Spring 2023 Courses

Students learn the skills with which to read German-language texts of any difficulty with some fluency. Study of syntax and grammar; practice in close reading and translation of fiction and expository prose in the humanities and sciences.

A beginning content- and task-based course that focuses on the acquisition of spoken and written communication skills, as well as on the development of cultural awareness and of foundations in grammar and vocabulary. Topics such as school, family life, and housing. Course materials include a variety of authentic readings, a feature film, and shorter video clips. Tutors are available for extra help.

Builds on and expands knowledge acquired in GMAN 120. A content- and task-based course that helps students improve their oral and written linguistic skills and their cultural awareness through a variety of materials related to German literature, culture, history, and politics. Course materials include authentic readings, a feature film, and shorter video clips. Tutors are available for extra help.

Builds on and expands knowledge acquired in GMAN 130. A content- and task-based course that helps students improve their oral and written linguistic skills and their cultural awareness through a variety of materials related to German literature, culture, history, and politics. Course materials include authentic readings, a feature film, and shorter video clips. Tutors are available for extra help.

An advanced German language and culture course focusing on current issues in German-speaking countries through the lens of soccer. Topics include men’s and women’s soccer, sexism and gender inequality, racism towards soccer players, and homophobia in soccer.

Climate change and global warming, with their catastrophic effects on life on earth, such as accelerated ice-melting and extreme weather patterns, loss of biodiversity and habitat, safety and health risks, are the defining issues of our time. How did we get there? How will we get out? In this course, we explore Germany’s history and culture of environmentalism and sustainability, which is often traced back to Saxon mining administrator Hans Carl von Carlowitz’ demand in 1716 that only so much wood be cut as could be regrown. We discuss Germany’s history and culture of environmentalism and sustainability from 1900 (Lebensreform, biodynamic agriculture, vegetarianism, Gartenstadt inspired settlements) to the present, with emphasis on 70s and 80s social (justice) movements (alternative life-styles,anti-nuclear protests, Green Party) to the present (Energiewende, renewables, coal and nuclear phase-out, food waste, factory farming & bioethics, consumerism & sustainable life-styles, slow growth/degrowth).

An advanced language course that addresses key authors and works of the German theatrical tradition. Refinement of skills in reading comprehension, writing, and speaking. Authors include Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Büchner, Hebbel, Wedekind, Brecht, and Müller.

Poetry in its different forms has been declared by philosophers, poets, and leaders sometimes a great threat, sometimes a great promise. Behind the fears and hopes lies the assumption that poetry has something essential to do with the world. Poetry acts on the world. We explore this presupposition. What is poetry that can change the world? What is a world that poetry can touch? Our primary postulates are that poetry changes the world by influencing our conception of its inner relations: with the self, with an other, in a community, within a state. The course begins with the early formulation of the question in Greek antiquity, which was highly influential on its later manifestations in European thought. We proceed to read and think alongside a selection of poems and theoretical works from the 19th and 20th century, by Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Luce Irigaray, as well as the poets Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Percy Shelley, and others. We then look at how poetry stood in its historical time, reading poetry of resistance and nationalist poetry, written in Cuba, Palestine, and Nazi Germany. At last, in our attempt to ask the question in our time, we read poetry and theoretical texts–mainly from the present–engaged with different struggles of our time: of the figuration of the self and its world, sexuality and gender, and the ecosystem.

Systematic, chapter by chapter study of Heidegger’s Being and Time, arguably the most important work of philosophy in the twentieth-century. All major themes addressed in detail, with particular emphasis on care, time, death, and the meaning of being.

