German Course Descriptions
German 110
- First-Year German: A Foundation Course
Full course for one year. This course introduces the student to all
of the basic language skills in German. The teaching of grammar is
always supplemented with cultural vignettes from German-speaking
countries. Classroom activities include skits, poetry readings,
film clips, and internet research. In order to employ the knowledge
of German language and culture more creatively, the student will be
asked to participate in a final project at the end of the academic
year. Use of the language laboratory is part of the course. This
course is reserved for students without a background in the
language. Conference.
German 220
- Second-Year German: Cultural and Literary Perspectives
Full course for one year. The course is designed to develop an
understanding of German language, culture, and literature through a
variety of texts, class discussions, and written assignments.
Course material is drawn from different fields. In addition to
literature, we will include readings on history, art, philosophy,
and current events from the media pertaining to the German-speaking
countries. The communicative competence of students is developed in
frequent discussions. One hour each week is spent in conversation
tutorials. Students review grammar systematically throughout the
year and use the language laboratory. Prerequisite: German 110 or
111 or placement by examination. Conference.
German 311
- Advanced German: Germany Today
Full course for one semester. This course explores contemporary
issues in post-unification Germany through a variety of texts and
other media. Readings include current debates in the German press,
with topics such as the new German identity, Germany and the
European Union, minorities and citizenship, political parties, and
the crisis of the German economy. We will also focus on selected
literary texts and recent films. Language skills will be enhanced
through discussion and short weekly writing assignments.
Prerequisite: German 220 or consent of the instructor. Conference.
German 321
- Modernism
Full course for one semester. By the end of the nineteenth century,
the metropolis had become a central force in the transformation of
culture in Europe. This course traces various manifestations of
Central European modernism in the context of three metropolitan
centers, Berlin, Vienna, and Prague.
Modernism I: Berlin 1871–1929
Full course for one semester. Germany’s cultural transformation in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is explored
through works primarily by Berlin writers and artists. Various
forms of modernism in the Wilhelminian and Weimar eras will be
discussed through an interdisciplinary approach, with focus on
literature, visual arts, music, film, and philosophy. The effect of
the urban milieu on new aesthetic movements and representations of
war are among the major issues to be discussed. Readings include
works by Fontane, H. and Th. Mann, Holz, Schlaf, Simmel, Tönnies,
Rosa Luxemburg, Brecht, and Döblin. Readings in German, discussion
and papers in German and English. Prerequisite: German 220 or
consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Modernism II: Turn-of-the-Century Vienna and Prague,
1890–1918
Full course for one semester. The course explores the cultural
transformation in Central Europe at the turn of the century.
Impressionism, decadence, and aestheticism will be discussed as the
predominant artistic modes of the epoch. The emergence of the
"modern" in the late Habsburg Empire will be investigated through a
broad spectrum of works, ranging from the literary movement Jung
Wien (Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal); texts by the Prague writers
Rilke and Kafka; studies in psychoanalysis (Freud); essays,
memoirs, and diaries (Broch, St. Zweig, Lou-Andreas Salomé);
philosophical texts (Mach, Wittgenstein); music (Schoenberg); to
the fine arts (Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka). Students taking the
course for German literature credit will meet once a week in an
extra seminar. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 321.
German 325
- Modern German Jewish Writers: Emancipation and Its Discontents
Full course for one semester. This course examines texts by modern
German Jewish writers and thinkers, with a special emphasis on the
period between 1900 and 1933. Often regarded as the culmination of
a century-long process of emancipation and acculturation, this
period is in fact marked by complex renegotiations of
German/Austrian Jewish identity. Themes include gender and
assimilation, exile and diaspora, racial antisemitism, Jewish
"self-hatred," representations of East European Jewry, and the
aestheticization and politicization of Jewish traditions. The
course concludes with a brief look at the post-Holocaust
reinterpretation of the "German-Jewish symbiosis." Readings from
Lessing, Heine, Schnitzler, Kafka, Lasker-Schüler, Roth, Celan,
Mendelssohn, Buber, Freud, Scholem, and Benjamin. Conducted in
English. Students may arrange with the instructor to take the class
for German credit. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 329. Not
offered 2005-06.
