Course Archive

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Courses Spring 2020

Exploring Contemporary German Culture

GMAN 151 (L5, taught in German)

Susan Morrow

Advanced German course focusing on vocabulary expansion through reading practice; stylistic development in writing; and development of conversational German. Critical analysis of selected aspects of contemporary German culture, such as Green Germany, social movements from the 60s to today, the changing “Sozialstaat,” and current events.

The Afro-German Experience

GMAN 163 (L5, taught in German)

Theresa Schenker

Investigation of the history and culture of Afro-Germans. Topics include pre-colonial contacts between Africans and Germans, German colonies in Africa, and the Afro-German fate during and after the Nazi regime. Strong focus on the experience of Afro-Germans in contemporary Germany as seen in Afro-German fictional and non-fictional texts and media. Course culminates in an analysis of the image of people of color and questions of racism in Germany today

Introduction to German Literature: Narratives of the Uncanny

GMAN 176 (L5, taught in German)

Thiti Owlarn

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (graduate/undergraduate)

GMAN 247 / GMAN 710

Kirk Wetters

A detailed study of Goethe’s 1795/96 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – the first novel of the nineteenth century and the prototypical novel of education (Bildungsroman); engagement with critical and scholarly reception starting with Schiller and Schlegel, theories of the novel and transformations of modern society.

The Death Sentence: When the State Kills

GMAN 316 / HUMS 317

Paul North & Nica Siegel

The political, economic, and philosophical figure of the “death sentence,” although it has archaic roots, continues to haunt the 21st century. “Capital punishment,” often understood as the paradigmatic, final, and ultimate form of sovereign power, will form only the starting point of our inquiry. If it is the case that, as John Locke writes quoting Cicero, salus populi suprema lex esto (the safety and salvation of the people is the highest good), and if, furthermore, this maxim extends in the name of national security up to and including the point where the lives of certain people and populations are thrown into question, then all instances where the state kills, sanctions killing, or benefits directly or indirectly from the killing of its own citizens must be in question in the course. It may seem strange–modern politics, economics, and philosophy all begin from death sentences. The French revolution depended on bloody executions that were “necessary” for founding a new polity. The Atlantic slave trade condemned millions of Africans to death, under economic reasoning, for the benefit of world capitalism. Athens killed the philosopher Socrates because he was dangerous to the polis, and philosophy has enshrined this death sentence as its mythical origin and its most modern moment. We will investigate the stories and logics these events have in common.

Why does the state kill its own? Why are death sentences necessary for the current complex of state-nation-capital? Why did “barbaric” practices not end with enlightenment, the critique of religion, scientific rationalism, modernization, capitalism? Answers to these questions come from texts in political theory, philosophy, history, and the social sciences.

Landscape, Film, Architecture

GMAN 344 / FILM 344

Fatima Naqvi

How do we move through particular landscapes and what does this movement do for our understanding of them? How do we come to reflect on our emplacement in specific geographies or topographies? What kinds of aesthetic responses to landscape have films and novels offered, especially in the period after the end of World War II, when the widespread scale of destruction attuned people to questions regarding the built environment and land usage.

In this course, we look at visual and verbal means utilized by artists to expand on philosophical, historical, economic and sociological inquiries into how places are inhabited and experienced. We explore real and imaginary spaces in works by filmmakers, architects, sculptors, photographers, and writers. We begin with the “insulted landscape” of the immediate decades after 1945; we continue with ways of experiencing landscape that are class and gender based; we ask what the end of the Anthropocene holds in store for humans’ experience in the future.

Films by Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Michael Haneke, Christian Petzold, Ulrike Ottinger, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Ulrich Seidl, Valeska Grisebach; texts by Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek. Additional readings by Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, J.B. Jackson, Lucius Burckhardt, Kevin Lynch, Christopher Alexander, Anette Freytag.

The German Novel in the 20th and 21st Century

GMAN 365 / LITR 460

Rüdiger Campe

The course discusses exemplary novels in German language after 1945 from West and East Germany, Germany after Reunification, from Austria, and from Switzerland. Part I, “Zero Hour - or Not,” on political critique of Nazi Germany and the attempt of aesthetic clean break (e.g., Gunther Grass, Wolfgang Koeppen, Ingeborg Bachmann, Max Frisch); Part II “1968: Revolution or New Interiority,” on social protest versus aesthetic internationalism (e.g., Peter Handke, Christa Wolf, Hubert Fichte, Thomas Bernhard); Part III, “The Attempt of Being Contemporary,” on German and German speaking societies in the global world (e.g., Elfriede Jelinek, Daniel Kehlmann, Yoko Tawada, Rainald Goetz). While “contemporaneity” is the particular mark of the last section, all works desire to critically intervene in their moment and their place in time. Giving an account of this desire is the goal of the course.

Ernst Cassirer. Form as Function (graduate)

GMAN 705 / HSAR 530 / CPLT 851

Rudiger Campe & Nicola Suthor

Cassirer’s philosophy of the “symbolic form”—foundational for the art historical method of iconography as well as structural analysis in literature and art—is reexamined for its validity. Cassirer’s revolutionary concept of function as opposed to substance, developed in the Neo-Kantian context of hermeneutics and modern science, is the point of departure for our new engagement with his work. We center on Cassirer’s theory of form in art and literature and repercussions in Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, Walter Benjamin, George Kubler, and others. Cassirer’s philosophy of myth and the political gives further importance to the “symbolic form.”

Courses Fall 2019

Advanced German, Contemporary Germany
GMAN 152 (L5, taught in German)

Theresa Schenker

Pre-1945 German Culture and History

GMAN 162 (L5, taught in German)

Marion Gehlker

Once upon a time, long before Tolkien, Disney, or Rowling, two brothers named Grimm published a collection of fairy tales that went on to have an immense cultural impact throughout the world. German children grow up with these fairy tales and they play a huge part in German culture even today. The Grimm fairy tales are the textual point of departure for a multi-faceted, integrative exploration of this popular and influential genre through time. Students explore fairy tales by Wilhelm Hauff and Ludwig Bechstein, as well as traditional cultural theories of the German fairy tale, psychoanalytic and pedagogical interpretive approaches, and contextualization of this genre in cultural and social history. The focus is on the role that the literary fairy tale played in German culture throughout history and the impact German fairy tales still have today.

Introduction to German Lyric Poetry

GMAN 173 (L5, taught in German)

Irina Kogan

Vienna 1900-1938 (graduate/undergraduate)

GMAN 323 / GMAN 714

Fatima Naqvi

The Vienna of 1900—of Freud, Schnitzler, Strauss, Hofmannsthal, Kraus, Musil, Mahler, Schönberg, Klimt, Schiele, and Wittgenstein—has become the stuff of myth. For good reason: at the turn of the 20th century, the capital of the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual Habsburg Empire became a focal point for experimentation in literature, fine art, architecture, music, film, psychology, and philosophy.

In this course, we will examine the emergence of new aesthetic strategies and the development of psychoanalysis; we delve into questions of representation and language. How do the artists of the time thematize the pressures of urbanization, secularization, ethnic conflict, cosmopolitanism, sexuality, gender, and consciousness? Continuing into the interwar period, we examine the collapse of empire and its ramifications for architecture, urban planning, and artistic representation. The post-1918 period, leading up to the rise of fascism in the early 1930s and Austria’s Anschluss, witnessed the emergence of progressive social ideals in the public sphere, from childcare to public housing projects. Women writers move to the forefront as chroniclers and analysts of squalid living conditions, rising anti-Semitism, and gender disparities.

Walter Benjamin’s Critical Theory (graduate only)

GMAN 709

Paul North

Careful analysis of central texts in Benjamin’s oeuvre in the context of his philosophical, political, and literary reading.

Graduate Proseminar in German Literature (graduate only)

GMAN 712

Kirk Wetters

Field-specific introduction to the history and methods of the field of German in a comparative and interdisciplinary context, with emphasis on project design and professionalization. Specific topic(s) in the form of case studies chosen by proseminar participants and first- and second-year graduate students in German. Focus on cornerstone works of literature and emerging fields in the context of established critical approaches. Proseminar participants and the faculty proseminar leader collaboratively teach and design individual meetings. Strongly encouraged for first- and second-year graduate students in German. The fall 2019 topic is Critical Methodologies of Literature and Theory.

Courses Spring 2019

GMAN 151

Exploring Contemporary German Culture

Marion Gehlker

Advanced German course focusing on vocabulary expansion through reading practice; stylistic development in writing; and development of conversational German. Critical analysis of selected aspects of contemporary German culture, such as Green Germany, social movements from the 60s to today, the changing “Sozialstaat,” and current events.

GMAN 160

German Culture, History, and Politics in Text and Film

Theresa Schenker

Advanced language course about the history, politics, and culture of East Germany from 1945 to reunification. Analysis of life in the German Democratic Republic with literary and nonliterary texts and films. Includes oral and written assignments, with an emphasis on vocabulary building and increased cultural awareness. Taught in German.

GMAN 171

Introduction to German Prose Narrative

Hinz, Ole

Study of key authors and works of the German narrative tradition, with a focus on the development of advanced reading comprehension, writing, and speaking skills. Readings from short stories, novellas, and at least one novel. Writings by exemplary storytellers of the German tradition, such as Goethe, Kleist, Hebel, Hoffmann, Stifter, Keller, Kafka, Mann, Musil, Bachmann, and Bernhard.

GMAN 225 / FILM 346 / LITR 362 (also GMAN 760 / FILM 760 / CPLT 905)

Intermediality in Film

Peucker, Brigitte

Film is a hybrid medium, the meeting point of several others. This course focuses on the relationship of film to theater, painting, and video, suggesting that where two media are in evidence, there is usually a third. Topics include space, motion, framing, color, theatricality, tableau vivant, ekphrasis, spectatorship, and new media. Readings feature art historical and film theoretical texts as well as essays pertinent to specific films. Films by Fassbinder, Bergman, von Trier, Jarman, Godard, Haneke, Antonioni, Greenaway and others.

GMAN 372 / HUMS 274 / LITR 228 / JDST 355

Reflections on the Holocaust 

Truestedt, Katrin

Reflections on how the Holocaust has shaken our understanding of modern Western culture. We focus especially on literary and theoretical reflections on the Holocaust as undermining the very possibility of experience, representation, and of inhabiting a shared world. The course aims to give perspective on the complex factors conditioning the Holocaust; the rise of nationalism, fascism, and racism; the relationship between modernity and barbarism; inclusion and exclusion; law and bare life, World War II and the emergence the Camp System in Eastern Europe; collaboration, resistance, and survival. Readings by Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, and others.