One of the most obvious and agreed-upon traits of realist literature seems to be its exclusion of the fantastic; the two are typically seen as opposites which define strictly different modes and genres of literature. However, while the term fantastic conjures up products of the imagination—Einbildungskraft, phantasía—, one of the most influential theorizations of the fantastic consists precisely in a text’s leaving undecided the question of whether or not a ‘fantastical’ element is a product of the characters’ or the narrator’s imagination (Tzvetan Todorov). The course uses this paradox as a point of departure to explore mainly, but by no means only German-language literary and programmatic texts of the past 200 years and their entanglements of realism and the fantastic. We study, among other things, ghosts, doppelgänger, recent modes of magical realism, and their functions. Readings include E.T.A. Hoffmann, Theodor Fontane, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Haruki Murakami, and Olga Tokarczuk.

The course takes up a pressing topic from the sciences and looks at it from the angle of the humanities: how are ecological crises, how is–most specifically and urgently–our current climate crisis represented and reflected upon in non-scientific public discourse: in journalism, in the social media, in literature, and in film? With a focus on, but not limited to literary texts, the course draws on established categories of literary analysis, such as plot patterns or the techniques of narration and/vs. description, and links them to philosophical concepts such as Karen Barad’s agential realism and Donna Haraway’s “chthulucene.” In so doing the course not only looks into (and questions) the common accusation that literature is conspicuously silent when it comes to the matter of the climate crisis, but also investigates (literary and non-literary) ecological narration as situated at the intersection of representation and ethics. Literary readings include Adalbert Stifter, Amitav Ghosh, W.G. Sebald, Ian McEwan, Judith Hermann, Ilija Trojanow, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Dialogue constitutes an integral part of human experience and culture ever since antiquity. Whether as a rhetorical or a dramatic device, written or oral, fictional or not, dialogue substantiates the core of any intersubjective communication, building bridges between the self and the Other while maintaining them as two separate entities. This seminar explores the form and function of dialogue through a wide range of theoretical and literary texts, focusing on a set of social, hermeneutical, poetical, and political questions. Specific attention is given to literary cases of failed dialogues and miscomprehension, aiming at the unique potential of the literary text to draw our attention beyond the limits of human communication and language. Readings include texts by Plato, Buber, Mead, Habermas, Bakhtin, Schleiermacher, Gadamer, Kristeva, Glissant, Shakespeare, Goethe, Austen, Beckett, Schnitzler, Gogol, Celan, Herta Müller, and others.

Both the ideology and practices of Nazi Germany rank among the most insidious the world has ever seen. For this reason, this historical era has generated, simultaneously, immense revulsion and immense fascination among scholars. They have attempted to explain how such a regime could emerge, how its citizens could come to support it, how it could carry out atrocities with such scale and brutality, and how Germany could rebuild itself after such physical and ideological violence. In this course, we join these scholars in trying to understand Nazi Germany. Together, we chart the rise and fall of National Socialism in Germany from the early twentieth century through the decades after the end of the Second World War. Via a collection of both primary and secondary source literature, we confront some of the most contentious debates in this field of study: what made Nazism so popular among ordinary Germans? How do we interpret Hitler’s role in its development? Was German violence toward Jews and other groups slated for murder a product of deep-seated antisemitism and xenophobia or did it evolve organically over the course of the Nazi period? Did the Holocaust form from the top down as the product of a small collection of people driven by the demands of the Führer, or from the bottom up as a function of shifting circumstances like the trajectory of the Second World War? How can we understand the emergence of camps and killing fields? How do we make sense of the complicated registers of German guilt for the events of the Nazi period? Is it useful (or appropriate) to compare the Holocaust to other genocides? This course exposes students to the range of answers that responsible and meticulous historical research has offered to these questions. There are, however, mountains of literature that have been written on the rise, lifespan, and fall of National Socialism. This course can only begin to chip away modestly at that mass. Nevertheless, the goal is that, by the end of the semester, students develop a sense of the outlines of the major historiographical debates about this period and give thought to the ways that those debates remain relevant to our contemporary world.

