GER 509/MED 509Middle High German Literature IISeminar examines the ins and outs of knowing as it is depicted in medieval literature. Philosophical, theological, and imaginative texts in which ways of knowing or what and how one knows are studied. Related topics to be addressed include love, literacy, learning, teaching, hagiography, and gender (what can women know and how do they acquire knowledge?). Readings and discussions will be in English.
GER 521Topics in German Intellectual HistoryA critical reading of works from the Germanic tradition that have transformed Western notions about God. Written by novelists and philosophers as well as theologians, these works raise questions--with an urgency unique to their subject matter--about the ultimate foundations of reason, the character of historical knowledge, the communicability of personal experience, the relationship between language and revelation, the possibility of textual interpretation, and the status of humans in the universe.
GER 525/MOD 525Studies in German FilmThis seminar in media history, theory and criticism subjects a rediscovered cache of rare silent films to a variety of critical interrogations, exploring the complex intermedial dynamics (relations to theater, variété, literature), establishment of key legitimation discourses (film criticism and theory, the Autorenfilm), development of new narrative forms ("birth" of the feature film, the serial detective genre), work of ignored pioneers (the Brothers Skladanowsky, Oskar Messter), gender and class dynamics in the transformation of the public sphere, and issues of technology, politics and the historicity of perception.
ARC 552/ART 599/GER 527Art, Architecture, and PsychoanalysisTheories of the unconscious and psychoanalytic metapsychology in relation to questions of form, structure, and method in the history of art and architecture. Topics explored include phantasy, projection, introjection, condensation, displacement, fetishism, sublimation, identification, reparation, incorporation, revelry, and play. Close readings include Freud, Ferenczi, Rank, Klein, Lacan, Caillois, Winnicott, Bion, Laplanche. Case studies of writers, artists, and architects; psychoanalytic readings of art and architecture by contemporary critics and historians.