GMAN 418 / LITR 453 (also GMAN 742 / CPLT 782)

Being a Person

Campe, Rüdiger; Truestedt, Katrin

In Western experience, the social and legal notion of a “person” has been deeply informed by how “persons” are formed and performed onstage and in narration, and vice versa. Readings focus on three areas: (1) basic texts on the history of the notion of “person” and “character” in legal, poetical, and philosophical contexts from Aristotle to modernity; (2) the performance of personhood in the rebirth of modern theater in early modern times; and (3) the narrative evocation of a new modern character in the rise of the modern novel. In order to bring into view the performative and aesthetic dimensions of personhood we discuss questions such as: What does it mean to appear as a person on a stage? What does it take to appear as a certain character (e.g. as reflected in Commedia dell’Arte; Shakespeare; Racine; Lessing)? What is a main and what is a supporting character (e.g. as reflected in Defoe, Richardson, Goethe, Kleist, Mary Shelley)? How can a protagonist of a novel be constituted and how is her or his identity defined and secured? Gender, race, and social class are of relevance throughout, as well as the question of being a non-person (a madman, an animal, a monster, an outcast).

GMAN 422 / HUMS 250 / LITR 439 / PHIL 476 (also GMAN 654 / CPLT 562)

Living Form: Organicism in Society and Aesthetics

Wetters, Kirk

Starting with Kant, the organic is defined as a processual relation of the part and the whole, thereby providing a new model of the individual as a self-contained totality. Students explore the implications of this conception in Goethe’s writings on morphology (The Metamorphosis of Plants, “Orphic Primal Words”), the Romantics’ Atheneum, Hanslick’s On the Beautiful in Music, Oswald Spengler’s cultural morphology, the concept of autopoeisis in Maturana and Varela, Luhmann’s systems theory, and Canguilheim’s critique of the analogy of organic life and society.

GMAN 368 / FILM 419 / LITR 382 (also GMAN 730 / CPLT 716 / FILM 729)

German New Waves in Cold War Europe

Trumpener, Katie

Comparative study of New Wave cinema in East and West Germany, with a focus on aesthetic ferment, institutional barriers, and transformation. Berlin as the best place to follow Europe’s emerging cinematic New Waves before 1961. Distinctive approaches developed by young filmmakers in East and West Germany to political and documentary filmmaking, to the Nazi past and the Cold War, and to class, gender, and social transformation.

Graduate Courses Spring 2019

GMAN 742 / CPLT 782 (also GMAN 418 / LITR 453)

Being a Person

Campe, Rüdiger; Truestedt, Katrin

In Western experience, the social and legal notion of a “person” has been deeply informed by how “persons” are formed and performed onstage and in narration, and vice versa. Readings focus on three areas: (1) basic texts on the history of the notion of “person” and “character” in legal, poetical, and philosophical contexts from Aristotle to modernity; (2) the performance of personhood in the rebirth of modern theater in early modern times; and (3) the narrative evocation of a new modern character in the rise of the modern novel. In order to bring into view the performative and aesthetic dimensions of personhood we discuss questions such as: What does it mean to appear as a person on a stage? What does it take to appear as a certain character (e.g. as reflected in Commedia dell’Arte; Shakespeare; Racine; Lessing)? What is a main and what is a supporting character (e.g. as reflected in Defoe, Richardson, Goethe, Kleist, Mary Shelley)? How can a protagonist of a novel be constituted and how is her or his identity defined and secured? Gender, race, and social class are of relevance throughout, as well as the question of being a non-person (a madman, an animal, a monster, an outcast).

GMAN 654  / CPLT 562 (also GMAN 422 / HUMS 250 / LITR 439 / PHIL 476)

Living Form: Organicism in Society and Aesthetics

Wetters, Kirk

Starting with Kant, the organic is defined as a processual relation of the part and the whole, thereby providing a new model of the individual as a self-contained totality. Students explore the implications of this conception in Goethe’s writings on morphology (The Metamorphosis of Plants, “Orphic Primal Words”), the Romantics’ Atheneum, Hanslick’s On the Beautiful in Music, Oswald Spengler’s cultural morphology, the concept of autopoeisis in Maturana and Varela, Luhmann’s systems theory, and Canguilheim’s critique of the analogy of organic life and society.

GMAN 730 / CPLT 716 / FILM 729 (also GMAN 368 / LITR 382 / FILM 419)

German New Waves in Cold War Europe

Trumpener, Katie

Comparative study of New Wave cinema in East and West Germany, with a focus on aesthetic ferment, institutional barriers, and transformation. Berlin as the best place to follow Europe’s emerging cinematic New Waves before 1961. Distinctive approaches developed by young filmmakers in East and West Germany to political and documentary filmmaking, to the Nazi past and the Cold War, and to class, gender, and social transformation.

Courses Fall 2018

GMAN 150

Advanced German I

Marion Gehlker

An advanced language and culture course focusing on contemporary Germany. Analysis and discussion of current events in Germany and Europe through the lens of German media, including newspapers, books, TV, film radio, and modern electronic media formats. Focus on oral and written production to achieve advanced linguistic skills.

GMAN 165

The German Fairy Tale and its Legacy

Theresa Schenker

Once upon a time, long before Tolkien, Disney, or Rowling, two brothers named Grimm published a collection of fairy tales that went on to have an immense cultural impact throughout the world. German children grow up with these fairy tales and they play a huge part in German culture even today. The Grimm fairy tales are the textual point of departure for a multi-faceted, integrative exploration of this popular and influential genre through time. Students explore fairy tales by Wilhelm Hauff and Ludwig Bechstein, as well as traditional cultural theories of the German fairy tale, psychoanalytic and pedagogical interpretive approaches, and contextualization of this genre in cultural and social history. The focus is on the role that the literary fairy tale played in German culture throughout history and the impact German fairy tales still have today.

GMAN 172

Introduction to German Theater

Morrow, Susan

GMAN 254 / PHIL 274 / RLST 249

Jewish Philosophy

Franks, Paul

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.

GMAN 311/HUMS 230/LITR 215

The Age of Goethe

Wetters, Kirk

Introduction to Germany’s classical period, from the 1780s to the 1810s, with attention to the varied forms of literature, philosophy, art, music, and culture. The close connection between literature and philosophy; the theoretical foundations of European Romanticism. Some attention to twentieth‐century theory.

GMAN 314 / PLSC 309 / (Grad GMAN 651 / PLSC 583 / PHIL 672)

Contemporary Critical Theory

Benhabib, Seyla

Frankfurt School Critical Theory after Habermas’s program focuses on a number of unresolved questions such as pragmatic Kantianism, modernity and post-colonial theory, idea of progress in critical theory and judgment as amoral, political, aesthetic category. Readings from: Habermas, McCarthy, Baynes, Honneth, A. Allen, Ferrara, and Zerilli.

GMAN 326 / LITR 248

Franz Kafka & Thomas Mann

Hagens, Jan

Comparison of Kafka’s radical modernism and Mann’s neoclassical realism as fundamentally different modes of responding to the challenges of twentieth-century culture. Close reading of short stories by both writers, with attention to the authors’ themes, literary techniques, and worldviews.

GMAN 379 / LITR 374

German Cinema 1918–1933

Hagens, Jan

The years between 1918 and 1933 are the Golden Age of German film. In its development from Expressionism to Social Realism, this German cinema produced works of great variety, many of them in the international avantgarde. This introductory seminar gives an overview of the silent movies and sound films made during the Weimar Republic and situate them in their artistic, cultural, social, and political context between WWI and WWII, between the Kaiser’s German Empire and the Nazis’ Third Reich. Further objectives include: familiarizing students with basic categories of film studies and film analysis; showing how these films have shaped the history and the language of film; discussing topic-oriented and methodological issues such as: film genres (horror film, film noir, science fiction, street film, documentary film); set design, camera work, acting styles; narration in film; avantgarde cinema; the advent and use of sound in film; Realism versus Expressionism; film and popular mythology; melodrama; representation of women; modern urban life as spectacle; film and politics. Directors studied include: Grune, Lang, Lubitsch, Murnau, Pabst, Richter, Ruttmann, Sagan, von Sternberg, Wiene, et al.

GMAN 381 / PHIL 204

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Franks, Paul

An examination of the metaphysical and epistemological doctrines of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

GMAN 371 / HUMS 353 / LITR 442

Kafka and the Philosophers

Campe, Rüdiger

The notion of the “Kafkaesque” is testimony to the exceptional place and impact of Kafka’s work and writing in world literature. In fact, Kafka has not only been extensively imitated by other writers and read by literary critics but his narratives and novels became the place of intense engagement by philosophers. More often than not, Kafka is not just another example for a theoretical concept but offers the possibility for new concepts or even requires new ways of thinking. An introduction into Kafka’s world of writing is offered by the reading of pieces form his early work (Description of a Struggle), the novel The Trial (with Orson Welles’s movie), and the late narrative Josephine, the Singer. The philosophers to read on Kafka (and in their own context) are Albert Camus, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Claudio Agamben, and, in conjunction with Kafka, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty.

GMAN 386 / PHIL 486

Kant’s Critique of Judgment

In-depth study of Kant’s third and final critique, one of the major works of modern philosophy, containing both the foundation of modern aesthetics and a critical reformulation of natural teleology. Discussions address both parts and their enigmatic unity; highlight the relation of nature and freedom, mechanism and teleology, theoretical and practical cognition at the heart of the book; and include post-Kantian thought (German Idealism, 20th century continental philosophy) that only became possible through Kant’s third critique.

GMAN 413 / HUMS 355 / LITR 454 / PHIL 489

The Politics of Moral Emotions: Ressentiment and Resentment

Setton, Dirk

GMAN 571 / CPLT 788

Robert Musil: Man Without Qualities. The End of the Novel

Campe, Rüdiger

Musil’s unfinished, gigantic novel Man without Qualities (published 1930–33) is one of the quintessential modernist (interwar) European novels. Close (i.e., selective) reading of the novel is introduced by examples from Musil’s earlier highly experimental narratives (Unions; The Blackbird), and it is accompanied by looking into Musil’s widespread scientific and sociolegal interests, which are relevant for the novel (statistics and probability; the Vienna Circle and the modern science of philosophy; theories of accountability and the case study; Wagner and Romantic music; the theory of the image in the age of cinema). Taking as its point of departure the intertwining of essayistic writing and narration that characterizes Man without Qualities, the reading centers on the self-theorization of the novel and, even more fundamental, the question of prose as literary form and method of notation. Readings in English or German. Discussions in English.

