230318 Sweet Venom? Vigilantes in Film, Literature and Art 1900-2017 (S) (SoSe 2017)

When thinking about self-justice, we are used to arguments about democracy, human rights and law. Thinking of the U.S., in particular, we all grew up consuming media telling us about those values. Anyway, paying a closer look on many popular narratives from Hollywood and beyond, one can easily discover many stories where the protagonists have to take law and order in their own hands because their system’s surroundings seem to need it.
Even though focusing on the United States, we will search for transcultural origins of vigilante narratives and follow their traces until postmodern media landscape, raising the spotlight on publications of the 20th and 21st century. We will look for vigilante myths from various points of view, including questions about gender, ethnicity and class, yet also searching for the underlying moral(s) explaining the fascination with protagonists that search for revenge or intervention against laws and pacifism.
Looking back at the Ku-Klux-Klan knights in 'The Birth of a Nation' (1915), going over postmodern works like 'Ghost Dog' or 'The Brave One' to the emblematic masked hero in 'V for Vendetta', the “Dark Knight” of “Gotham” and many more (less) famous protagonists in between, we will search for various examples of medialized self-justice trying to interrelate, contextualize and systematize them as specific cultural narratives.