Courses Spring 2024

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.

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.

An advanced language and culture course focusing on the diverse queer communities in Germany and Austria. Students analyze and discuss the plurality of queer representations through topics such as queer literary and artistic production, queer urban spaces (Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna), Afro-German and Turkish minorities, queer social movements since the 1960s, as well as the aesthetics of drag. Special emphasis on the historical conditions for queer culture in Germany and the LGBTQ+ terminology in German language. Focus on oral and written production to achieve advanced linguistic skills. Students watch and read a variety of authentic German, including newspapers, books, TV, film, songs, and modern electronic media formats. 

This class introduces students to aspects of architecture as art and building design, within the context of social and environmental justice issues in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students explore the “New Settlements of Berlin Modernism,” the Bauhaus School, subsidized public housing, industrial and solar architecture in Germany, as well as examples at Yale and in New Haven.

This course delves into “Gegenwart”—presence, nowness, or contemporariness—as a literary concept. With a focus on publications of the last decade, the course invites students to explore a variety of textual genres (novels, articles, poetry, and dramatic scripts) that seek to grapple with the (im)possibility of documenting/ relating to/creating the present time through literature. While the course teaches classical textual analysis and enables students to acquire the analytical tools necessary to discuss and critically review literary text, it also includes new media in the form of Instagram and TikTok art, “Twitteratur,” as well as established media of the “here and now,” such as poetry slam, “Tonbandlyrik,” as well as theatre and performance cultures. Authors/artists include Kim de l’Horizon, Mithu Sanyal, Theresa Präauer, Svenja Gräfen, Joshua Groß, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, and many more. Engaging with contemporary and retro forms of relating to the “now,” students have the chance to creatively apply their skills and try out Gegenwarts-genres in their own projects.  

The history of Germany from its unification in 1871 through the present. Topics include German nationalism and national unification; the culture and politics of the Weimar Republic; National Socialism and the Holocaust; the division of Germany and the Cold War; the Student Movement and New Social Movements; reunification; and Germany’s place in contemporary Europe.

The course is designed as an introduction to the thought of these three towering figures in the German-language intellectual tradition and to their contributions to our attempts to understand the human mind and society. We read seminal essays as well as (excerpts from) longer works, including Marx’s Capital, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality and Thus Spake Zarathustra, and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. But we also look at what came before and after these thinkers, considering—among others—Kant, Ludwig Feuerbach, Melanie Klein, Adorno, and Foucault; and we think about the relevance of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud for the understanding of our own times.

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.

This course offers an introduction to Yiddish culture across five centuries. How did the vernacular of Eastern European Jewry shape the making of the modern Jewish self? We consider this development through the metaphor of “the golden chain”—Yiddish as both a guarantor of continuity across diasporic time and space and as the medium through which the yoke of tradition could be loosened and broken. Topics and media include: translations/rewritings of the Bible, liturgy, rabbinic canon, and pan-European epic; Hasidic tales and the rise of modern Jewish fantasy; dramas, short stories, and novels set in the archetypical (Jewish) town known as the shtetl; popular theater and song; the daily newspaper; high modernist poetry; the golden era of cinema; wartime documentation and postwar memorialization; and the contemporary multimedia scene (Hasidic, left, kitsch).

Historical narrative between fiction and reality. The tension or possible contradiction between the concepts of history and fiction. Historiography, history writing as a literary genre, biography and biographical fiction (biopic), historical novels, novellas, dramas and films. Poetics and historiography of the German classical period (Aristotle, Wieland, Schiller, Kleist). Contemporary works of film and literature. 20th-century theories of S. Kracauer and Lukács (The Historical Novel). Literary works of Schiller (Wallenstein), Goethe (Torquato Tasso), W. Scott (Waverley), S. Zweig (historical novellas), Mann (Death in Venice), Martin (Fire and Blood), Field (Tár).

Introduction to Jewish philosophy, including classical rationalism of Maimonides, classical kabbalah, and Franz Rosenzweig’s inheritance of both traditions. Critical examination of concepts arising in and from Jewish life and experience, in a way that illuminates universal problems of leading a meaningful human life in a multicultural and increasingly globalized world. No previous knowledge of Judaism is required.

This course maps intersections between economics and religion, as they have been formulated mainly by German-speaking authors in the fields of philosophy, sociology, critical theory and theology. The course challenges the traditional view that religion (especially Christianity and Judaism) is an ally of capitalism and explores alternatives to this natural bond. Among these alternatives, we observe some socialist, anarchist, and Marxist thinkers and theologians who draw on religious sources to support their activism or use religion as a source to develop critiques of capitalism. Through reading texts by authors such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Gorgio Agamben, Saidiya Hartman, Gustav Landauer, Hermann Cohen, Erich Fromm, José Miranda, and Gustavo Gutiérrez, among others, we learn about how religion and capitalism are intertwined and how they shape the world in which we live.