GMAN 593 / CPLT 954

Reading Theory

Truestedt, Katrin

From the new form of literary theory taking shape in romanticism to recent German media studies, this course examines the relation of close readings of singular texts to larger theoretical claims. We reflect on the eminent status that literary readings have attained for broader theoretical and philosophical projects. We specifically focus on a certain theoretical milieu in which far-reaching theoretical claims were not merely exemplified or illustrated by, but in fact developed from distinct practices of (close) reading of particular literary texts. The aim is to analyze this distinct type of theory by investigating the scenes of reading that major theoretical endeavors depended upon, in order to trace the trajectory of theory and turn to more recent theoretical endeavors, to discuss the changed status that reading has for them. Among the authors read are Schlegel, Benjamin, de Man, Derrida, Blumenberg, Butler, Kittler, and Latour.

GMAN 651 / PLSC 583 / PHIL 672 (also GMAN 314 / PLSC 309)

Contemporary Critical Theory

Benhabib, Seyla

Frankfurt School Critical Theory after Habermas’s program focuses on a number of unresolved questions such as pragmatic Kantianism, modernity and post-colonial theory, idea of progress in critical theory and judgment as amoral, political, aesthetic category. Readings from: Habermas, McCarthy, Baynes, Honneth, A. Allen, Ferrara, and Zerilli.

GMAN 443 / GMAN 682 / LITR 455 / CPLT 704 / CLCV 443 / PHIL 478 / HUMS 356

Antigone after Hegel: The Ambiguities of Ethical Life and Action

Setton, Dirk

Fall 2015 Undergraduate Courses

GMAN 158 / JDST 416

Reading Yiddish

Price, Joshua

An introduction to the literary language (alphabet, phonology, Hebrew and Slavic vocabulary, Ashkenazi culture), with grammar exercises and annotated readings from classic authors.

GMAN 314 / GMAN 651 / PLSC 309 / PLSC 583 / PHIL 627

Contemporary German Culture

Schenker, Theresa; Gutterman, Julia

Analysis and discussion of current social and cultural trends. Topics drawn from newspapers, films, TV series, cabaret, short literary texts, and talks. Focus on oral and written production to improve upper-level linguistic skills.

GMAN 173

Introduction to German Lyric Poetry

Ronzheimer, Elisa

The German lyric tradition, including classic works by Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Eichendorff, Heine, Mörike, Droste-Hülshoff, Rilke, George, Brecht, Trakl, Celan, Bachmann, and Jandl. Attention to the German Lied (art song). Development of advanced reading, writing, speaking, and translation skills.

GMAN 226 / LITR 218

Faust

Hagens, Jan

The development of the Faust motif through time, from the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation to the twentieth century. Readings from the English adaptation of the original German chapbook and from works by Marlowe, Ben Johnson, Goethe, Wilde, Bulgakov, and Thomas Mann. Screenings of films with a Faustian theme.

GMAN 231 / JDST 338

Twentieth-Century German-Jewish Thought

Hotam, Yotam

Relations between secular and theological notions in the writings of twentieth-century German-Jewish thinkers, including Gershom Scholem, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Hannah Arendt. Focus on the scholars’ ongoing engagements with topics such as godly love, the conflict between reason and revelation, the relations between Judaism and Christianity, worldliness and transcendence, and mysticism.

GMAN 240 / LITR 226

German Modernism

Sussman, Henry

Introduction to the radical innovations of modernism as it was forged, received, and revised in German-speaking Europe from c. 1880 to 1945. Literary experiments in dissonance and multifaceted suggestion; strategies in criticism and elucidation demanded by modernist works. Some attention to parallels in painting and music. Readings in English translation. Priority to German Studies majors.

GMAN 276 / LITR 423

Satire, Irony, Parody

North, Paul

The uses and abuses of satire, irony, and parody as literary modes for social critique. Examination of the historical claim that antiquity uses satire, the romantic period uses irony, and the modernist period to the present uses parody for the purposes of critique. Readings include German and Austrian literature written from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries and classic works in the ancient Greek, Roman, English, Spanish, and American traditions.

GMAN 326 / LITR 248

Franz Kafka & Thomas Mann

Hagens, Jan

Comparison of Kafka’s radical modernism and Mann’s neoclassical realism as fundamentally different modes of responding to the challenges of twentieth-century culture. Close reading of short stories by both writers, with attention to the authors’ themes, literary techniques, and worldviews.

GMAN 358  / GMAN 558 / LITR 416 / JDST 345 / JDST 694 / CPLT 575

Georg Lukács: Literature and Politics

Wetters, Kirk, Hever, Hannan

Literary critical, aesthetic, political and theoretical writings of Georg Lukács; Lukács as a Jewish thinker and Marxist critic; the development of Lukács’ thought against the backdrop of twentieth-century history; influence and reception in Germany, Israel, Austria, the United States and the Soviet Union.

GMAN 362 / GMAN 619 / LITR 468 / CPLT 530

The Question of Form

Jacobs, Carol

The concept of art in relation to form and deformation. Starting with the Plato (The Republic) we will then trace its echoes in modern literature (Keats, Shelley, Hardy, Kleist, Kafka), and film (Godard, Egoyan, Dreyer, Sun Zhou, Wong Kar-Wai).

GMAN 389 / GMAN 589 / LITR 237

Hegel and Dialectical Thought

Sussman, Henry

A careful inventory of Hegelian dialectics and a broad view of subsequent philosophical and literary projects to the postwar twentieth century. Additional readings in Schlegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Freud, Kafka, Benjamin, and Blanchot. German idealism’s unparalleled innovation; the rise and fate of a powerful philosophical operating system.

Students are encouraged to read German, Danish, and French material in the original.

GMAN 416 / GMAN 600 / LITR 430 / CPLT 787

Novels of the Institution

Campe, Rüdiger

Close reading of novels of institutions—school, law court, administration, hospital—from c. 1900. The shift of focus from the individual to the institution; consequences of this shift for the concept and form of the novel. Works by R. Walser, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, and Thomas Mann; readings in social and aesthetic theory by Simmel, Lukács, and Benjamin.

Discussion in English; readings in German and English.

GMAN 456 / GMAN 605 / CPLT 517 / LITR 456

Interpretation and Authority

Jacobs, Carol

Close readings of works on problems of authority and interpretation by Sigmund Freud, Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, and Walter Benjamin. Exploration of their writing as a performance that questions simplistic notions of truth. Consideration of the problem of how to interpret texts that unsettle the very nature of interpretation.

Fall 2015 Graduate Courses

GMAN 558 / GMAN 358 / LITR 416 / JDST 345 / JDST 694 / CPLT 575

Georg Lukács: Literature and Politics

Wetters, Kirk, Hever, Hannan

Literary critical, aesthetic, political and theoretical writings of Georg Lukács; Lukács as a Jewish thinker and Marxist critic; the development of Lukács’ thought against the backdrop of twentieth-century history; influence and reception in Germany, Israel, Austria, the United States and the Soviet Union.

GMAN 565

Nothing

North, Paul

European thought has concerned itself historically with “things” and occasionally with the highest and most permanent things such as the world, the soul, and God. Yet in order to articulate what these things are and do, philosophers and artists often turned to a concept of nothing. Leibniz, for example, formulated the most fundamental philosophical question as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” And yet the meaning and function of nothing remain obscure. What kind of thing is it? Is there just one kind of nothing? How does “no” operate on this special kind of “thing” to give it such power? In this course we will study the moments when “nothing” becomes crucial to philosophical, religious, political, and artistic projects. Other negativities will be important too, such as those signalled by the little words “no,” “not,” “non-,” “never,” “nor,” “-less,” “in-” and “un-,”  “void,” and “null.” Authors we will read include Plato, Gorgias, Philo, Duns Scotus, Meister Eckhart, Shakespeare, Kant, Bergson, Heidegger, Walser, Beckett, and Sartre.

GMAN 589 / GMAN 389  / LITR 237

Hegel and Dialectical Thought

Sussman, Henry

A careful inventory of Hegelian dialectics and a broad view of subsequent philosophical and literary projects to the postwar twentieth century. Additional readings in Schlegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Freud, Kafka, Benjamin, and Blanchot. German idealism’s unparalleled innovation; the rise and fate of a powerful philosophical operating system.

Students are encouraged to read German, Danish, and French material in the original.

GMAN 600 / GMAN 416 / LITR 430 / CPLT 787

Novels of the Institution

Campe, Rüdiger

Close reading of novels of institutions—school, law court, administration, hospital—from c. 1900. The shift of focus from the individual to the institution; consequences of this shift for the concept and form of the novel. Works by R. Walser, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, and Thomas Mann; readings in social and aesthetic theory by Simmel, Lukács, and Benjamin.

Discussion in English; readings in German and English.

GMAN 605 / GMAN 456 / CPLT 517 / LITR 456

Interpretation and Authority

Jacobs, Carol

Close readings of works on problems of authority and interpretation by Sigmund Freud, Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, and Walter Benjamin. Exploration of their writing as a performance that questions simplistic notions of truth. Consideration of the problem of how to interpret texts that unsettle the very nature of interpretation.

GMAN 619 / GMAN 362 / LITR 468 / CPLT 530

The Question of Form

Jacobs, Carol

The concept of art in relation to form and deformation. Starting with the Plato (The Republic) we will then trace its echoes in modern literature (Keats, Shelley, Hardy, Kleist, Kafka), and film (Godard, Egoyan, Dreyer, Sun Zhou, Wong Kar-Wai).

GMAN 651 / GMAN 314 / PLSC 309 / PLSC 583 / PHIL 627

Contemporary Critical Theory

Benhabib, Seyla

A careful examination of Hegel’s theory of the modern state and its elaboration by Habermas and Honneth.

