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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
Kafka can be read as the chronicler of modern despair in an unidentifiable, timeless landscape. He can also be read as a representative of his era, his "existential anguish" springing from the culturaland historical conflicts (anti-Semitism and theories of sexuality) that agitated Prague at the turn of the century. The course covers Kafka's shorter fiction (fragments, parables, sketches) and longer tales ("The Metamorphosis" and"The Judgement"). Students also examine thenovels The Trial and The Man Who Disappeared ( Amerika), and excerpts from his diaries and letters. The course is taught in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in German can read selections in the original for extra credit.
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4.00 Credits
Designed to deepen the proficiency gained in German 101 and 102, this course increases students' fluency in speaking, reading, and writing, and adds significantly to their working vocabulary. Readings include selected 20th-century literary texts, such as Franz Kafka's Die Verwandlung, supplemented by audiovisual materials.
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4.00 Credits
Intensive study of a foreign language creates an effective learning environment for those who wish to achieve a high degree of proficiency in the shortest possible time. This course enables students with little or no previous experience in German to complete two years of college German within five months. Students take 15 class hours per week during the semester at Bard and 20 hours per week during June at Collegium Palatinum, the German language institute of Schiller International University in Heidelberg. As the course progresses, the transition is made from learning the language for everyday communication to the consideration of literary and cultural values through the reading of classical and modern texts (works by Goethe, Eichendorff, Kafka, Brecht). Financial aid is available to cover the costs of the program.
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4.00 Credits
Close readings of selected tales, with emphasis on language, plot, motif, image, and relation to folklore. This study includes critical examination and the application of major theoretical approaches: Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, and feminist.
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4.00 Credits
Students in this course undertake an intensive study of Goethe's drama about a man in league with the devil. The dynamics of Faust's striving for knowledge of the world and experience of life, and Mephistopheles' advancement and subversion of this striving provide the basis for analysis of the play's central themes of individuality, knowledge, and transcendence. The themes are examined in regard to their meaning in Goethe's time and their continued relevance today. To gain a fuller appreciation of the variety, complexity, and dramatic fascination of Goethe's Faust, students also consider Faust literature before and after Goethe and explore the integration of Faust in music, theater, and film (for example, Arrigo Boito's opera Mefistofele and Friedrich W. Murnau's film Faust). The course is taught in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in German are encouraged to read Faust in the original.
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4.00 Credits
A survey of Novellen, Erz?hlungen, parables, and other short forms of mainly 20th-century prose. Students combine detailed literary analysis with an examination of social/political/historical contexts. Readings include Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Robert Walser, Heinrich von Kleist, Jeremias Gotthelf, Walter Benjamin, Hans Erich Nossack, Ingeborg Bachmann, Max Frisch, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Ilse Aichinger, Jenny Erpenbeck, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Yoko Tawada. The course is conducted in German. Richard Wagner's cycle of four music dramas about gods, dwarves (Nibelungs), giants, and humans has been read and performed as a manifesto for socialism, a plea for a Nazi-like racialism, a study of the workings of the human psyche, a forecast of the fate of the world and humankind, and a parable about the new industrial society of his time. Students read Heinrich Heine, the Brothers Grimm, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, as well as the anonymous author of the medieval epic, the Nibelungenlied. Musical expertise is neither expected nor provided.
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4.00 Credits
"Exit metaphysics, enter sauerkraut" is thephrase frequently used to describe the development of 19th-century German literature from Romanticism to naturalism. The phrase also alludes to the overwhelming experience of most intellectuals and writers at that time: awareness of the loss of security that idealistic philosophy had provided and an attempt to find new absolutes. The focus is the evolution of this experience as it manifests itself in literature. Close readings are made of works by Grillparzer, Nestroy, Grabbe, Hebbel, Heine,M?rike, Droste- Hülshoff, Keller, Stifter, Fontane, C. F. Meyer, Schnitzler, Hauptmann, and Wedekind. The course is conducted in German.
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4.00 Credits
This course introduces students to the pleasures and challenges of German poetry. Participants read exemplary works by the most important German poets of the last three centuries, including Goethe, Schiller, H?lderlin, Brentano, Heine, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, George, and Celan. While focusing closely on the formal features of each poem (metrical structure, tropes, generic conventions), students explore how the poem engages with the major philosophical shifts and historical catastrophes of the times. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which poets like H?lderlin and Rilke appropriate and transform historical genres (such as the hymn, ode, sonnet, and elegy) by infusing them with their own conceptions of history, subjectivity, and poetic writing. Conducted in German.
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4.00 Credits
A critical exploration of German literature, theater, visual arts, architecture, and film in the period from 1918 to 1933. TheWeimar Republic witnessed the emergence of a distinctive brand of modernism, characterized by an unprecedented openness to mass culture and to new technologies of reproduction. Students analyze works of literature and art in their relation to the rapid technological and social modernization that shaped the period, and to the profound sociopolitical conflicts to which this process gave rise.
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4.00 Credits
An interdisciplinary examination of the aesthetic and intellectual shifts that transformed West German cultural and political life in the years leading up to the student rebellion of 1968. The aesthetic production that the course focuses on reappropriated many of the strategies of the historical avant-garde (especially those of Dadaism), often in the hope of subverting the "spectacle" ofconsumer capitalism and transforming everyday life. Topics include experimental poetry ("Wiener Gruppe," Enzensberger); theater, and antitheater (Handke, Weiss); "New German Cinema"(Fassbinder, Kluge); visual art (Beuys, Fluxus, Pop, Capitalist Realism); and pronouncements and manifestos of the student movement (Dutschke, Baumann, Gruppe SPUR). All readings and classroom discussions are in German.
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