Culture and Literature
The profile Culture and Literature offers a unique and cutting edge teaching programme that connects the study of societal real-life challenges and cultural practices with literature, films, series, art and other types of cultural narratives.
Recent graduates from our profile have secured jobs in academia, journalism, secondary education, and with NGOs and lobby groups, to name just a few examples. Many of our graduates went on to prestigious postgraduate programmes across and beyond Europe in Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, Euroculture, AI, Cultural Analysis and Philology, amongst many others.
Here is the Culture and Literature profile course offer within the BA European Languages and Cultures in detail:
Year 1:
1. Introduction to Culture and Literature
This course will introduce students to the crucial roles which literature, but also films, series and other types of narratives have played, and continue to play, in shaping the way humans think, feel and act. We will map and sometimes dismantle some of the major cultural ideas and ideals we live by, such as investment in knowledge, individualism or romantic love. In this process, our focus will lie on aspects of morality: How do narratives affect our sense of right and wrong? What impact do they have on our changing ideas of good and evil in a world of relativity and uncertainty? And what dilemmas arise from our involvement with villains and antiheroes?
2. Academic Skills and Perspectives - Culture and Literature
In the first half of this course, students will learn fundamental methods and techniques necessary for academic work throughout the BA programme. In the second half, the Culture and Literature strand of the course will pick up on crucial insights from our introductory module and intensify and diversify connections between contemporary societal challenges and cultural idea(l)s. Students will be introduced to further core topics of contemporary cultural studies, including narratives of displacement, (post)colonial writing, gender and artificial intelligence, many of which will be deepened in the further course of the profile. We will continue to use literature and other types of cultural narratives as sources of knowledge and of critical discussion about these matters.
3. Faculty-wide course
Across the Faculty of Arts, students will choose faculty-wide courses as part of their trajectories. In the first year of our BA programme, they will have the choice between Stories we live by: Mediating Identities through Language, Media, Culture and Literature and Global Change: Global Change in Context.
Year 2:
4. Gender in Culture and Literature
This course addresses relevant theories and methods in the field of gender studies, focusing on literature, film and cultural-historical context in the 20th and 21st centuries. Key questions are: Which factors and relations determine gender in the humanities? How is gender reflected in narrative fiction? How are LGBTQ+ persons described in cultural-historical texts such as life writing, tv series and (fiction) films?
5a. Advanced European Studies - Culture and Literature: Children’s Literature
Building on previous understandings of children's media and culture, in this course students critically engage with the concepts of age, culture and didacticism. We will analyse a wide range of European children's texts, from picturebooks to schoolyard songs, from Ikea advertisements to politically committed Young Adult literature. We will learn how to read children's media for the ideology it contains, and extrapolate that to understand the ways in children's texts reflect societal and political concerns. Focusing on modern crises, we can identify modern reflections on child-adult-elderly relationships, and the expectations placed on the young.
5b. Advanced European Studies - Culture and Literature: Europe’s Tomorrow in a Sustainable World
Humanity finds itself in a spot which is getting hotter by the minute: anthropogenic climate change has become the most urgent challenge for the human imagination. This course invites students to explore how culture and literature and the environmental humanities at large can contribute to developing what Anna Tsing calls “the arts of living on a damaged planet.” Through discussion of thought-provoking works ranging from cli-fi to eco-thrillers as well as visionary critical discourses and self-reflexive creative critical practices, we will study the mutually transformative relationship between human cultures and more-than-human lifeworlds.
6. The Unfamiliar: Otherness, Strangeness, Abnormality
In everyday culture, many things can be considered “strange” or “abnormal”: Situations, beliefs, or behaviors. In this course, we will analyze such judgments in order to understand underlying idea(l)s of cultural “sameness”, normality and normativity, drawing from a range of cultural,social and psychological theories as well as from literary and artistic works.
7. Faculty-wide course
Across the Faculty of Arts, students will choose faculty-wide courses as part of their trajectories. In the second year of our programme, they will have the choice between four courses: Stories we live by: Narrating the world; Global Change: Contemporary Issues of Global Transformation; Humane AI & the Digital Society: Humane AI in Digital Societies; Projects Cultural Heritage: Heritage in a Changing World.
Year 3:
8. Thinking Culture
This course takes a tour through a selection of advanced theoretical approaches to analysing literary and, more broadly, cultural representations: aesthetic, cultural-historical, reception, narratological, spatial, ethical, post-modern, postcolonial, and interdisciplinary approaches. Through engagement with different approaches, students get a sense of how cultural representations can help us think about both society and the broader realm of ideas at an advanced level.
9. Culture and Literature Thesis Lab
This course will run in parallel to the first phase of you writing your Bachelor’s Thesis, and provide you with ample support, training, and feedback to bring your thesis trajectory to a successful conclusion.
10. Bachelor’s Thesis - Culture and Literature
Supervised and supported by a designated expert, you will write your concluding thesis on a topic of your choice.
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