GMAN 652 / CPLT 840 / FILM 840 / HSAR 687 / RUSS 712

Moscow/Berlin: Leftist Avant-Gardes and Interwar Modernism

Clark, Katerina, Trumpener, Katie

From 1918 to the mid-1930s, Moscow and Berlin were central gathering points for left-wing modernists. Each city developed its own modes of modernism, yet in sustained dialogue, given massive Russian emigration to Berlin after 1918, the Weimar obsession with early Soviet aesthetics (and cinema), intellectuals traveling in both directions, and the large-scale emigration of German leftists to the Soviet Union after 1933. And in the late 1940s and ’50s, Soviet intellectuals (and German emigrants returning from Moscow) shaped a “late modernism” in East Berlin. Centered on literature and film, the course also considers a wide array of art forms (including painting, photography, architecture, music, and aesthetic theory). Works by modernists such as Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov, Nabokov, Shklovsky, El Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Malevich, Tretiakov, Lukács, Moholy-Nagy, Benjamin, Brecht, Richter, Beckmann, Grosz, Heartfield, Höch, Lang, Döblin, Ruttmann, Mies van der Rohe, Eisler, Busch, Konrad Wolf, Peter Weiss.

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Spring 2015 Undergraduate Courses

GMAN 160 (22197)

German Culture, History, and Politics in Text and Film

Theresa Schenker

An advanced language course focused on improving upper-level language skills through the discussion of selected aspects of post-1945 German culture, politics, and history in literary and nonliterary texts and film. Includes oral and written assignments with an emphasis on vocabulary building and increased cultural awareness. After GMAN 140, 145, or 150. L5

GMAN 191 (22426) / LITR 334

Problems of Lyric

Howard Stern

Masterpieces of European and American lyric studied in relation to the various determinants of poetry: grammar and logic, meter and rhyme, self-consciousness and performativity, myth and theme. Poets include Brecht, Rilke, Goethe, Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop. Reading knowledge of German or French useful but not required. HU

GMAN 209 (22267) / HIST 231

War in Germany, 1648–2010

John Tooze

The rise and fall of modern militarism in Germany. Individual battles, soldiers, and weapons discussed within a broader context of the justification and regulation of state violence. Germany as a European battlefield, and as a nation that has perhaps come closest to drawing a final, concluding line under its military history. HU

GMAN 210 (22199) / HUMS 322

The Frankfurt School

Kirk Wetters

Major works of the Frankfurt school of social research explored in the context of twentieth-century social, psychological, political, literary, and aesthetic thought. HU

GMAN 225 (22201) / FILM 346 / LITR 362, Intermediality in Film

Brigitte Peucker

The relationship of film to theater and painting, with the suggestion that where two media are in evidence, there is usually a third. Topics include space, motion, color, theatricality, tableau vivant, ekphrasis, spectatorship, and new media. Readings feature art-historical and film-theoretical texts as well as essays pertinent to specific films. HU

GMAN 247 (22206) / HUMS 227 / LITR 201

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister

Kirk Wetters

A detailed study of Goethe’s two Wilhelm Meister novels. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as the first novel of the nineteenth century and the prototypical novel of education (Bildungsroman); Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years as an unconventional sequel in which Goethe shows his unwillingness to repeat the model of his earlier breakthrough work. Readings and discussion in English. HU

Spring 2015 Graduate Courses

GMAN 520 (21047) / PHIL 613

History of Analytic Philosophy

Paul Franks

A study of the problems and methods of early analytic philosophers, including Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists. Problems such as realism, a priori propositions and convention, logic and meaning, empirical knowledge, verification and truth. Methods of analysis deploying formal notations, and studies of ordinary and scientific uses of language.

GMAN 615 (20818) / CPLT 964

Meaning and History: Blumenberg, Derrida, Foucault

Rudiger Campe

Discussion of seminal works by Blumenberg, Derrida, and Foucault from the early 1960s. All three authors develop models of critical hermeneutics from their respective readings of Husserl (and Heidegger) on science and technology (Crisis of European Sciences). We explore how a general rethinking of interpretation and criticism in the humanities starts from the questioning of science and technology, and what this means for today’s humanities.

GMAN 705 (21051) / PHIL 702

Nietzsche: Truth, Value, and Tragedy

Karsten Harries

An examination of Nietzsche’s understanding of tragedy as the only acceptable answer to nihilism, given the death of God. T 1:30–3:20 GMAN 760bU/CPLT 905bU/FILM 760bU, Intermediality in Film Brigitte Peucker Film is a hybrid medium, the meeting point of several others. This course focuses on the relationship of film to theater and painting, suggesting that where two media are in evidence, there is usually a third. Topics include space, motion, color, theatricality, tableau vivant, ekphrasis, spectatorship, and new media. Readings feature art historical and film theoretical texts as well as essays pertinent to specific films. Films by Fassbinder, Bergman, Murnau, von Trier, Rohmer, Godard, Kiarostami, and others, concluding with three films by Peter Greenaway.

GMAN 710 01 (20792) 

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister

Kirk Wetters

Goethe’s epoch-making Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship marks a turning point in the history of the novel. Published in 1795–96, it is generally recognized as the first novel of the nineteenth century and as the prototypical novel of education. In the unconventional sequel, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, Goethe shows his unwillingness to repeat the model of his earlier breakthrough work.

GMAN 760 01 (20807) 

Intermediality in Film

Brigitte Peucker

Film is a hybrid medium, the meeting point of several others. This course focuses on the relationship of film to theater and painting, suggesting that where two media are in evidence, there is usually a third. Topics include space, motion, color, theatricality, tableau vivant, ekphrasis, spectatorship, and new media. Readings feature art historical and film theoretical texts as well as essays pertinent to specific films. Films by Fassbinder, Bergman, Murnau, von Trier, Rohmer, Godard, Kiarostami, and others, concluding with three films by Peter Greenaway.

Fall 2014 Undergraduate Courses

GMAN 162 01 (12933) 

Contemporary German Culture

Theresa Schenker

Analysis and discussion of current social and cultural trends. Topics drawn from newspapers, films, TV series, cabaret, short literary texts, and talks. Focus on oral and written production to improve upper-level linguistic skills.

Prerequisite: GMAN 150, or with permission of instructor. May not be taken for credit after GMAN 168.

GMAN 172 01 (12934) 

Introduction to German Theater

Nadine Schwakopf

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.

GMAN 211 01 (12935) /HUMS311/PHIL412

Marx, Nietzsche, Freud

Rüdiger Campe

The revolutionary ways in which Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud redefined the ends of freedom. Key works of the three authors on agency in politics, economics, epistemology, social life, and sexuality. Agency as individual or collective, as autonomous or heteronomous, and as a case of liberation or subversion. Additional readings from Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Weber.

GMAN 226 01 (12803) /LITR470

Faust

Jan Hagens

The development of the Faust motif through time, from the legend’s origins in the Renaissance-Reformation period to twentieth-century variations. Readings from the English adaptation of the original German chapbook, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Goethe’s Faust (Part I), and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus; screenings of films with a Faustian theme.

GMAN 234 01 (12938) /LITR244

German Fairy Tales

Henry Sussman

The influence of German fairy tales on the genre of fiction and on the emergence of psychology, psychoanalysis, and folklore. The fairy tale’s relation to romanticism; the importance of childhood sensibility to the fields of education, psychology, criticism, and cybernetics; the expansion of children’s literature into new mass media.

GMAN 268 01 (12940) /LITR457/GMAN564/CPLT532/HUMS262

W. G. Sebald

Carol Jacobs

Close readings of the major works of W. G. Sebald along with texts of other authors who played a direct role in these writings, including Thomas Browne, Grimmelshausen, Kafka, and Heshel. Texts in relation to theory of literature in terms of memory, representation, identity, ethical imperatives, and intertextual and intermedia relations.

GMAN 308 01 (12943) /CPLT560/GMAN559/LITR439

Rilke and Yeats

Carol Jacobs

Permission of instructor required. Readings in translation. Close readings of individual works by Rainer Maria Rilke and William Butler Yeats, with an eye to the theoretical implications of their writings.

GMAN 313 01 (12945) /LITR319

Eccentric Realism

Rainer Nägele

Reexamination of accepted concepts of “the real” through close readings of German nineteenth-century realist short stories and novellas by Keller, Stifter, and C. F. Meyer. Prerequisite: GMAN 150 or equivalent.

GMAN 380 01 (12543) /MUSI380/ER&M280

Music in Nazi Germany

Gundula Kreuzer

The interrelations between music and politics under the extreme conditions of a totalitarian regime. How the National Socialists sought to police all aspects of Germany’s musical life between 1933 and 1945 and why they often failed. Topics include aesthetic, political, and administrative prerequisites for the Nazis’ efforts; consequences of Nazism for musical culture during the Third Reich and beyond; and the vulnerability of music to ideological appropriation.

GMAN 408 01 (12792) /FILM357/GMAN602/LITR304/CPLT621

Books, Displays, and Systems Theory

Henry Sussman

A status report on the book as a medium in an age of cybernetic technology and virtual reality. The contentious no-man’s land between books and contemporary systems.

Fall 2014 Graduate Courses

GMAN 559 01 (10739) /CPLT560/LITR439/GMAN308

Rilke, Yeats

Carol Jacobs

Study of the works of two twentieth-century authors, Rainer Maria Rilke and William Butler Yeats, who, in very different ways, challenge conventional modes in which to think about the relationship between literature and what we tend to call reality.

GMAN 564 01 (10737) /LITR457/GMAN268/CPLT532/HUMS262

W.G. Sebald

Carol Jacobs

Close readings of the major works of W.G. Sebald along with texts of other authors whose writings play a direct or indirect role in these writings (Thomas Browne, Grimmelshausen, Celan). We explore the workings of these texts in relation to theory of literature in terms of memory, representation, identity, ethical imperatives, and intertextual and intermedial relations.

GMAN 602 01 (10743) /FILM357/LITR304/GMAN408/CPLT621

Books, Displays, and Systems Theory

Henry Sussman

A status report on the book as a medium in an age of cybernetic technology and virtual reality. The contentious no-man’s-land between books and contemporary systems.

GMAN 667 01 (10750) /CPLT711

Hölderlin

Rainer Nägele

There is something curious about the status of Hölderlin’s poetry in the context of European literature: only known to a small circle within his lifetime, Hölderlin’s poetry emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century as a major model for modern poetry. This seminar examines in close readings the particular shapes and forms of Hölderlin’s poetry that allowed it to become a major force in modernity. The seminar pays particular attention to the close connection between poetry and poetics in Hölderlin’s writings.

GMAN 704 01 (10950) /PHIL701

Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation

Karsten Harries

A careful reading, with special emphasis on the reception of Schopenhauer’s ideas.

