Literaturgeschichte (Literary History)

The term populism occupies one of the top places in contemporary political debate. Since around 2010 and alongside multiple crises, which gave rise to a broad range of protest movements in the US and many European states, populism has become a catch-all phrase to describe political contention from all ideological camps. Especially Donald Trump’s ascent to the Oval Office and the successes of right-wing political projects in other countries have furthered notions of a new genuine populist politics symptomatic of our democratic day and age, resulting in the opposition of “we” the common people and “they” the elites as a fundamental antagonism seemingly anchored in the very fabric of society and politics. On closer inspection, however, populism is a multifaceted political term that has come a long way to entail the meaning it possesses today. In order to assess the scope and content of populism we will read and discuss texts on the historical and contemporary modes of appearance of populism in the US.

Course Outline and Requirements

This course follows three aims. The first is to gain an understanding of populism in the US and beyond. The second aim is to collectively think, discuss, and question populism while writing about it in short formats. The third is to present these short formats in a Blog in an effort to gain an understanding of contemporary publishing practices.

In every meeting of the seminar the participants will turn into editors of the blog, conversely the seminar will turn into an editorial team to discuss the texts that are deemed to be published in the blog by the respective editors. The discussion is the foundation for reworking the texts in order to publish them in the blog.

All students are required to hand in two short texts (8.000 signs each) for discussion and have to comment on two texts of their peers. The seminar will take place in two weekend block sessions in December and January after three introductory sessions in November. The texts have to be handed in one week before the topic is discussed.