Fachbereich 7

Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft


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"You're Doomed at Being You": Chuck Palahniuk's Fiction of Self-Destruction


DozentIn: Rouven Brinkmann, (they/them)

Veranstaltungstyp: Seminar

Ort: 11/214: Di. 08:00 - 10:00 (13x), 41/112: Mittwoch, 07.06.2017 18:00 - 20:00

Zeiten: Di. 08:00 - 10:00 (wöchentlich), Ort: 11/214, Termine am Mittwoch, 07.06.2017 18:00 - 20:00, Ort: 41/112

Beschreibung: **Please note: course times will be from 8.30 to 10 am.**

"Palahniuk’s characters struggle to maintain an identity against the power of commodity fetishism, religion, mass media, and excessive nostalgia forcing us into narrow subjectivities. Palahniuk’s ethos (...) turns on overcoming our reluctance to abandon the comforts of conformity; to deviate from the master narratives scripted for us by powerful institutions in favor of chaos and spontaneity." (Rubin 130)

"Palahniuk sees the symbiotic necessity of creation and destruction in building a relationship between the individual and the world. At the same time, Palahniuk’s statement concerning romanticism and his outright denial of nihilism reveals an awareness that a tendency towards destruction (akin to nihilism) may be necessary to drive a romantic concern in 'reconnecting with community.'" (Williams 172)

In their respective works, Williams and Rubin echo the broad scholarly consensus on Chuck Palahniuk’s body of work: excessive, transgressive fictions bordering on nihilism, their protagonists disenfranchised individuals who strive for authentic existence by establishing non-/counter-normative community - a community all too often centered around self-destruction and the annihilation of the normative body.

This course seeks to investigate Palahniuk's poetics of self-destruction, i.e. the immediate, formal, and symbolic representation of bodies and their disintegration in his works, against the backdrop of common readings of Palahniuk's fiction as, e.g., "nihilistic," "romantic," or "transgressive."

Please purchase
Palahniuk, Chuck. "Fight Club." (ISBN 978-0099765219)
Palahniuk, Chuck. "Rant." (ISBN 978-0307388896)
Palahniuk, Chuck. "Lullaby." (ISBN 978-0099437963)

*Please note*: many of the primary works we read in this course feature graphic depictions of sex, violence, and/or sexualized violence.

Students will be required to...

- participate actively and regularly,
- discuss and familiarize themselves with theories relevant to Palahniuk's representation of self-destructive bodies,
- discuss and familiarize themselves with Palahniuk's fictions and Palahniuk as an authorial figure,
- pass a number of short quizzes or hold short presentations,
- write a term paper (4.000-5.000 words).


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