ANGLISTIK/AMERIKANISTIK

Language performance across the life-span: the age factor (Hauptseminar) 4002073
2 SWS ab 5. Sem. Mi 08-10 R 23 Amei Koll-Stobbe
This Hauptseminar will deal with age as a sociolinguistic variable. The focus will be on
changes in language and language use which occur from childhood through adolescence and
mature adulthood up to advanced age. In addressing this topic, we will include findings from
social psychology and sociology, pointing out the shift from a conception of age as a
biologically conditioned factor to a view of age as a flexible and socially negotiable construct.
Additionally, we will take into account results of sociolinguistic research that illustrate
convergent and divergent features of language production of young, grown-up and elderly
language speakers as well as findings from psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics,
confronting notions of age as maturation with conceptions of age as decay in relation to
language use and communicative competence. Finally, we will study the construction of age
in public discourse, e.g. in press language and advertising. Students must be willing to give a
presentation based on a self-study project.
maximum participants: 30
Linguistic semscapes: Written forms of communicative interactions in multicultural city
spaces (Hauptseminar) 4002074
2 SWS ab 5. Sem. Mi 10-12 R 23 Amei Koll-Stobbe
In recent years an increasing number of sociolinguists have started to take a closer look at
language around us displayed on shop windows, commercial signs, posters, official notices,
graffiti and other displays of written language visible in the public sphere. In this seminar we
will learn how to analyze the cityscapes of multilingual urban agglomerations, an approach
that gives insights into spread, functional domains and prestige of languages in multicultural
settings and relates to other fields in linguistics such as social semiotics, language policy and
phenomena of language contact and change. Students are expected to embark on self-study
and data-collecting projects and to give presentations in class.
Textbook: Shohamy, E., Gorter, D. (eds.) Linguistic landscapes: Expanding the scenery. New
York: Routledge 2009.ER 930 S559
maximum participants: 30
LITERATURWISSENSCHAFT UND CULTURAL STUDIES USA/KANADA
Holocaust Literature (Hauptseminar) 4002077
2 SWS ab 5. Sem. Mo 10-12 R 24 Hartmut Lutz
After the end of the Nazi holocaust, survivors felt that there would be “no poetry after
Auschwitz” (T. W. Adorno), or they considered “silence as the deepest form of respect for the
Holocaust victims” (Eli Wiesel and George Steiner), but as time went on, they began to
realize that they had to bear witness to the unspeakable horror they had gone through by
writing down their experiences for the coming generations. Collective traumas are transgenerational.
In this seminar we will read and discuss diaries and memoirs of holocaust
survivors as well as fictional recreations and reflections by contemporaries and later
generations. Students should obtain copies of Eli Wiesel’s Night (1960), Isaac Bashevis
Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story (1972), Walter Abish’s How German Is It? (1979/80), and
Eva Stachniak’s Necessary Lies (Canada, 2000). Additional short texts will be made available
during the term. All participants are expected to submit 4 pp. fact sheets/book reports for our
classroom discussions. Scheine will be based on term papers .
maximum participants: 25
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