Spring 2014 Undergraduate Courses

GMAN 160 01 (21098) 

German Culture, History, and Politics in Text and Film

Marion Gehlker

Final exam scheduled (Group 37) 05/03/2014 S 9.00

An advanced language course focusing on improving upper-level language skills through the discussion of selected aspects of German culture, politics, and history in literary and nonliterary texts and film. Topics include the Weimar Republic, youth movements, social democracy, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and postwar developments. Frequent oral and written assignments; emphasis on vocabulary building.

GMAN 176 01 (21577) 

Medieval German Romance and Epic

William Whobrey

Study of five great medieval works of Arthurian romance and courtly epic: Erec, Parzival, Tristan, the Rolandslied, and the Nibelungenlied. Literary transmission in both oral and written cultures, courtly patronage and its historical context, moral and religious codes of knighthood, and development of a literary German language. Readings in modern verse translation.

GMST 184 01 (21675) /LITR215/HUMS230/GMAN311

The Age of Goethe

Kirk Wetters

Introduction to Germany’s “classical” period, from the 1790s to the 1830s, with attention to literature, philosophy, art, and culture. The close connection between literature and philosophy of the period; the theoretical foundations of European Romanticism and of later backlashes against it. Some attention to twentieth-century theory.

GMAN 192 01 (21785) /LITR467

The Prose Labyrinth

Howard Stern

Short prose (prismatic, encyclopedic, labyrinthine) considered as a characteristic genre of twentieth-century literature. Works by Benjamin, Shklovsky, Ponge, Queneau, Calvino, and Cortázar. All readings available in English.

GMST 194 01 (21848) /LITR243/MUSI363/THST351

Cabaret

Lynda Paul

An exploration of cabaret as both a historical and a contemporary form of musical-literary-theatrical performance. Famous historical cabarets, with a focus on Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; films, plays, novels, and short stories based on the genre; cabaret songs and famous performers. Analysis of works by contemporary American cabaret artists. Students collaborate to write, produce, and perform three cabaret events.

GMAN 209 01 (21770) /HIST231

War in Germany, 1648–2010

John Tooze

The rise and fall of modern militarism in Germany. Individual battles, soldiers, and weapons discussed within a broader context of the justification and regulation of state violence. Germany as a European battlefield, and as a nation that has perhaps come closest to drawing a final, concluding line under its military history.

GMST 212 01 (21772) /PHIL261/HUMS330

Realism, Idealism, and Romanticism

Paul Franks

Investigation of the possibility of individual agency and absolute reason in modernity. Introduction to figures from classical German philosophy such as Kant, Goethe, Mendelssohn, Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel. Themes include realism, idealism, romanticism, skepticism, nihilism, freedom, individuality, systematicity, and romantic irony.

GMST 222 01 (20344) /HUMS464

The Question of Evidence

Rudiger Campe

Ideas of what constitutes evidence and their role in shaping difference, strife, and parallels between science and humanities in Western culture. Key texts and authors in the debate, from ancient rhetoric to current philosophy and history of science. Evidence as a concept and a practice; forms of evidence, including persuasion, inference, conviction, and visualization; contemporary debates on definitive arguments.

GMAN 256 01 (21771) /FREN352/LITR217

Poetry and the Holocaust

Thomas Connolly

The relationship between poetry and the Holocaust, both in poetry’s attempts to remember and come to terms with the past, and in the ways that it predicts and warns about the future. Readings from French, German, Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish, and Italian works in translation.

GMAN 302 01 (21065) /HUMS332/RLST312

Faith and Knowledge in Hegel and Derrida

Paul North

Examination of the frequently opposed human capacities of faith and knowledge through close reading of essays by Hegel and Derrida. Differences between conceptualizations of the two concepts and of human capacities at these two points in the history of philosophy. Some attention to contemporary background materials and to literary texts by Hölderlin and Kafka that offer strong counterpoints to the philosophical accounts.

GMAN 311 01 (21676) /LITR215/HUMS230/GMST184

The Age of Goethe

Kirk Wetters

Introduction to Germany’s “classical” period, from the 1790s to the 1830s, with attention to literature, philosophy, art, and culture. The close connection between literature and philosophy of the period; the theoretical foundations of European Romanticism and of later backlashes against it. Some attention to twentieth-century theory.

GMAN 345 01 (21624) /HUMS237/LITR344

Fiction and Knowledge

Carol Jacobs

Fiction and related prose pieces in which the relationships between narration, fiction, understanding, and knowing play a critical role. Focus on works by Western writers of the nineteenth through the twenty-first century. The texts’ theoretical implications and implicit self-definitions; the import of concepts such as truth, fiction, self-consciousness, perception, science, and narrative.

GMAN 354 01 (21576) /LITR355/FILM459/GMST354

The Films of Fassbinder, Herzog, and Haneke

Brigitte Peucker

Close study of the films of R. W. Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Michael Haneke. Questions of authorship, cultural politics, intermediality, and cinematic modernism. Readings and discussion in English.

GMAN 363 01 (21627) /HUMS238

The Bildungsroman, 1750–1800

Kirk Wetters

The origins of the German novel. The historical and cultural context of the later eighteenth century, including the Enlightenment and revolutions; literary history of the period; the significance of the authors for the literary and intellectual currents of their time.

Spring 2014 Graduate Courses

GMAN 560 01 (22588) 

Knowing Fiction

Carol Jacobs

Close readings of fictional works of the nineteenth–twenty-first century in order to meditate the theoretical implications of their implicit self-definitions and the import of such concepts as truth, fiction, self-consciousness, perception, science, and narrative. Principal readings include works by Hebel, Balzac, Goethe, Kleist, Poe, Sebald, and Kehlmann.

GMAN 570 01 (22799) 

The Bildungsroman 1750–1800

Kirk Wetters

The origins of the German novel. Works covered include Wieland’s Agathon, Moritz’s Anton Reiser, Heinse’s Ardinghello, Nicolai’s The Life and Opinions of Sebaldus Nothanker, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and Hölderlin’s Hyperion.

GMAN 592 01 (22758) 

Fassbinder, Herzog, Haneke

Brigitte Peucker

Close study of the films of R.W. Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Michael Haneke. Questions of authorship, cultural politics, intermediality, and cinematic modernism.

GMAN 618 01 (22800)

Psychoanalysis and Therapies

Henry Sussman

A broad survey extending from the philosophical backgrounds of psychoanalysis (Plato, Kant, Hegel, brief selections), with careful attention to the precedents that Freud established. The seminar extends to several of the formats and models for psychotherapeutic healing that this paradigm generated, among them Lacanian psychoanalysis, interpersonal psychiatry, object-relations, schizoanalysis, and cognitive therapy.

GMAN 622 01 (22801) /HIST653

Reading Modern German History

John Tooze

The aim of the course is to introduce students to key problems in modern German historiography from 1648 to the present. En route we address a series of more general problems in the writing of modern history that are exemplified by the German case. These include questions of the relationship of history to the critical project of the enlightenment in all its forms, the conceptualizations of the role of war and politics and the individual actor in history, questions of the state and revolution and the concept of crisis.

GMAN 637 01 (22577) 

Faith and Knowledge

Paul North

This course is oriented around two long essays with the same title, Hegel’s “Faith and Knowledge” of 1802 and Derrida’s of 1994. In addition to understanding the relationship of the two human capacities in each philosopher’s writing, we position the writings with respect to one another. With each essay we also read a close literary counterpoint that shifts the terms of the argument. In the case of Hegel, some poems by Hölderlin. In the case of Derrida, some fragments by Franz Kafka.

GMAN 650 01 (22586) /CPLT692

At the Threshold of Modernity: Heine and Baudelaire

Rainer Nagele

An attempt to analyze the transition from Romantic poetry to modernism and the relative relation of the two most important lyrical poets in this transition through a close reading of their poetry. We also read Adorno’s essay “Die Wunde Heine.”oems by Hölderlin. In the case of Derrida, some fragments by Franz Kafka.

Fall 2013 Undergraduate Courses

GMAN 162 01 (11158) 

Contemporary German Culture

Marion Gehlker

Analysis and discussion of current social and cultural trends. Topics drawn from newspapers, films, TV series, cabaret, short literary texts, and talks. Focus on oral and written production to improve upper-level linguistic skills.

GMAN 173 01 (11648) 

Introduction to German Lyric Poetry

Jan Van Treeck

The German lyric tradition, including classic works by Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Eichendorff, Heine, Mörike, Droste-Hülshoff, Rilke, George, Brecht, Trakl, Celan, Bachmann, and Jandl. Attention to the German Lied (art song). Development of advanced reading, writing, speaking, and translation skills.

GMST 186 01 (11679) /LITR226

German Modernism

Henry Sussman

Introduction to the radical innovations of modernism as it was forged, received, and revised in German-speaking Europe from c. 1880 to 1945. Literary experiments in dissonance and multifaceted suggestion; strategies in criticism and elucidation demanded by modernist works. Some attention to parallels in painting and music.

GMST 201 01 (11279) /GMAN245

Postwar German Literature and Politics

Jason Groves

Introduction to the literature of East and West Germany from the 1950s to the present. Focus on the relationships between literature, history, and politics. Readings include works by Paul Celan, Heinrich Böll, Peter Handke, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, and W. G. Sebald.

GMST 210 01 (11191) /GMAN274

Revolutionary German and Soviet Theater

Rainer Nagele, Joshua Alvizu

Theater as revolutionary process in German and Soviet plays and in theoretical and dramaturgical texts of the 1920s and early 1930s. Focus on the writings of Bertolt Brecht and Sergei Tretyakov, with some attention to works by Benjamin, Shklovsky, Eisenstein, and Meyerhold. Brief examination of set designs; musical excerpts from Hans Eisler.

GMST 226 01 (14065) /LITR470/GMAN226

Faust

Jan Hagens

The development of the Faust motif through time, from the legend’s origins in the Renaissance-Reformation period to twentieth-century variations. Readings from the English adaptation of the original German chapbook, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Goethe’s Faust (Part I), and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus; screenings of films with a Faustian theme.

GMAN 245 01 (11280) /GMST201

Postwar German Literature and Politics

Jason Groves

Introduction to the literature of East and West Germany from the 1950s to the present. Focus on the relationships between literature, history, and politics. Readings include works by Paul Celan, Heinrich Böll, Peter Handke, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, and W. G. Sebald.