The German Democratic Republic (1949-1989) was a political and aesthetic experiment that failed, buffeted by external pressures, and eroded by internal contradictions. For forty years, in fact, its most ambitious literary texts and films (some suppressed, others widely popular) explored such contradictions, often in a vigilant, Brechtian spirit of irony and dialectics. This course examines key texts both as aesthetic experiments and as critiques of the country’s emerging cultural institutions and state censorship, recurrent political debates and pressing social issues. Texts by Brecht, Uwe Johnson, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, Johannes Bobrowski, Franz Fühmann, Wolf Biermann, Thomas Brasch, Christoph Hein; films by Slatan Dudow, Kurt Maetzig, Konrad Wolf, Heiner Carow, Frank Beyer, Jürgen Böttcher, Volker Koepp.  

The stage is, and always has been, a political space. Ever since its beginnings, theatre has offered ways to rethink and criticize political systems, with the stage serving as a “moral institution” (Schiller) but also as a laboratory for models of representation. The stage also delineates the limits of representation for democratic societies (Rousseau), as it offers the space for experimentation and new modes of being together, being ensemble. The stage also raises the question of its own condition of possibility and the networks it depends on (Jackson). This course revisits the history of German and German speaking theatre since the Enlightenment, and discusses the stage in its relationship to war, the nation state, the social question, femicide and gender politics, the Holocaust, globalization, and 21st century migration. Readings include works by G.E. Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, Hugo v. Hofmannstahl, Georg Büchner, Peter Weiss, Ida Fink, Dea Lohar, Elfriede Jelinek, Christoph Schlingensief, Heiner Müller, and Elsa Bernstein.

Play has long been understood as an activity that is central to human life. Children learn through it, art and literature are created through and incite it, humans as social animals unite and clash through it. But for as important as play can seem, it is equally difficult to understand. What is play and what is not? What does play accomplish? What are its dangers? This seminar explores modern theories and practices of play with an emphasis on the German tradition. A main goal of the seminar is to build a solid foundation for our discussions of play through readings of influential theories by authors such as Schiller, Wittgenstein, Freud, Klein, and Caillois. In doing so, we engage a wide range of theoretical discourses including aesthetics, poetics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. These theories are complemented by studies of various practices of play, from drama by the avid gambler G.E. Lessing, to aleatoric compositional methods used by the poetic, visual, and musical avant-gardes of the 20th century, to contemporary uses of simulation and virtual worlds. Most importantly, we challenge ourselves to incorporate play into our own thought and work, setting out from the assumption that in order to approach play seriously, we must ourselves adopt a playful attitude. Critical and reflective writing assignments are complemented by creative assignments relying on elements of play such as randomness and collaboration.

Hermann Broch’s 1930 novel trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, a classic of German-language, Austrian and Central European modernism. Sleepwalking as a critical diagnosis of the possibilities of action and agency in war-torn 20th-century Europe. Sub-themes of the individual novels–”Romanticism,” “Anarchy,” “Rationality” (Sachlichkeit)–which further characterize the situation of the modern subject. World War I and the fall of the Habsburg Empire; “Hofmannsthal’s Vienna;” the “merry apocalypse” of Austrian culture; Broch’s aesthetics, theory of kitsch, and anticipation of postmodernity. Broch’s contemporaries and readers: Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Erich Kahler, Maurice Blanchot, Milan Kundera. Field trips to the Beinecke library and Broch’s grave in Killingworth, CT.

Alienation has been explored in social, economic or environmental respects, and thinkers differ widely according to how, where, and when to identify the other of alienation, a non-alienated way of life or reconciliation. This course discusses alienation and reconciliation along these lines in Rousseau, Hegel, Marx; Simmel, Lukács, Sartre; Lefebvre, J.B. Foster, J.W. Moore and others.

The idea of “world literature” seems self-evident, despite numerous divergences and transformations since Goethe put the weight of his authority behind it in the middle the 19th Century. World literature, according to the standard view, is an international canon of “great books” that traveled between languages and survived as enduring cultural milestones. The frequently untransparent processes that lie behind such transformations are, however, also an enduring problem, as is the question of disciplinary competency for multiple languages, histories, conceptions and traditions. How can anyone speak for “world literature”? Where does literary history and interpretation intersect with anthropology? It is also easy to argue that the urge toward inclusive universalism is self-contradictory. The cosmopolitan concept of world literature is itself under suspicion of being Eurocentric, colonialist, touristic and ideological. World literature may also refer to the equally capacious concept of myth; to imaginative works of world-building; to works in which the concept of world is itself transformed; to works in which “the world” is at stake.

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.

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

Play has long been understood as an activity that is central to human life. Children learn through it, art and literature are created through and incite it, humans as social animals unite and clash through it. But for as important as play can seem, it is equally difficult to understand. What is play and what is not? What does play accomplish? What are its dangers? This seminar explores modern theories and practices of play with an emphasis on the German tradition. A main goal of the seminar is to build a solid foundation for our discussions of play through readings of influential theories by authors such as Schiller, Wittgenstein, Freud, Klein, and Caillois. In doing so, we engage a wide range of theoretical discourses including aesthetics, poetics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. These theories are complemented by studies of various practices of play, from drama by the avid gambler G.E. Lessing, to aleatoric compositional methods used by the poetic, visual, and musical avant-gardes of the twentieth century, to contemporary uses of simulation and virtual worlds. Most importantly, we challenge ourselves to incorporate play into our own thought and work, setting out from the assumption that in order to approach play seriously, we must ourselves adopt a playful attitude. Critical and reflective writing assignments are complemented by creative assignments relying on elements of play such as randomness and collaboration.

