| This course will seek to locate German detective fiction, as represented through novels, short stories, films and other audio-visualmedia that have excited the popular imagination in the twentieth century, in a locus of literary-cultural involvement with thehistoriographical singularities of the second half of the twentieth century. It will seek to analyse the post/modern human subject— via and with the detective—as an anomie-ridden, individuated Self (e.g., Kommissar Peter Faber in the Dortmunder “Tatort”-series), which is—but not necessarily so—reduced to an occasionally- dysfunctional and conflict-ridden state in the face of personalcircumstances. The course will also seek to engage with this contested selfhood, using the theoretical frameworks of, among others,Daniel Wildmann, Glenn Most, Christoph Cornelißen and Robert Stockhammer, and a close critical reading of selected novels andshort stories by Bernhard Schlink, Ferdinand von Schirach, Friedrich Dürenmatt and Jacob Benjamin Bothe (“Jakob Arjouni”) andvarious Tatort-episodes filmed at German, Austrian, Swiss and other Germanophone locales, Italy, Spain and Turkey. In the process,a genre that has been seen, internationally, as a platform for the hyper-talented, if asocial and maverick, amateur who delves intodetection as a vocation and, thereafter, achieves widespread recognition will be studied through characters who (more often thannot) are located within official frameworks of crime-scene-investigation and can, at best, only temporarily ignore legal procedures. |