Film makes bodies visible, it helps to explore and understand them, and it has effects on the bodies of the spectator. In this course, we look at a selection of European and German films with a focus on the engagement of the human body. Spanning a period of almost a century (1929–2019), the material assembles cinematic traditions from across epochs: from Weimar cinema’s last years of silent film, via post war Austrian filmic activism and various cinematic traditions from East and West Germany, all the way up to the present, the Berlin School, and transnational European Cinema. Films by well-known directors such as G.W. Pabst, Werner Herzog, R. W. Fassbinder, Michael Haneke and VALIE EXPORT are complemented with lesser-known artists such as Heiner Carow or Mara Mattuschka, and newcomers as Jan Soldat or Pia Hellenthal to convey the diversity within film’s and filmmakers’ exploration of the human body. As the thematic vector brings together auteurs of entirely different traditions, it also draws attention to filmic genres often neglected by academics, such as anime, music videos, pornography, and short film.

Movement through post-1945 landscapes and cityscapes as a key to understanding them. The use of cameras and other visual-verbal means as a way to expand historical, aesthetic, and sociological inquiries into how these places are inhabited and experienced. Exploration of both real and imaginary spaces in works by filmmakers (Wenders, Herzog, Ottinger, Geyrhalter, Seidl, Ade, Grisebach), architects and sculptors (e.g. Rudofsky, Neutra, Abraham, Hollein, Pichler, Smithson, Wurm, Kienast), photographers (Sander, B. and H. Becher, Gursky, Höfer), and writers (Bachmann, Handke, Bernhard, Jelinek). Additional readings by Certeau, Freytag, J.B. Jackson, L. Burckhardt.

Individual study under faculty supervision. Applicants must submit a prospectus and bibliography approved by the faculty adviser to the director of undergraduate studies. The student meets with the adviser at least one hour each week and takes a final examination or writes a term paper.

Images with high pathos inform our perception of human life and define our stance in the world. The seminar wants to foster a critical awareness of the formative power that pathos figures exert on our moral beliefs concerning human behavior. The course covers the timespan from Antiquity to Modernity in Western culture and deals with historical moments that reflect different attempts to cultivate and temper strong emotions. We discuss the transfer of pathos and how the dissemination of eminent pathos figures of antiquity have shaped the imagery of the Western canon; we tackle with one of the most far-reaching concepts of art history, Aby Warburg’s Pathos formula that encourages us to draw in broad strokes connecting lines of affection over centuries and different cultures; we look into the discourse on human suffering in Medieval times and how it has defined the Christian doctrine of the affective image; we have a close look at treatises of the 17th century that worked on theorizing human passions and discuss the Enlightenment perspective that aimed at interiorizing pathos by dint of the discourse of beauty; we discuss the Modern “close-up” and how it unfolds the moment of pure bodily presence as highly affective entity. We ask if we are in need of new pathos images that reflect our current emotional stakes, and how they might look.

Preparation of an original essay under the direction of a faculty adviser.

This course introduces a variety of language teaching principles and methods and discusses best practices in language teaching. Students get to know the most important second-language acquisition theories as background to our discussions on effective language teaching. We combine the principles of language teaching with observed classroom techniques as we discuss and prepare lesson plans for language-learning classrooms. 

