GER 101Beginner's German IThe course lays a foundation for functional acquisition of German. Class time is devoted to language tasks that will foster communicative competence, stressing listening and reading strategies, vocabulary acquisition, authentic input, and oral production. Conducted in German.
GER 105Intermediate GermanDevelops intermediate proficiency in reading and writing as well as functional communication: vocabulary building, grammar acquisition, discussion of literary texts, newspaper and Internet material.
GER 107Advanced GermanContinues improvement of proficiency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing using news magazines, electronic media, and literary texts as a basis for class discussion. Grammar review is included.
GER 207Society,Pol&Culture in Germany 1890-1945This course offers discussions of exemplary texts from the first half of the twentieth century including essays, speeches, poems, prose, and films. These will be examined in the context of important historical events in modern Germany such as the end of the Kaiserreich, urbanization and the development of mass culture, World War I, the Weimar Republic, and the rise of National Socialism. We will also work intensively on spoken and written German.
GER 209Intro to German Literature after 1700(LA)An introduction to major authors, periods, and genres of German literature from the eighteenth century to the present. The course provides a background for the further study of German literature while developing subtle interpretive techniques and providing intensive writing practice.
GER 301Topics in German Drama and Theater(LA)Focusing on the relation between theater and politics, this seminar will deal with some of the most important dramas and dramatic fragments by Friedrich Schiller.
GER 305Topics in German Poetry(LA)The course will track the changing fates of the poetological homunculus baptized "lyrical I" in 1910, across the battle-worn 20th century, from George and Rilke to the transgressive subjectivities of Expressionist poetics, from avantgarde challenges to bourgeois individualism to Celan's codes and the supposed "New Subjectivity" of the 1970s, and, finally, into the present moment of, inter alia, the Neobaroque wisdoms of poeta doctus Grünbein and the mellowed grooves of Mayröcker and her entourage. Do we need a notion of lyric subjectivity and perhaps of its demise to account for the peculiar intimacy of poetic enunciations?
GER 306/JDS 304German Intellectual History(EC)This course will investigate the ways in which German Jews of the 19th and 20th centuries adopted and transformed "German" categories of historical thought from the perspective of the Jewish outsider. Such thinkers raised urgent questions about the politics of history, the history of religion, and the consequences of both for a modern understanding of time. As we read, we will take seriously their hybrid, "hyphenated" perspective: the goal will be to gain insight--on the one hand--into a unique chapter of German-Jewish intellectual thought, and--on the other--into the more general question of what it means to do history at all.
GER 324Topics in Germanic Literatures(LA)Perhaps no literary genre has a more intimate relationship to law than tragedy. For one, the tragic conflict often involves a figure caught between competing and incompatible legal orders; for another, the rules and conventions of the genre itself have always been more strictly codified than those of other literary forms. Tragedy often shows the impossibility of subsuming a particular case under a general principle while insisting on the need for laws that derive their authority by abstracting from the particular. This course explores this paradox in tragedies from antiquity (Sophicles' Antigone) to the German 19th century.
GER 328Media Theory: Rhetorics of Surveillance(EC)Taking up the master trope of dystopian futurity articulated in Orwell's 1984, this seminar in media theory will track the paranoid logics of surveillance across a wide range of literary, philosophical, technological (photographic, cinematic, digital) and architectural manifestations. Using a comparative, historical and interdisciplinary approach we will consider surveillance as a political tactic, a narrative strategy, a theory of the subject, a spatial configuration, a mode of spectatorship, and as a key dynamic of both old and new media.
GER 506Second Language Acquisition & PedagogyReadings and discussion in classroom application of SLA theory. Focus on quantitative as well as interpretive analysis. Primary audience is the current teaching staff of GER 101, but others are welcome. In English.
POL 509/GER 532/SOC 528State, Democracy, and Society in TwentieSituated at the intersection of the history of political thought, public law, and social theory, this course examines the ways European thinkers have argued about how, if at all, democratic ideals can be realized in the circumstances of modernity, social complexity and modern capitalism in particular. Evaluation of their arguments about the political forms, especially types of states, and the bases of social integration, nationalism in particular, that democracy might require. Special attention is paid to the evolution of the welfare-state, its critics from Hayek to Foucault, and attempts to save it on a supranational level.
GER 512German Literature in the 18th CenturyCourse examines Aristotle's formulation that history is verity and fiction is verisimilitude and how that concept was given a new meaning through the emergence of the modern novel in the 17th and 18th centuries, when fiction produced a "doubling of reality" and ushered in a realignment of what would become key terms of modernity: not just fiction and reality, but possibility, contingency, fancy, and probability, a concept native to rhetoric that now acquires a new mathematical meaning. Course focuses on what this co-evolution teaches us both about the history of the novel and the formation of modern scientific thinking.
GER 516/SLA 521Topics in 20th-Century LiteratureAn examination of aspects the "Return to Order", in the 1920's and '30's, after an earlier period of avant-garde experimentation. Considers novel aesthetic strategies which confound distinctions between Realism and Modernism, and the discourse of the "human" and "humanism" that motivated artistic production of the period. The approach of the course lies at the intersection between anthropology and aesthetics and addresses topics emergent at this theoretical locus: biography and portraiture; ethnographic writing; the ontology of documentary; biopolitical utopias of the `new man'.
GER 520/ART 590Topics in Literary and Cultural TheorySeminar examines a range of practices in writing, drawing, photography, painting, film, television and other forms of notation and recording in the period 1968-1983. Topics studied include: political and literary writings by H. M. Enzensberger and A. Kluge; ends of the modernist novel in U. Johnson and P. Weiss; systems of notation and documentation in U. Johnson, R. D. Brinkmann, H. Darboven; vicissitudes of historical representation in G. Richter, S. Polke, A. Kluge, and R. W. Fassbinder.
GER 521Topics in German Intellectual HistorySeminar examines the exchanges between literature and aesthetics, economics, political theory, and anthropology. Course develops a "poetics of homo oeconomicus" to account for the discursive strategies of business studies as much as for the economic formation of literary production. In the interdependance of economic text and textual economy what is at stake is the figure and efficacy of homo oeconomicus: its origin, fortunes and desires, its success, its modes of intercourse and traffic, its entaglements and symbolic exchanges.