From stalker thrillers and crime procedurals to autofiction and prestige TV, contemporary culture is saturated with stories of obsession. This course investigates how obsessions shape not only characters but narrative structures, and audience engagement across a range of media. In this seminar we will examine the compulsions that drive individual characters—whether toward love, justice, control, perfection, or self-destruction—and consider how these obsessions reflect upon larger cultural anxieties around identity, surveillance, trauma, and consumption. Primary texts will include Sally Roonie’s Conversations with Friends, Nick Hornby’s Juliet Naked, as well as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Killing Eve, and Charlie Kaufman’s I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Throughout, we will engage with Lennard Davis’s Obsession: A History to contextualize how the concept of obsession operates today—as personal pathology, cultural script, and narrative engine. Readings in affect theory, media studies, and cultural criticism will help frame our analysis of obsession as both a narrative device and a symptom of contemporary life.
- Trainer/in: Susanne Bayerlipp