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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This course explores the intimate connection between story and history in modern German culture. We will trace how history patterns personal experience and how narrative shapes historical understanding. Themes will include realism and everyday life, modernism and war trauma, the writing of monuments, and representations of Nazism and the Holocaust. Texts by Heinrich von Kleist, Theodor Storm, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Ernst Jünger, Günter Grass, and W.G. Sebald. Films by Leni Riefenstahl, Rainer Maria Fassbinder, Edgar Reitz, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Readings in German, discussion and papers in German and English. Prerequisite: German 311 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2009-1
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This course explores multifaceted experiences of exile represented in 20th-century literature and theory. A small selection of film screenings complements textual analyses. Varying definitions of exile, ranging from catastrophe to a new state of freedom, will be discussed. We will examine the transformation of lived experience into literary themes and techniques. While emphasizing the heterogeneity of the approaches, we will also aim at establishing a working definition of an "aesthetics of exile." Literary readings include works by Kafka, Nabokov, Bachmann, Ch. Wolf, Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, and Turkish expatriates in Germany. Studies of exile associated with the Frankfurt School, postcolonial theory, poststructuralism, and new feminist thought constitute the theoretical framework. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for German literature credit will meet once a week in an extra seminar. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 340.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. The rise of the ideal of Romantic love around 1800 presented literary authors with a new question: Can love, one of the oldest and most familiar of literary themes, be written about at all How can we communicate feelings that in their intensity and specificity seem necessarily to elude verbalization In this course, we will read a range of poems and stories that confront this question. We will analyze a bourgeois Enlightenment discourse on individuality and sexual difference that still influences contemporary conceptions of love. Finally, we will examine the creation of a new semantics of love in literary modernism. Literary readings by Lessing, Goethe, Kleist, Schlegel, Eichendorff, Keller, Benn, Rilke, Lasker-Schüler, Th. Mann, Kafka, Bachmann. Theoretical readings by Plato, Freud, Foucault, Luhmann, and others. Readings are in German, discussion and papers are in German and English. Prerequisite: German 311 or consent of the instructor.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This course acquaints students with 20th-century novelists of the German language. Beginning with Kafka, we will trace various manifestations of the genre from the 1920s onward. Readings in the early 20th century include works by Th. Mann, Broch, Musil, Rilke, and Hesse. We will then focus on representatives of the post-World War II novel, such as Frisch, B ll, Grass, and Ch. Wolf. Categories closely connected with the novelistic mode, such as irony, ambiguity, digression, and reflection, will be of major concern. Selected readings by Lukács, Todorov, Bakhtin, and Iser will provide the theoretical framework. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for German credit will meet once a week in an extra seminar. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 354. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. Through a study of Holocaust film and literature, this course investigates the relations between history, trauma, and representation. How do authors and filmmakers describe events that shatter traditional forms of perception and comprehension How do they portray human agency in an age of bureaucratically administered mass destruction How do they relate history, memory, and imagination We will study works from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds and explore a wide range of genres including documentaries, diaries, novels, poetry, drama, comics, and feature films. Primary sources will include works by Primo Levi, Jean Amery, Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Peter Weiss, Charlotte Delbo, Cynthia Ozick, Tadeusz Borowski, Aharon Appelfeld, Art Spiegelman, Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann. Conducted in English. Students may arrange with the instructor to take the class for German credit. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 358.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. At the advent of the 20th century, the metropolitan city emerged as a new network of signification generating a rethinking of the trajectories of time and space. We will explore the transcription of urban space as a new site of knowledge in experimental literary forms. The spatialization of memory and history will be a major focus. City narratives from German modernity include Rilke's novel The Notebooks of Malte Lauridds Brigge, Benjamin' s Berlin Chronicl e an d Arcades Project , and essays by Simmel and Krakauer. We will also explore contemporary readings representing space as the container of traumatic memory (Sebald, Austerlitz), nostalgia (Pamuk, Istanbul), and "subaltern counter publics" (postcolonialism). Theories on memory are examined through Freud, Bergson, and Ricoeur. Students taking the course for German credit will have an extra weekly seminar. Prerequisite: German 220 or consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 365. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This course is an introduction to German poetry. The goal of the course is to develop skills in interpreting individual texts and to reflect on poetry's status within the discourses of history, philosophy, and politics. The readings have been arranged by topic rather than chronologically or by author. We will study poems by Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, H lderlin, Eichendorff, Heine, M rike, George, Rilke, Trakl, Benn, Brecht, Celan, Eich, Bachmann, and others. Prerequisite: German 220 or consent of the instructor. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This course is designed to acquaint students with the theory and seminal texts of German Romanticism. Beginning with the emergence of the movement from the context of German Idealism, we will explore the revolutionary premises and program of early Romanticism in works by Schiller, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, and Tieck. Through concepts such as transcendental universal poetry and irony we will examine the modernity of the Romantics. Our readings include works by the Heidelberger Romantics, such as Eichendorff, and by prominent women authors of Romanticism, including Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Bettina Brentano, and Caroline Günderrode. We will read selections from lyric poetry across the Romantic movement. Works by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heine will lead us to the apex and dissolution of Romanticism. The course concludes with an overview of philosophical and political developments in mid-19th century, such as the rise of nationalism and liberalism, Junges Deutschland and the revolution of 1848. Readings are in German, discussion and papers are in German and English. Prerequisite: German 311 or consent of the instructor. Not offered 2009-10.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This seminar explores the role literature and literary theory have played in the development of contemporary feminism and queer theory. We will also ask why the study of language is crucial for understanding the sociocultural dynamics of sex and gender. Authors will include Kleist, Goethe, von Droste-Hülshoff, Kafka, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Jelinek, Irigaray, Kristeva, Butler, Goldberg, and Bersani. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for German credit will meet in extra sessions. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 391.
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3.00 Credits
Full course for one semester. This seminar offers an introduction to two of the most enigmatic authors in the German canon. We will focus on the unique challenges their work presents for ideas about what literature is and how it acquires historical or political significance. We will also look at how several major critics have tried to come to terms with these maverick writers. Readings in German. Discussions and papers in German and English. Prerequisite: German 311 or consent of the instructor. Conference.
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