The stage is, and always has been, a political space. Ever since its beginnings, theatre has offered ways to rethink and criticize political systems, with the stage serving as a “moral institution” (Schiller) but also as a laboratory for models of representation. The stage also delineates the limits of representation for democratic societies (Rousseau), as it offers the space for experimentation and new modes of being together, being ensemble. The stage also raises the question of its own condition of possibility and the networks it depends on (Jackson). This course revisits the history of German and German-speaking theatre since the Enlightenment, and discusses the stage in its relationship to war, the nation state, the social question, femicide and gender politics, the Holocaust, globalization, and twenty-first-century migration. Readings include works by G.E. Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, Hugo v. Hofmannstahl, Georg Büchner, Peter Weiss, Ida Fink, Dea Lohar, Elfriede Jelinek, Christoph Schlingensief, Heiner Müller, and Elsa Bernstein.

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.

This reading seminar surveys major themes in German history since unification. Through readings of both classic and recent research, students familiarize themselves with key debates that have shaped historical understanding of modern Germany.

For a long time, thinking about producing literature has been dominated by the legalism of authorship. The notion of the “writing scene” allows us to rethink the production of literature in broader ways: technologies of writing, the writing body, systems of writing, etc. This course looks at investigations into the act of writing by Benjamin, Blanchot, Foucault, Barthes, Flusser, Latour; theories of cultural production by Cassirer, Jameson, Goody, Kittler, Bolter, Rheinberger; and vignettes of writing scenes in Quintilian, Christine de Pisan, Dante, Descartes, Goethe, Blake, Hegel, Flaubert, F. Douglass, V. Woolf, Kafka, Proust, Cixous.

Hermann Broch’s 1930 novel trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, a classic of German-language, Austrian, and Central European modernism. Sleepwalking as a critical diagnosis of the possibilities of action and agency in war-torn twentieth-century Europe. Sub-themes of the individual novels—Romanticism, anarchy, rationality (Sachlichkeit)—which further characterize the situation of the modern subject. World War I and the fall of the Habsburg Empire; “Hofmannsthal’s Vienna;” the “merry apocalypse” of Austrian culture; Broch’s aesthetics, theory of kitsch, and anticipation of postmodernity. Broch’s contemporaries and readers: Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Erich Kahler, Maurice Blanchot, Milan Kundera. Field trips to the Beinecke Library and Broch’s grave in Killingworth, CT.

Historical narrative between fiction and reality. The tension or possible contradiction between the concepts of history and fiction. Historiography, history writing as a literary genre, biography and biographical fiction (biopic), historical novels, novellas, dramas, and films. Poetics and historiography of the German classical period (Aristotle, Wieland, Schiller, Kleist). Contemporary works of film and literature. Twentieth-century theories of S. Kracauer and Lukács (The Historical Novel). Literary works of Schiller (Wallenstein), Goethe (Torquato Tasso), W. Scott (Waverley), S. Zweig (historical novellas), Mann (Death in Venice), Martin (Fire and Blood), Field (Tár).

This is the second part of a year-long seminar (first part CPLT 904) to introduce students to the discipline of psychoanalysis through primary sources, mainly from the Freudian and Lacanian corpuses. We rigorously study key concepts of continental psychoanalytic theory that students have heard or read about before but never had the chance to study. Students gain proficiency in what has been called “the language of psychoanalysis,” as well as tools for their critical practice in humanities disciplines such as literary criticism, political theory, film studies, gender studies, theory of ideology, sociology, etc. Concepts studied include the unconscious, identification, the drive, repetition, the imaginary, the symbolic, the real, and jouissance. A central goal of the seminar is to disambiguate Freud’s corpus from Lacan’s return to it. We pay special attention to Freud’s “three” (the ego, superego, and id) in comparison to Lacan’s “three” (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real). The corpus treated in this seminar comes from continental Europe and includes few materials from the Anglophone schools of psychoanalysis developed in England and the USA. During the second term and depending on the interests developed by the group in the first term, we devote five weeks to special psychoanalytic topics such as sexuation, perversion, fetishism, psychosis, anti-asylum movements, or to special circulations of psychoanalytic concepts across different disciplines, such as film theory or the critique of ideology. Commentators and critics of Freud and Lacan are also consulted (Michel Arrivé, Guy Le Gaufey, Jean Laplanche, André Green, Markos Zafiropoulos, and others). No previous knowledge of psychoanalysis is needed. We start at the beginning and the simplest questions are the most useful. Graduate students from all departments and schools on campus are welcome. Taught in English. Materials can be provided to cover the linguistic range of the group.

By arrangement with the faculty.