232078 The World ends tomorrow and you MAY die - the notion of paranoia and conspiracy in American Culture (S) (SoSe 2011)

Unmarked helicopters circle above rural USA in stealth mode. Some claim they’re FBI, others link them to the CIA, but a few claim they belong to some other, more sinister organisation. Does the government cooperate with alien ‘greys’ or are they fighting them. Perhaps they are fighting not outsiders, but their own citizens – if so, what for? Anyway, it’s too dangerous to trust them, provided they’re even in charge. But if not, then who is? And would you really want to know?
From Randolph Hearst to MK Ultra and beyond, paranoia has always been a major influence on American culture. From Young Goodman Brown to Inception, authors have documented this streak of the American mind.
We will read some of those texts and examine how, and why, the paranoid disposition is so strongly emphasized in them. Naturally we’ll be doing some psychoanalytic theory.
In addition to short stories, movie and TV-material and secondary texts, we will work on An American Dream by Norman Mailer and Vineland by Thomas Pynchon.

Literaturangaben

Mailer, Norman. An American Dream
Pynchon, Thomas Vineland