Film offers unique ways to approach the human body. Film makes bodies visible, it helps to explore and understand them, and it has effects on the bodies of the spectator. In this course, we look at a selection of European and German films and trace their particular employment and engagement of the human body. Spanning a period of almost a century (1929–2019), the material assembles cinematic traditions across epochs: from Weimar cinema’s last years of silent film, via post war Austrian filmic activism, various cinematic traditions from East and West Germany, all the way up to the present, the Berlin School and transnational European Cinema. Structured in four larger segments, the course approaches bodies on film by means of thematic vectors. We take a look at the body’s depiction, at its disciplining, at cinema’s role in terms of the body’s representation, as well as its commodification. Each thematic session is paired with a critical readings on the topic and the cinematic body in question, which helps trace to the cultural contexts they emerge from, without adhering to a strict chronology. Exploring the cinematic bodies created over the past century in their astonishing variety—acting bodies and bodies filmed by accident, idealized bodies and those celebrating imperfection, absent and elusive bodies, all the way up to the human’s replacement by animation—allows the class to explore important milestones in the history of German and European cinema, while also learning about different ways of representing, engaging with, and creating cinematic bodies. These “cinematic bodies”, the course hopes to show, signify different things for different films. They become significant by means of their actions (dance, gymnastics, sports, sex), they take shape in the disciplining of their representation (queerness, femininities & masculinities, abled-ness, ethnicity), and fulfill different functions for the genres they cite (actionist cinema, pornography, documentation, narrative film). The unsettling effect cinematic bodies have on filmic genre distinctions—such as those between fiction and report, between pornography and its documentation, between scripted narrative and spontaneous improvisation—are of particular interest. Assembling a number of filmmakers with an emphasis on German/European traditions, the course revisits the filmic canon and introduces filmmakers from outside film studies’ canonical scope. Established auteurs such as G.W. Pabst, Werner Herzog, R. W. Fassbinder, Michael Haneke and VALIE EXPORT will be juxtaposed and paired with lesser known artists such as Heiner Carow or Mara Mattuschka, and newcomers such as Jan Soldat or Pia Hellenthal, to convey the diversity within film’s and filmmakers’ exploration of the human body. As the thematic vector brings together auteurs of entirely different traditions, it also draws attention to filmic genres often neglected by academics, such as anime, music videos, pornography or short films.

This course sets out to investigate the literary techniques of description and narration and their political stakes in the context of climate politics, primarily focusing on, but by no means limited to, the German-speaking world. Taking the notoriously descriptive prose of Adalbert Stifter and its harsh criticism from the left as a point of departure and considering theoretical texts by György Lukács, Amitav Ghosh, Eva Horn, and Donna Haraway, we look at the interrelated functions of description, science, and narration in literary and non-literary forms of expressing urgency today—from viral tweets to politically engaged novels—and we discuss the often-articulated accusation that literature is conspicuously silent when it comes to expressing the pressing matter of our ecological crisis. Authors include Stifter, Ghosh, W.G. Sebald, Ian McEwan, Judith Hermann, Ilija Trojanow, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Movement through post-1945 landscapes and cityscapes as a key to understanding them. The use of cameras and other visual-verbal means as a way to expand historical, aesthetic, and sociological inquiries into how these places are inhabited and experienced. Exploration of both real and imaginary spaces in works by filmmakers (Wenders, Herzog, Ottinger, Geyrhalter, Seidl, Ade, Grisebach), architects and sculptors (e.g. Rudofsky, Neutra, Abraham, Hollein, Pichler, Smithson, Wurm, Kienast), photographers (Sander, B. and H. Becher, Gursky, Höfer), and writers (Bachmann, Handke, Bernhard, Jelinek). Additional readings by Certeau, Freytag, J.B. Jackson, L. Burckhardt.

Dialogue constitutes an integral part of human experience and culture ever since antiquity. Whether as a rhetorical or a dramatic device, written or oral, fictional or not, dialogue substantiates the core of any intersubjective communication, building bridges between the self and the Other while maintaining them as two separate entities. This seminar explores the form and function of dialogue through a wide range of theoretical and literary texts, focusing on a set of social, hermeneutical, poetical, and political questions. Specific attention is given to literary cases of failed dialogues and miscomprehension, aiming at the unique ability of the literary text to draw our attention beyond the limits of human communication and language. Readings include texts by Plato, Schlegel, Novalis, Bachtin, Levinas, Buber, Gadamer, Parsons, Kleist, Beckett, Melville, Schnitzler, Celan, Bachmann, and others.

A systematic, chapter-by-chapter study of Heidegger’s Being and Time, arguably the most important work of philosophy of the twentieth century. All the major themes of the book are addressed in detail, with a particular emphasis on care, time, death, and the meaning of being.

By arrangement with the faculty.