze mobilizes a new experience of city life as other visual technologies like photography and film become more ubiquitous. Around the same time, the hyper-visibility of hysterical women inspires innovative forms of narration that intertwine exhibitionism, voyeurism, and a gendered critique of the gaze. And finally, the mass surveillance by the state - both real and imagined - prompt us to look more carefully at the powers afforded to visibility and invisibility, and the literary and filmic depictions of those powers.