Digitale Lehre
The seminar deals with the fastest growing part of contemporary literature: fan fiction. These are texts published in online portals that continue real or fictional, historical or current characters and plot contexts in their own unique way. Often it is about popular series from the fantasy genre. But there are also Jane Austen, Karl May or Schiller fans who continue or rewrit their favorite works in this way. And there is fan fiction about celebrities of our time, from Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama to right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik.

In the seminar we want to learn to understand these texts as contemporary literature. What kinds of 'presence' are developed here? What do we know about the authors? Which topics are popular and what distinguishes fan fiction from conventional literature? Certainly it will also be about media aspects that are characteristic for online writing and reading: teasers, seriality, self-portrayal, etc.

We don't want to discuss these questions only theoretically, we want to deal with fan-fiction texts in a concrete way. For this purpose we have compiled a corpus of works from fanfiction.de. While we will read the texts methodically in the seminar, two other classes  will offer the opportunity to perform other kinds of analysis with these texts: In the exercise "Simple programming! A Workflow for Literature Analysis", know-how will be imparted, with which not only individual texts but the entire corpus can be digitally analyzed. In the "Project Seminar Empirical Text Analysis" we will jointly develop concepts for experiments to explore how exactly fan fiction is read in practice. It makes sense to attend at least one of these events together with the "Contemporary Literature" seminar. But all three of them also work individually.

In terms of teaching methods, we want to build on the digital interaction we developed in the summer. We don't want to just stare at each other via zoom tiles, but rather use a variety of digital preparation forms for small groups to make the meetings exciting and entertaining. You can find out how this works in the video conference of our first session!

Moodle is our central platform for the whole semester. For all tasks you can start from here!
 

Semester: Inverno 2020/21