“H/history in our postmodern era is now being placed in inverted commas.”
(Alun Munslow, 2000)

Ever since Jean-François Lyotard defined “postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives” in 1984, historians are constantly challenged to review their concepts of what history actually is. As Callum G. Brown put it, “[p]ostmodernism is the biggest thing to hit the History profession for al-most 200 years”. As a result, this has led to “a tectonic impact upon understanding the past” (Brown, 2005) and – among many other things – to “epistemological uncertainty” as well as “the ungluing of methodological confidence” (Munslow, 2000) within historical scholarship.
(De)construction, intertextuality, representation, discourse, semiotics, self, demystification, power – during the last decades, most historians have become familiar with this (incomplete) list of postmod-ernist buzzwords. Theorists like Baudrillard, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Said et al. have become regulars within the annotation columns of historical writings. Although, their approaches weren’t given a warm welcome by everybody: From well-founded skepticism to radical “pomophobia” (Bev-erley Southgate, 2003), historians have developed several different attitudes when it comes to post-modernism. However, there is no way around those approaches anymore, whether we like it or not.
If successful in its aims, the course might a) help students “lose their ‘theoretical innocence’”, as Keith Jenkins put it in his fundamental Postmodern History Reader (1997), by briefly introducing them to postmodernist thinking, b) enable them to be reflexive concerning their own concept of his-tory, and c) supply them with examples, in which historians actually applied postmodern approaches. Besides, postmodernist theories shouldn’t be simply adopted without any critique. Therefore, read-ings of “classical” postmodernist arguments will be brought face-to-face with opposing voices.
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Das Seminar umfasst neben der wöchentlichen Sitzung einen höheren Anteil an Eigenarbeit (Lektüre); eine Kombination mit einer weiteren Veranstaltung ist NICHT erforderlich.
[Besides the weekly meetings the seminar contains a higher pro-portion of independent work (reading); a combination with an-other seminar or lecture is not required.]