The lecture explores the political and societal force of literature in the globalized and medialized world. It presents cases where literary texts and their authors became the cause of scandals and aroused controversial public debates. The core question aims at the way in which literature touches societal taboos and how the medial public, but also the authors themselves deal with the scandals. Scandal theory maintains that collectives need scandals as a sort of valve in order to gbe able to uarantee their further functioning. However, it will be shown that scandals also may become literarily productive in so far as the authors concerned write about their scandal experience in their texts. We will discuss scandals about Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Martin Walser, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, Sybille Lewitscharoff and others.
- Lehrende/r: Claudia Lieb