German 331
- Alterity: Theoretical and Literary Configurations
Full course for one semester. The course traces treatments of "das
Fremde" in major philosophical and literary works of the German
language from romanticism to the present. Through selected texts by
Hegel, Tieck, Kleist, Büchner, Nietzsche, Simmel, Freud, Th. Mann,
and Gadamer, we will explore shifting definitions of alterity. We
will then focus on the discourse of alterity in the contemporary
literary scene in Germany. Readings include recent constructions of
selfhood and otherness by German authors (H. Müller, B. Strauss,
F.X. Kroetz, S. Lenz, and S. Nadolny) and by Turkish émigrés, such
as Ören, Pazaraya, Özakin, and Senocak. Current theoretical
approaches will complement the literary readings. Readings in
German, discussion and papers in German and English. Prerequisite:
German 311 or its equivalent, or consent of the instructor.
Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
German 335
- Readings in Contemporary German Literature
Full course for one semester. This course offers several
expeditions into the German-language literary imagination since the
late 1980s. We will explore topics, such as the German unification,
pop culture, exilic identities, remembrance, and contemporary
myths. Texts include those by Brussig, Sparschuh, Schulze, Kracht,
Senocak, Honigmann, Sebald, Hermann, and Bernhard. Themes and
techniques of postfeminist writing will be examined in works by
Jelinek and Erpenbeck. Conducted in German. Prerequisite: German
311 or its equivalent or consent of instructor. Conference.
German 336
- Story and History
Full course for one semester. This course explores the intimate
connection between story and history in modern German culture. We
will trace how history patterns personal experience and how
narrative shapes historical understanding. Themes will include
realism and everyday life, modernism and war trauma, the writing of
monuments, and representations of Nazism and the Holocaust. Texts
by Heinrich von Kleist, Theodor Storm, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff,
Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann,
Ernst Jünger, Günter Grass, and W.G. Sebald. Films by Leni
Riefenstahl, Rainer Maria Fassbinder, Edgar Reitz, and Hans-Jürgen
Syberberg. Readings in German, discussion and papers in German and
English. Prerequisite: German 331 or consent of the instructor.
Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
German 340
- Exile: Theoretical and Literary Configurations
Full course for one semester. The course explores multifaceted
experiences of exile represented in twentieth-century literature
and theory. A small selection of film screenings complements
textual analyses. Varying definitions of exile, ranging from
catastrophe to a new state of freedom, will be discussed. The
autobiographical aspects of exilic texts will be a major tenet of
the course. The transformation of lived experiences into literary
themes and techniques will be discussed. While emphasizing the
heterogeneity of the approaches, we will also aim at establishing a
working definition of an "aesthetics of exile." Literary readings
include works by Kafka, Nabokov, Bachmann, Ch. Wolf, Rushdie, Orhan
Pamuk, and Turkish expatriates in Germany. Studies of exile
associated with the Frankfurt School, postcolonial theory,
poststructuralism, and new feminist thought constitute the
theoretical framework. Fassbinder's Ali and Steam: The
Turkish Bath are the films to be discussed. Conducted in
English. Students taking the course for German literature credit
will meet once a week in an extra seminar. Conference. Cross-listed
as Literature 340. Not offered 2005-06.
German 341
- Modern German Theater: From Brecht to Handke
Full course for one semester. We will read and discuss plays by
such playwrights as Brecht, Dürrenmantt, Frisch, Weiss, Hochhuth,
Müller, Kipphardt, Kroetz, Speer, and Handke. The readings will be
augmented with theoretical writings from such subjects as epic
theatre, social realism, documentary theatre, "Sprechstücke," and
the folk play. The sociopolitical background will also be
discussed. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for
German literature credit will meet once a week in an extra seminar.
Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 341. Not offered 2005-06.
German 351
- German Drama and Dramatic Theory: From Lessing to Brecht
Full course for one semester. Classics of the German and Austrian
drama from the eighteenth to the twentieth century by writers such
as Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Grillparzer, Büchner, Hebbel,
Hauptmann, and Kaiser. Dramatic theory from the Enlightenment to
Naturalism and Expressionism will be introduced. Students taking
the course for German credit will meet separately to discuss the
texts in the original. Conducted in English. Conference.
Cross-listed as Literature 351. Not offered 2005-06.
German 354
- The Modern German Novel
Full course for one semester. This course acquaints students with
twentieth century novelists of the German language. Beginning with
Kafka, we will trace various manifestations of the genre from the
1920s onward. Readings in the early twentieth century include works
by Th. Mann, Broch, Musil, Rilke, and Hesse. We will then focus on
representatives of the post–World-War-II novel, such as Frisch,
Böll, Grass, and Ch. Wolf. Categories closely connected with the
novelistic mode, such as irony, ambiguity, digression, and
reflection, will be of major concern. Selected readings by Lukåcs,
Todorov, Bakhtin, and Iser will provide the theoretical framework.