GMAN 274 01 (11190) /HUMS239/GMST210

Revolutionary German and Soviet Theater

Rainer Nagele, Joshua Alvizu

Theater as revolutionary process in German and Soviet plays and in theoretical and dramaturgical texts of the 1920s and early 1930s. Focus on the writings of Bertolt Brecht and Sergei Tretyakov, with some attention to works by Benjamin, Shklovsky, Eisenstein, and Meyerhold. Brief examination of set designs; musical excerpts from Hans Eisler.

GMAN 277 01 (10329) /GMST294/LITR331/HUMS467/ENGL430

Nietzsche and Emerson

Paul North, Paul Grimstad

Comparative introduction to the central writings of Nietzsche and Emerson, with reference to the historical relationship between the two men. Overlap and antagonism on themes such as power, fate, nature, language, and writing; concepts that underwent radical shifts in each thinker’s work; ways in which philosophical style and ideas of style shaped and complicated the writers’ thinking.

GMST 294 01 (10330) /LITR331/GMAN277/HUMS467/ENGL430

Nietzsche and Emerson

Paul North, Paul Grimstad

Comparative introduction to the central writings of Nietzsche and Emerson, with reference to the historical relationship between the two men. Overlap and antagonism on themes such as power, fate, nature, language, and writing; concepts that underwent radical shifts in each thinker’s work; ways in which philosophical style and ideas of style shaped and complicated the writers’ thinking.

GMST 361 01 (11159) /GMAN361/HUMS255

Visions of the End and Representations of Transcendence

Kirk Wetters

The end as a formal feature of narrative and temporal forms, and as an opening to an uncertain beyond. The complex relation between finality and transcendence in Goethe’s Faust II, Mahler’s symphonic works, twentieth-century German and Austrian literature (Broch, Ransmayr, Sebald), and Beckett’s Endgame.

GMST 369 01 (10344) /CPLT628/GMAN685/RLST322/JDST737/LITR327/HUMS410/RLST682/GMAN388

Translating the Sacred

Hindy Najman, Kirk Wetters

Historical dynamics of cultural transfer, translation, reinterpretation of religious revelations, and foundational narratives from antiquity to modernity. Readings from ancient scripture, modern literary works, and theoretical reflections.

GMST 378 01 (11192) /HUMS226/LITR307

Walter Benjamin and the Modernization of Nineteenth-Century Paris

Henry Sussman

The radical modernization of Paris under the Second Empire (1851–70) as seen through the eyes of Walter Benjamin. Focus on Benjamin’s Arcades Project, a compendium that charted developments such as Parisian mass transit and streamlined traffic, the construction of apartment houses, and the dissemination of mass media. Readings from other literary texts on the same events include works by Balzac, Zola, and Aragon.

GMST 381 01 (11860) /PHIL204

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Paul Franks

An examination of the metaphysical and epistemological doctrines of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

GMAN 388 01 (10343) /CPLT628/GMAN685/RLST322/JDST737/LITR327/HUMS410/RLST682/JDST237

Translating the Sacred

Hindy Najman, Kirk Wetters

Historical dynamics of cultural transfer, translation, reinterpretation of religious revelations, and foundational narratives from antiquity to modernity. Readings from ancient scripture, modern literary works, and theoretical reflections.

Fall 2013 Graduate Courses

GMAN 635

Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption

Paul North

In this course we make a careful study of this difficult text, which attempts to reorient modern philosophy according to renovated theological categories. Alongside it, we read texts and excerpts by Hegel, Hermann Cohen, Kierkegaard, and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy that informed its writing. 

GMAN 645

Benjamin’s Arcades: The Modernization of Nineteenth-Century Paris

Henry Sussman

The radical modernization of Paris under the Second Empire (1851–70) was, for Walter Benjamin, Europe’s key moment in preparation for the innovations and horrors of twentieth-century life. His monumental Arcades Project is a compendium of materials, mostly by others and not unlike a Web site, chronicling such developments as Parisian mass transit and streamlined traffic, the construction of apartment houses, and the dissemination of mass media over this period. Examining this work closely serves as a base camp to some of the key literary artifacts showcasing the same events (Balzac, Zola, Aragon), and to focused theoretical investigations into twentieth-century media and urbanization. Course work segues out from the nexus of historical, literary, architectural, media, demographic, and theoretical concerns assembled unforgettably by Benjamin.

GMAN 685

Translating the Sacred 

Kirk Wetter, Hindy Najman

The transformation of ancient and modern textual traditions, with particular focus on the effects of translation and the historical dynamics of cultural transfer, appropriation, reception, and reinterpretation. Readings include canonical and noncanonical scriptural sources (Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Jubilee, Temple Scroll, 4 Ezra, Epistle to the Hebrews, Revelation, Midrash selections from Sifrei Devarim, Eichah Rabbah, Bereshit Rabbah); modern literary authors (Petrarch, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Borges); theoretical and philosophical works (Philo of Alexandria, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Scholem, Foucault, Szondi)

GMAN 701 01 (12537) /CPLT710

Hermeneutics and/or Deconstruction

Rainer Nagele         

A close reading of selected texts of the hermeneutical tradition from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and readings of relevant texts from Derrida and Paul de Man.

Spring 2013 Undergraduate Courses

GMAN 160 01 (21861) 

German Culture, History, and Politics in Text and Film

Marion Gehlker

An advanced language course focusing on improving upper-level language skills through the discussion of selected aspects of German culture, politics, and history in literary and nonliterary texts and film. Topics include the Weimar Republic, youth movements, social democracy, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and postwar developments. Frequent oral and written assignments; emphasis on vocabulary building.

GMAN 171 01 (21862) 

Introduction to German Prose Narrative

Martin Wagner

Study of key authors and works of the German narrative tradition, with a focus on the development of advanced reading comprehension, writing, and speaking skills. Readings from short stories, novellas, and at least one novel. Writings by exemplary storytellers of the German tradition, such as Goethe, Kleist, Hebel, Hoffmann, Stifter, Keller, Kafka, Mann, Musil, Bachmann, and Bernhard.

GMST 182 01 (22378) /LITR346/HUMS400

Legacies of the Enlightenment

Kirk Wetters

Kant’s question “What is Enlightenment?” traced through literature, philosophy, theory, and the arts. Classic theories through the mid-twentieth century from works by Rousseau, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Spengler, Schmitt, Weber, Adorno, Heidegger, Habermas, Foucault, and Derrida. Theoretical work is paired with literature, art, and film.

GMAN 191 01 (22298) /LITR334

Problems of Lyric

Howard Stern

Masterpieces of European and American lyric studied in relation to the various determinants of poetry: grammar and logic, meter and rhyme, self-consciousness and performativity, myth and theme. Poets include Brecht, Rilke, Goethe, Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop.

GMST 255 01 (24589) /LITR301/HUMS275

Walking in Literature

Jason Groves

Walking as a central figure for and activity in literature from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. The promenade and the bourgeois subject; Romantic wandering; Doppelgänger; translation; critiques of progress; slowness; the city and the fugitive. Readings from the works of Kant, Rousseau, Schiller, Goethe, Thoreau, Kafka, Benjamin, Woolf, de Certeau, and Sebald.

GMST 285 01 (22574) /GMAN612/GMAN285/HUMS303

Science and Literature in Modernism

Rudiger Campe

Modernist writing as it developed in science and in literature from 1880 to 1930, with emphasis on Austrian and German works from the turn of the century. Strategies of observing, describing, writing, and narrating.

GMST 293 01 (22431) /HUMS316/GMAN630

Illegitimacy

Kirk Wetters

Theoretical exploration of legitimacy as a fundamental historical, legal, and political concept; works by Weber, Schmitt, Blumenberg, and Luhmann. Literary readings on illegitimacy in the specific sense “born out of wedlock”; authors include Shakespeare, Goethe, Kleist, Dostoevsky, and Gide.

GMAN 308 01 (22709) /CPLT560/GMAN559/LITR439

Rilke and Yeats

Carol Jacobs

Close readings of individual works by Rainer Maria Rilke and William Butler Yeats, with an eye to the theoretical implications of their writings.

GMST 350 01 (22278) /GMAN350/LITR247

Kafka’s K’s

Rainer Nagele

Study of two Kafka novels in which the hero is named only by the letter K. Critique of autobiographical implications; the reduction to the initial as a radical translation of any life into the literary.

GMAN 406 01 (22320) /FILM410/CPLT902/FILM718/GMAN636/LITR350

Theatricality in Film

Brigitte Peucker

Examination of the multiple implications of theatricality in and for the cinema. Theatricality as excess; the appropriation of theatrical modes for film; theatricality as modernist self-reflexivity; performance and the relation of theatricality to subjectivity (performing the self); ritual and reenactment in film; theatricality and the real; the material image.

Spring Graduate Courses 2013

GMAN 559 01 (20661) /CPLT560/LITR439/GMAN308

Rilke and Yeats

Carol Jacobs

Reading and discussion of the works of Rainer Maria Rilke and William Butler Yeats.

GMAN 612 01 (21136) /GMAN285/HUMS303/GMST285

Science and Literature in Modernism

Rudiger Campe

The course explores modernist writing as codeveloped in science and literature between 1880 and 1930. Starting from Zola’s notion of the “experimental novel,” strategies of writing and narrating in both science and literature are discussed, including the questions of case study, metaphor and concept, protocol sentence, and automatic writing. Literary authors include Zola, Schnitzler, Döblin, Musil, Benn, Hofmannsthal, Breton, Gertrude Stein; scientific authors are Claude Bernard, Freud, Mach, Carnap, William James.

GMAN 626 01 (21137) /HIST650

Theories of History in Germany from Benjamin to Kluge and Negt

Paul North, John Tooze

Theories and philosophies of history in Germany from the interwar period to the late twentieth century, from Walter Benjamin to the renegades of the Frankfurt School, Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt. This is a reading seminar based on the original texts with a limited amount of secondary historiography and commentary.

GMAN 630 01 (21139) /GMST293/HUMS316

Illegitimacy

Kirk Wetters

Theoretical exploration of legitimacy as a fundamental historical, legal, and political concept; authors include Weber, Schmitt, Blumenberg, Luhmann. This conceptual study is combined with literary readings on illegitimacy in the specific sense of “born out of wedlock”; main authors are Shakespeare, Goethe, Kleist, Dostoevsky, and Gide.

GMAN 636 01 (20699) /FILM410/CPLT902/FILM718/GMAN406/LITR350

Theatricality in Film

Brigitte Peucker

Examination of the multiple implications of theatricality in and for the cinema. Theatricality as excess; the appropriation of theatrical modes for film; theatricality as modernist self-reflexivity; performance and the relation of theatricality to subjectivity (performing the self); ritual and reenactment in film; theatricality and the real; the material image.

