GERM 2221 Madmen, Hysterics, and Criminals: Inventing Deviance

Conducted in English. Counts toward German major, German minor, and German Studies minor.. In this seminar we address three major questions, guided by a broad selection of readings from German, French, British, and American literature and theory from 1800 to the present: How do we as readers define the abnormal and the deviant? What aesthetic practices does literature employ to represent these threshold experiences, and what is their history? How might we rethink our own notions of normality when faced with their artificiality? Literary, theoretical, and musical texts by Balzac, Bernhard, Büchner, Freud, Genet, Kracht, Plath, Stevenson, and others help us establish a history both of abnormality and our own cultural self-understanding.