230560 Representations of Death and Dying (Resurrection) (BS) (WiSe 2020/2021)

Resurrected by popular demand, this class will deal with a variety of visual and literary representations of death and processes of dying that may be disturbing to some viewers/readers.

We will mostly look at instances of fictional personified, heroic, aestheticized, and/or romanticized death in literary fiction, images, movies and video games and apply a variety of theoretical frameworks to these representations to investigate their social and cultural functions and effects. The focus will be predominantly on representations from Anglophone countries, but will also include other examples from Europe as points of comparison.

The topics that will be addressed in this class contain sensitive issues, however, this class will not be graphic in the sense that we will not analyse visual material that contains actual scenes of ‘real’ death, dying people and/or processes of dying.