GMAN 663 01 (20669) /CPLT649

Desire of Knowledge/Knowledge of Desire

Rainer Nagele

The relationship between knowledge and desire is analyzed through close readings of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, Goethe’s Faust, and Kafka’s “Forschungen eines Hundes.”

Fall 2012 Undergrad Courses

GMAN 162 01 (13251) 

Contemporary German Culture

Marion Gehlker

Analysis and discussion of current social and cultural trends. Topics drawn from newspapers, films, TV series, cabaret, short literary texts, and talks. Focus on oral and written production to improve upper-level linguistic skills.

GMAN 172 01 (12509) 

Introduction to German Theater

Rudiger Campe

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.

GMST 183 01 (12930) /HUMS268/LITR336

Childhood and Memory in Modern Literature

Henry Sussman

The motif of childhood examined through memoirs, literary treatments, philosophical meditations, principles of psychoanalysis, and research on memory. Authors include Benjamin, Proust, Hoffmann, Keller, Woolf, Musil, Rousseau, Bergson, Freud, Bartlett, and Neisser.

GMST 226 01 (12785) /LITR470/GMAN226

Faust

Jan Hagens

The development of the Faust motif through time, from the legend’s origins in the Renaissance-Reformation period to twentieth-century variations. Readings from the English adaptation of the original German chapbook, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Goethe’s Faust (Part I), and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus; screenings of films with a Faustian theme.

GMST 315 01 (12223) /LITR431/CPLT651/HUMS368/GMAN647/PHIL606

Systems and Their Theory

Henry Sussman

Conceptual systems that have, since the outset of modernity, furnished a format and platform for rigorous thinking at the same time that they have imposed on language the attributes of self-reflexivity, consistency, repetition, purity, and dependability. Texts by Kant, Hegel, Bergson, Kafka, Proust, and Borges.

GMST 319 01 (13096) /LITR210/RUSS325

Modernist Berlin, Petersburg, and Moscow

Katerina Clark, Roman Utkin

A comparative exploration of Soviet Russian, Weimar German, and Russian émigré modes of modernism as produced in three major European cities between 1917 and 1933. Geographical and subjective space, urban modernity, childhood, fashion, gender, ethnicity, power, and avant-garde experimentation in literature, film, photography, architecture, and music.

GMAN 348 01 (12580) /GMAN624/HUMS227

Classicism and Beyond in German Literature

Kirk Wetters

Modern literature’s dependence on, and independence from, the inherited forms of classical antiquity. Case studies include Goethe’s “Orphic Primal Words” and Hölderlin’s “Pindar Fragments.” Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of artistic modernity; twentieth-century literary critical and philosophical discourses.

GMST 355 01 (12353) /GMAN562/CPLT630/HUMS365

The Concept of Time

Paul North

The historical formation of the concept of time, a fundamental idea in the humanities and sciences. The benefits and pitfalls of the specifically modern plan to ground thought and being in a theory of time. Texts in German intellectual history by Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, and Einstein, with reference to Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time.

GMST 361 01 (12868) /GMAN361/HUMS255

Visions of the End and Representations of Transcendence

Kirk Wetters    

The end as a formal feature of narrative and temporal forms, and as an opening to an uncertain beyond. The complex relation between finality and transcendence in Goethe’s Faust II, Mahler’s symphonic works, twentieth-century German and Austrian literature (Broch, Ransmayr, Sebald), and Beckett’s Endgame.

GMST 365 01 (12896) /LITR468/HUMS261/GMAN619

The Question of Form

Carol Jacobs      

The concept of art in relation to form and deformation. The Platonic tradition in The Republic and echoed in twentieth-century philosophy (Cassirer and Heidegger), modern literature (Keats, Hardy, Kleist, Poe, Kafka), and film (Godard, Egoyan, Dreyer, Sun Zhou, Wong Kar Wai).

Fall 2012 Graduate Courses

GMAN 562 01 (10559) /CPLT630/HUMS365/GMST355

The Concept of Time

Paul North  

The historical formation of the concept of time, a fundamental idea in the humanities and sciences. The benefits and pitfalls of the specifically modern plan to ground thought and being in a theory of time. Texts in German intellectual history by Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, and Einstein, with reference to Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time.

GMAN 605 01 (10554) /CPLT517

Interpretation and Authority

Carol Jacobs

Close readings of works on problems of authority and interpretation by Sigmund Freud, Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, and Walter Benjamin. Exploration of their writing as a performance that questions simplistic notions of truth. Consideration of the problem of how to interpret texts that unsettle the very nature of interpretation.

GMAN 614 01 (10569) /CPLT786

Literature and the Humanities

Rudiger Campe

The course discusses the place of literature and literary reading with regard to the ensemble of the humanities. Rather than addressing “literary theory,” the focus is on the epistemology of literature and literary criticism and their significance in and for the humanities. Main readings are Giambattista Vico (New Science), Friedrich Schlegel (Dialogue on Poetry), Wilhelm Dilthey (Introduction to the Human Sciences), and Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault (“ontology of literature”).

GMAN 619 01 (10857) /LITR468/HUMS261/GMST365

The Question of Form

Carol Jacobs

The concept of art in relation to form and deformation. The Platonic tradition in The Republic and echoed in twentieth-century philosophy (Heidegger), modern literature (Keats, Hardy, Kleist, Poe, Kafka), and film (Godard, Egoyan, Dreyer, Sun Zhou, and Wong Kar-Wai).

GMAN 624 01 (10861) /GMAN348/HUMS227

Overcoming Classicism

Kirk Wetters

Modern literature’s dependencies on and independence from the inherited forms of classical antiquity are explored in specific case studies, Goethe’s “Orphic Primal Words” and Hölderlin’s “Pindar Fragments.” This central focus is discussed in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of artistic modernity (Winckelmann, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel) and reflected in twentieth-century literary critical and philosophical discourses (Heidegger, Szondi, and Lacoue-Labarthe).

GMAN 647 01 (10564) /LITR431/GMST315/CPLT651/HUMS368/PHIL606

Systems and Their Theory

Henry Sussman

This course spans the developments between two of the most original and still-telling early system-makers, Kant and Hegel, and some important twentieth-century fiction writers, among them Kafka, Proust, Borges, Calvino, and Pynchon, whose works built and played upon the architecture of systems. We read a number of scholars and scientists who have thought about the systematic dimensions of culture and life: Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind; Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life; Anthony Wilden, System and Structure; and James Gleick, Chaos. Seminars are divided between elucidations of systematic pictures of the world and specific instances from criticism, literature, and other art forms. We work to discern the follow-through between conceptual systems and the systematic dimensions of our everyday lives, whether legal, institutional, or familial.

GMAN 680 01 (10864) /MUSI847/DRAM456

Wagner in and on Production

Gundula Kreuzer

An exploration of Wagner’s ideas of the Gesamtkunstwerk and their role in the theory and history of opera since the mid-nineteenth century. The seminar contextualizes Wagner’s theories of staging and his attempts at creating a lasting, “correct” production within contemporary theatrical practices and discusses their consequences for both historical and modern stagings, with a special focus on Tannhäuser, the Ring cycle, and (possibly) Parsifal. We broach such methodological issues as theories and analyses of performance, multimedia, and the operatic work; approaches to and reconstructions of historical stagings; and the increasing mediatization of opera. Ultimately, the seminar seeks to understand opera more broadly in its liminal state between fixity and ephemerality.

Spring 2012 Undergrad Courses

GMAN 160 01 (21407) 

German Culture, History, and Politics in Text and Film

Marion Gehlker     

An advanced language course focusing on improving upper-level language skills through the discussion of selected aspects of German culture, politics, and history in literary and nonliterary texts and film. Topics include the Weimar Republic, youth movements, social democracy, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and postwar developments. Frequent oral and written assignments; emphasis on vocabulary building.

GMAN 171 01 (21408) 

Introduction to German Prose Narrative

Gabriela Stoicea

Study of key authors and works of the German narrative tradition, with a focus on the development of advanced reading comprehension, writing, and speaking skills. Readings from short stories, novellas, and at least one novel. Writings by exemplary storytellers of the German tradition, such as Goethe, Kleist, Hebel, Hoffmann, Stifter, Keller, Kafka, Mann, Musil, Bachmann, and Bernhard.

GMST 185 01 (21294) /HUMS344/LITR204

Ideology, Religion, and Revolution in German Thought

Henry Sussman

Crosscurrents of conservatism and radicality in German literature and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contributions to the enterprise of systems theory and systems critique by Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Brecht. Alternatives for questioning and undermining the systematic aspirations of the Western tradition.

GMAN 191 01 (22240) /LITR334

Problems of Lyric

Howard Stern

Masterpieces of European and American lyric studied in relation to the various determinants of poetry: grammar and logic, meter and rhyme, self-consciousness and performativity, myth and theme. Poets include Brecht, Rilke, Goethe, Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop.

GMST 212 01 (22409) /MGRK212/HUMS277/LITR328

Folktales and Fairy Tales

Maria Kaliambou

History of the folktale from the late seventeenth through the late twentieth centuries. Basic concepts, terminology, and interpretations of folktales, with some attention to twentieth-century theoretical approaches. Performance and audience, storytellers, and gender-related distinctions. Interconnections between oral and written traditions in narratives from western Europe and Greece.

GMAN 222 01 (21745) /GMST333/GMAN614

Kleist and the Idea of the Present

Rudiger Campe

Comprehensive introduction to Kleist’s narrative prose, theater, and journalism. Kleist’s unique modernity, his invention of everyday topicality (in journalism), and his fascination with the concept of the present and the present moment (in poetic experimentation and politics).

GMAN 253 01 (24154) /HUMS198

German Expressionism

Jan Van Treeck

Study of German expressionism in literature, theater, painting, sculpture, performance, and film. The movement’s cultural and political background; expressionism as a literature of crisis and as a product of early twentieth-century media; expressionist radicalism on the left and right; new forms of literature; avant-garde theory; predecessors and successors of the movement. Readings and discussion in English; texts available in German.

GMST 294 01 (22730) /GMAN645/HUMS272

Confidence Games: Fakes, Frauds, and Counterfeits

Kirk Wetters

The tradition of the con artist in literature and film, from eighteenth-century German texts of Goethe and Schiller to Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder. Works by Orson Welles, Clifford Irving, Melville, Thomas Mann, André Gide, and Dostoevsky. Questions of authenticity, authorship, and authority.

