230537 Narrating, Representing, Understanding Dementia (BS) (SoSe 2025)

When biographic memory fails, the sense of self dwindles and self-representation becomes a challenge, narrative reaches its limit. A mind impaired by dementia has a rapidly shrinking ability to articulate itself, its being, paired with diminished vocabulary.
Fictional representations of dementia then attempt what strikes as almost impossible: to put into words a mental state that loses its words, its meaning, its coherence, that cannot narrate itself anymore or only in fragments; to offer images and visualizations of a lived reality that cannot be fully communicated. Thus imagining dementia shapes cultural, social, and generational understandings of the condition, they fill a need and at the same time leave little room for narratives by people living with dementia, the real stuff, so to say.
In this class we will set up an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to investigate a range of North American cultural products and their strategies of representing dementia.

Requirements for participation, required level

Notwendige Voraussetzungen: FsB vom 15.11.2023 (Einschreibung ab SoSe 2023)
Vor dem Besuch der Veranstaltungen in den Profilmodulen muss der Language Proficiency Test (23-ANG-Basis1) bestanden sein. Im Master of Education gilt diese Voraussetzung mit dem erfolgreichen Masterzugang als erbracht.