Conducted in English. Students taking the course for German credit
will meet once a week in an extra seminar. Prerequisite: sophomore
standing. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 354. Not offered
2005-06.
German 360
- Music in the German Social Imagination
Full course for one semester. This course will examine the question
of the social content of musical experience as it has been
developed in the German context in a range of genres: literature,
criticism, philosophy, and opera. Is music a public phenomenon,
endowed with a "community-forming power," or is music much rather a
private experience, through which the individual withdraws from
public life? We will discuss the complex interplay between these
contrary attitudes from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth
century, and the special place of this question given the
prevailing conception of the Germans as "the people of music."
Texts by Rousseau, Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist, Grillparzer,
Hegel, A.B. Marx, Mörike, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Th. Mann, Kafka,
Hesse, and Adorno. Operas by Mozart, Wagner, Berg, and Brecht and
Weill. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for German
credit will meet once a week in an extra seminar. Prerequisite:
sophomore standing. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 360. Not
offered 2005-06.
German 364
- The Idealist Revolution and Beyond
Full course for one semester. This seminar explores German
Idealism’s unparalleled influence on the study of literature and
the arts. Whether the topic is lyric poetry, mass culture, or the
theory of history, scarcely anybody in today’s humanities proceeds
without some engagement--implicit or explicit, positive or
negative, intentional or unwitting--with the forms and figures of
thought we find in Kant and his inheritors. Conducted in English.
Students may arrange with the instructor to take the class for
German credit. Prerequisite: sophomore standing. Conference.
Cross-listed as Literature 364. Not offered 2005-06.
German 374
- The Discourse of Law
This course will survey an array of works, both literary (dramas,
novellas) and critical and philosophical, that share a thematic
focus on the law, in the various senses of the term–moral,
juridical, religious and aesthetic, among others. Beginning with
key Enlightenment texts positing the values of autonomy and
self-governance, we will look at how German writers have configured
the relation of law, or lawfulness, to humanity. The main authors
to be studied are Kant, Schiller, Kleist, Brentano, Hegel, Wagner,
Grillparzer, Kafka, and Benjamin. Readings and discussion will be
primarily in German, with some secondary readings in English.
Prerequisite: German 311 or the equivalent, or consent of the
instructor.
German 391
- Studies in German Theory I: Frankfurt School Theory and Beyond
Full course for one semester. This course explores a tradition of
cultural critique whose analytic rigor and interdisciplinary
breadth continue to exert a profound influence on contemporary
thought. First we will examine texts by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud,
whose methods of uncovering the ideological or unconscious forces
operative in cultural phenomena informed the interpretive
frameworks developed by the Frankfurt School. We will then study
how, within these frameworks, thinkers associated with the
Frankfurt School re-imagined the ways that cultural phenomena are
embedded in social and political history, and in so doing
re-evaluated, transposed, or re-invented cultural and aesthetic
values. Readings from Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Lukács,
Adorno, Horkheimer, Arendt, Habermas, Althusser, and Foucault.
Conducted in English, but there will be an extra session in German
each week, using original texts, for those taking the course for
German credit. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 391.
German 392
- Studies in German Theory II: The Languages of War
Full course for one semester. This seminar explores the intimate
relationship between literary discourses and languages of conquest
and violence. We will focus on models of linguistic force,
considering whether oratorical (if not political) authority rests
on the power to declare war or peace. Authors will include Kant,
Büchner, Marx, Lenin, Benjamin, Jünger, Joyce, Freud, Stein,
Derrida, and George Bush Jr. Conducted in English. Prerequisite:
sophomore standing. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 392. Not
offered 2005-06.
German 400
- Introduction to Literary Theory
See Literature 400 for description.
Literature 400 Description
German 462
- Seminar: Friedrich Schiller: Drama and Theory
Full course for one semester. We celebrate in 2005 the 200th
anniversary of Schiller's death. His works, especially his dramas,
made him a classic writer. We will begin the seminar with a "Storm
and Stress" play, Intrigue and Love (1783). With Don
Carlos (1787) we will continue exploring Schiller's work
through a series of history plays, including Wallenstein
(1799) and Maria Stuart (1800). Dramatic and literary theory
will augment the readings. Conducted in English. Students taking
the course for German literature credit will meet once a week in an
extra seminar. Cross-listed as Literature 462.
German 470
- Thesis
One-half or full course for one year.
German 481
- Independent Study
One-half or full course for one semester. Prerequisite: approval of
instructor and division.
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