GMST 333 01 (21746) /GMAN614/GMAN222

Kleist and the Idea of the Present

Rudiger Campe

Comprehensive introduction to Kleist’s narrative prose, theater, and journalism. Kleist’s unique modernity, his invention of everyday topicality (in journalism), and his fascination with the concept of the present and the present moment (in poetic experimentation and politics).

GMAN 336 01 (23205) /GMAN585/CPLT585

Introduction to Middle High German

William Whobrey

A survey of Middle High German, with a view to translating from the original into English. Aspects of reading and translation are closely linked to an examination of the development of the German language. Special attention is given to the evolution of vernacular literature, the broader context of Latin culture, and the problems of manuscript transmission. Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich is read in its entirety.

Spring 2012 Graduate Courses

GMAN 585 01 (25264) /GMAN336/CPLT585

Intro to Middle HighGerman Lit

William Whobrey

A survey of Middle High German, with a view to translating from the original into English. Aspects of reading and translation are closely linked to an examination of the development of the German language. Special attention is given to the evolution of vernacular literature, the broader context of Latin culture, and the problems of manuscript transmission. Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich is read in its entirety.

GMAN 614 01 (21085) /GMST333/GMAN222

Kleist’s Here and Now

Rudiger Campe

The course provides a comprehensive introduction to the work of the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist. We read major instances of his narrative prose, his dramatic work, and his journalism. Particular attention is given to Kleist’s fascination with the immediate presence of “Here and Now”: this fascination occurs as well in what we can call the invention of modern journalism (Berliner Abendblätter) as in his most radical literary experiments.

GMAN 645 01 (21086) /GMST294/HUMS272

Fakes

Kirk Wetters

Starting from Orson Welles’s “F for Fake,” which articulates the main questions of the course, we examine some of Welles’s immediate sources of inspiration: Clifford Irving (including the recent film about his forged biography of Howard Hughes, The Hoax) and the art forger Elmyr de Hory. From there we look back at the literary tradition of the con artist: eighteenth-century German texts (particularly Goethe and Schiller) inspired by the figure of Cagliostro, Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, and André Gide’s The Counterfeiters. To conclude the seminar, the class collectively chooses an additional contemporary con (perhaps James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces) to investigate in detail. The final meetings are devoted to the Grand Inquisitor scene from Dostoevski’s Brothers Karamazov and Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder.

GMAN 648 01 (20782) /CPLT648

Repetition

Rainer Nagele

Repetition emerges in the nineteenth century as a particular preoccupation. We concentrate on some specific philosophical and theoretical texts: Karl Marx (the Eighteenth Brumaire), Kirkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud. But we also discuss some of the ramifications of repetition in poetry, literature, and rhetoric (rhythm, rhyme, refrain, and literary motifs).

GMAN 662 01 (21087) 

Baroque Theater: The Stage and the Text

Rudiger Campe

Focusing on the German Baroque tragic drama (Gryphius, Lohenstein), we study also Spanish and Italian works of the period (Monteverdi, Calderón). Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Tragic Drama (Trauerspiel) is discussed with reference to political theory, allegory, and the emblem. The course is designed as a general introduction to the Baroque, including more recent work such as Deleuze, Buci-Glucksmann, and others.

Fall 2011 Undergrad Courses

GMST 050 01 (12380) /FILM092

Spectatorship and Visual Culture

Brigitte Peucker

The position of the Western spectator from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries in a variety of paradigmatic situations. Spectatorship in the contexts of landscape, painting, the city, and film. Looking and the imagination; the relation of the represented to the real; vision and the senses; the nature and politics of looking.

GMAN 173 01 (12191) 

Introduction to German Lyric Poetry

Kirk Wetters

The German lyric tradition, including classic works by Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Eichendorff, Heine, Mörike, Droste-Hülshoff, Rilke, George, Brecht, Trakl, Celan, Bachmann, and Jandl. Attention to the German Lied (art song). Development of advanced reading, writing, speaking, and translation skills.

GMST 182 01 (12192) /LITR346/HUMS400

Legacies of the Enlightenment

Kirk Wetters

Kant’s question “What is Enlightenment?” traced through literature, philosophy, theory, and the arts. Classic theories through the mid-twentieth century include works by Marx, Nietzsche, Schmitt, Lukács, Weber, Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt, Habermas, Foucault, and Koselleck. Theoretical work is paired with literature, art, and film, starting with classics by Lessing, Mozart, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Wagner, Kafka, and Brecht.

GMST 265 01 (13872) /FILM418/LITR356/GMAN320/HUMS207

Scandinavian Cinema

Katie Trumpener, Soeren Forsberg

Contemporary Scandinavian genre and art films examined in relation to earlier high points of Scandinavian cinema. The concepts of regional cinema and of regional audience and market; ways in which Scandinavian cinema reflects shared cultural assumptions; differences between national and authorial styles.

GMAN 268 01 (13658) /GMST308/LITR466/GMAN564/HUMS262

W. G. Sebald

Carol Jacobs

Close readings of the major works of W. G. Sebald along with texts of other authors who played a direct role in these writings, including Thomas Browne, Grimmelshausen, Kafka, and Heshel. Texts in relation to theory of literature in terms of memory, representation, identity, ethical imperatives, and intertextual and intermedia relations.

GMST 308 01 (12214) /LITR466/GMAN268/GMAN564/HUMS262

W. G. Sebald

Carol Jacobs

Close readings of the major works of W. G. Sebald along with texts of other authors who played a direct role in these writings, including Thomas Browne, Grimmelshausen, Kafka, and Heshel. Texts in relation to theory of literature in terms of memory, representation, identity, ethical imperatives, and intertextual and intermedia relations.

GMAN 311 01 (11590) /GMST336/LITR319

German Eccentric Realism

Rainer Nagele

Reexamination of accepted concepts of “the real” through close readings of German nineteenth-century realist short stories and novellas by Keller, Stifter, and C. F. Meyer.

GMAN 320 01 (13873) /GMST265/FILM418/LITR356/HUMS207

Scandinavian Cinema

Katie Trumpener, Soeren Forsberg

Contemporary Scandinavian genre and art films examined in relation to earlier high points of Scandinavian cinema. The concepts of regional cinema and of regional audience and market; ways in which Scandinavian cinema reflects shared cultural assumptions; differences between national and authorial styles.

GMST 336 01 (11592) /LITR319/GMAN311

German Eccentric Realism

Rainer Nagele

Reexamination of accepted concepts of “the real” through close readings of German nineteenth-century realist short stories and novellas by Keller, Stifter, and C. F. Meyer.

GMST 354 01 (15413) /LITR355/GMAN592/GMAN354/FILM459/FILM765

The Films of Fassbinder, Herzog, and Haneke

Brigitte Peucker

M 7.00-9.00p

Close study of the films of R. W. Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Michael Haneke. Questions of authorship, cultural politics, intermediality, and cinematic modernism. Readings and discussion in English.

GMST 364 01 (12211) /LITR304

Books, Displays, and Systems Theory

Henry Sussman

A status report on the book as a medium in an age of cybernetic technology and virtual reality. The contentious no-man’’s land between books and contemporary systems.

Spring 2011 Undergraduate Courses

GMAN 160 01 (22211) 

German Culture, History, and Politics in Text and Film

Marion Gehlker

An advanced language course focusing on improving upper-level language skills through the discussion of selected aspects of German culture, politics, and history in literary and nonliterary texts and film. Topics include the Weimar Republic, youth movements, social democracy, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and postwar developments. Frequent oral and written assignments; emphasis on vocabulary building.

GMAN 172 01 (22161) 

Introduction to German Theater

Jason Groves

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.

GMST 181 01 (21505) /HUMS320

Ideology, Revolution, Religion

Paul North

The tension between radicality and conservatism that characterized German culture from the Enlightenment to World War II. Introduction to the philosophical speculation, sociological critique, psychological theory, and literary and theatrical productions that both tried to resolve and helped to maintain this tension. Readings from the works of Goethe, Kant, Kleist, Marx, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Freud.

GMAN 192 01 (21588) /LITR467

The Prose Labyrinth

Howard Stern

Short prose (prismatic, encyclopedic, labyrinthine) considered as a characteristic genre of twentieth-century literature. Works by Benjamin, Shklovsky, Ponge, Queneau, Calvino, and Cortázar. All readings available in English.

GMST 200 01 (22545) /LITR211/HUMS293

Roots of Modernity

R. Howard Bloch, Rudiger Campe

Study of principal literary, visual, and musical works, artistic movements, social thought, and scientific and technological developments from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the Great War.

GMST 351 01 (22660) /LITR224/GMAN661/CPLT803/GMAN351

Hölderlin, Kafka, Benjamin

Rainer Nagele

The relationship between life and literature. Readings include literary texts and theoretical reflections by Hölderlin, Kafka, and Benjamin.

Spring 2011 Graduate Course

GMAN 651 01 (20778) /PLSC309/CPLT703/PHIL654/PLSC583/PHIL454

Contemporary Critical Theory: Habermas and Beyond

Seyla Benhabib

Critical theory after Jürgen Habermas’s “theory of communicative action” faces the challenges of a postnational society; the rise of a global worldwide net; increasing multiculturalism; the end of secularism; and a worldwide economic crisis. The course examines Habermas’s response as well as that of the third generation of critical theorists to these issues.

GMAN 661 01 (20782) /LITR224/CPLT803/GMST351/GMAN351

Hölderlin, Kafka, Benjamin

Rainer Nagele

The seminar addresses the question of the relationship of (auto-)biography and literature based on texts by Hölderlin and his undermining of the romantic concept of literature as subjective expression; Kafka’s notebooks, in which literary texts and diary entries are curiously intertwined; and finally Benjamin’s autobiographical texts (Berliner Kindheit) as well as his essays on Kafka and Proust. Discussion in English; reading knowledge of German is strongly encouraged.

GMAN 674 01 (20990) 

Designing Weimar Classicism

Rudiger Campe

The course explores the development of Weimar classicism in Germany in the era of European Romanticism and the French Revolution. Schiller’s and Goethe’s theoretical and poetic works between 1790 and 1805 unfold a new thinking of form in aesthetics, epistemology, and political theory. Works to be closely read include Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Mankind, Goethe’s Conversations of German Refugees, Schiller’s Bride of Messina, Goethe’s Iphigenia, Schiller’s poetry at the time of The Gods of Greece, and Goethe’s Sonnets. Readings in German.