How does "cultural studies" organize its work and offer conclusions that apply to more than individual cases? That problem has been approached in the cases of monuments and key events in cultural memory, but the older convention of "periods" or "epochs" has largely not been rethought as a site of analysis of cultural texts and artifacts.
This course takes up this challenge by offering case studies in the turns of centuries: it brings to bear some of the best contemporary theory on various cultural texts, to show what kinds of understandings can be gained by moving from an era's images of its own projects into more systematic analyses of the identity and power problems on which these images rest.
In germanophone regions, these turns of centuries were fraught eras, suffering (respectively) from the depredations of Napoleon, the pressures of modernization and urbanization, and political realignment and globalization have caused very specific tensions in their societies. Each of these tensions caused theorists to focus on particular issues, novelists or filmmakers to take on certain themes and tell particular stories, and governments (local or national) and groups of individual to invest hegemonic power in particular institutions and professions.
Each of these sites will thus be taken as a model of one set of tensions based on identity and (inter)national politics, and for how a particular group/location coped with them, through sciences (of all kinds, human and natural, Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften), institutions and disciplines, and narratives providing symbols for collective and individual identity and legitimizing the group's purposes and self-images. Assembling archives of these documents, theory, and national purposes will allow us not only to interrogate our habits of identifying eras, but also to evolve a set of tools that help to outline new ways to understand and explain the coherencies of eras -- as ways to do critical cultural studies that valorize both contemporaneous voices from the past and today's theoretical desiderata.
By so doing, we will see how each era privileges certain classes of texts, defines the individual, the citizen, and the human in particular ways, inscribes that individual into the public sphere of the nation through education and other institutions, and offers a vision of history that legitimizes or challenges the group's identity. We will learn as scholars how to situate central texts of culture within precise, illuminating historical, sociological, and narratological contexts, in awareness of how ideological premises become naturalized by disciplines, theories, and the institutions adapting them to the service of the nation, as well as by a characteristic "order of texts" (Chartier) -- a set of textual or artifactual "performances" that disseminated those ideologies.