German

Painting, sculpture, and architecture in Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, and Russia, ca. 1450-1800. Special emphasis is placed on the changing roles of court, city, cloister, and aristocracy and the relation of local styles to international trends, including art elsewhere in Europe. For department majors, this course satisfies the Group 2 distribution requirement. Offered in alternate years. One three-hour seminar.

The major works of the classical period in German literature. Texts by Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, and Kleist in relation to European historical, social, and philosophical change. Two 90-minute seminars.

In an effort to encompass the variety of responses to what is arguably the most traumatic event of modern Western experience, the Holocaust is explored as transmitted through documents, testimony, memoirs, creative writing, historiography, and cinema. In this study of works, reflecting diverse languages, cultures, genres, and points of view, the course focuses on issues of bearing witness, collective vs. individual memory, and the nature of radical evil. One three-hour seminar, plus weekly film showings.

An introduction to the poetry, drama, and prose of postwar Germany in the East and West. Emphasis on the political and social context of the major literary works from the '50s to the present. Two 90-minute seminars.

The visual arts in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Works of art, cinema, and literature in historical context. Topics include: modernism and modernity; Expressionism, Dada, New Objectivity in painting, photography, cinema, and literature; historical conditions of bodily experience and visual perception; emergence of new artistic and technological media; expansion of mass culture; place of politics in art; experience and representation of metropolitan life; changes in the conceptualization and representation of individuality, collectivity, embodiment, race, class, gender, sexuality. Two 90-minute seminars, one film screening.

The production and reception of art in the Federal Republic of Germany from c. 1960 to now, situating episodes in the history of painting, sculpture, and photography in relation to developments in literature and cinema. Topics include the problem of coming to terms with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung); the West German economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) and the functions and meanings of art in consumer society; violence, politics, and representation; abstraction and figuration in painting, sculpture, and photography; history, memory, and artistic tradition; art as a vehicle of socio-political critique. Two 90-minute classes.

Exemplary encounters between photography and literature in the 20th century. After providing students with a basis in the theory of photography, the course focuses on intersections between literary and photographic forms, producers, and movements. Topics will include modernism in New York (Williams, Strand, and Sheeler) and Mexico City (Lawrence, Bravo, Weston, Modotti), the New Photography and the photo essay in Germany (Benjamin, Moholy-Nagy, Renger-Patzsch, Sander), social criticism (Evans and Agee), surrealism (Breton), and the American road (Kerouac and Frank). Two 90-minute seminars.

Selected works of Kant are read, analyzed, and discussed.

The course provides an introduction to research on second-language acquisition and to the teaching of German as a foreign language.

The origin and development of tragedy, the Greek theater, and the history of our texts. The course involves the reading and analysis of selected tragedies, with an emphasis on the language, meter, and interpretation of the plays. Lectures and report.

Based on one specific text, the first term provides an introduction to language, metrics, manuscript tradition, and textual criticism. The second term deals with special topics in German literature between 1150 and 1450 or interdisciplinary topics such as orality and literacy, word and image.

Based on one specific text, the first term provides an introduction to language, metrics, manuscript tradition, and textual criticism. The second term deals with special topics in German literature between 1150 and 1450 or interdisciplinary topics such as orality and literacy, word and image.

German literature in the Counterreformation period, with attention to neighboring literatures. In addition to drama, lyric, and prose narratives, other, more overtly "occasional" forms are examined. Themes include courtliness and self-display, cultural styles, and the relationship of generic to moral intentions.

A study of changes in the philosophical and literary discourses of major movements from the Enlightenment to Sturm und Drang, along with special issues, problems, and works of the century.

Representative writers and literary movements from 1830 to 1890, with special attention given to the political, social, and cultural background of a specifically German version of Realism.

The course is a study of representative works and writers, with special attention given to the intellectual, cultural, and social context.

Course treats a wide range of theoretical and historical issues concerning the interpretation of literary and cultural materials. Topics include psychoanalytic approaches to literature, the Frankfurt School and its legacy, feminist theory, German-Jewish Acculturation, relations between literature and the other arts, theories of literary reception, and fascism and culture.

The course examines in their entirety mostly short texts that advance solutions to the intellectual problems preoccupying major German religious thinkers, writers, and philosophers, viz. justification, selfhood, theodicy, play, contingency, asceticism, estrangement, malaise, authenticity.

Historical and theoretical investigations of media from the advent of writing systems, paper and the construction of single-point perspective to phonography, radio, telephony, and television and up through the critical reflection on cyberspace, rhetorics of PowerPoint, surveillance and data shadows. Issues explored include the relationship between representation and technology, the historicity of perception, transformations of reigning notions of imagination, literacy, communication, reality and truth, and the interplay of aesthetics, technics and politics.

Historical and theoretical explorations of the study of literature, highlighting significant methodological and literary theoretical modes of inquiry. Potential topics addressed in this course include representative studies in the history of genre theory, narratology, semiotics, book history, formalism, and the history of reading and writing practices. Theoretical questions are explored via case studies from the history of literature.

Criticism as an applied art and as an autonomous discipline. Exploration of its place in intellectual history and a theoretical analysis of its basic assumptions. [Topics vary each year.]

This seminar explores the intricate relations of poetry to history and memory in the troubled 20th century. Individual poets are closely studied for their intrinsic interest but also for their (known and still to be discovered) connections with each other. The poets are Eugenio Montale, René Char, Paul Celan, and Anne Carson, but other writers will also be called on from time to time. Questions of war and resistance are important, and above all the course attends to what one might think of as the fate of language under pressure.