| Description |
“Nostalgia (from nostos – return home, and algia – longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy” (Boym, The Future of Nostalgia xiii).
In recent years, American culture has seen a surge of longing for a ‘simpler’ past, an imagined golden age, a vanishing natural world. From the whitewashed nostalgia of “Make America Great Again” to the rise of Trad Wives, from the carefully curated aesthetics of Cottagecore and Dark Academia to the pandemic-era millennial nostalgia, the US is haunted by what it thinks it has lost and by what it knows it is losing. Meanwhile, solastalgia – the pain or sickness of losing our home caused by the climate crisis – adds new layers of urgency and grief.
This course explores how American literature, film, digital media, and art engage with nostalgia and solastalgia. We read novels, short stories, critical essays, poems, alongside internet trends and visual artworks to analyze how they reproduce, resist, or reimagine the past, present, and the future. We trace nostalgia’s history – considered a curable condition by Swiss doctors in the seventeenth century – and explore the different (literary and aesthetic) forms of nostalgia and their political functions. In addition, we turn to the more recent critical term ‘solastalgia,’ discussing it within the frameworks of affect, eco-sickness, and cognitive theory.
Topics include, but are not limited to, critical memory work, anti-nostalgia, and critical fabulation, Indigenous and queer nostalgia, gendered forms of nostalgia, ecological grief and climate fiction.
Please reserve the following date to attend this mandatory guest lecture by Prof. Lee Medovoi:
27 October 2025, 2:15-4:00 p.m.
Required Reading:
Shorter texts will be made available on ILIAS. In preparation, students are expected to acquire and read the following texts:
• Octavia E. Butler. 1979. Kindred. London: Headline, 2018.
• Powers, Richard. Bewilderment. London: Hutchinson Heinemann, 2021. |
User:
Öffentlicher Bereich
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