Courses
SEMESTER I, FALL 2013
Primarily for Undergraduates
GRMN0100 Beginning German
Jane
Sokolosky
A course in the language and cultures of German-speaking countries. Four
hours per week plus regular computer and listening comprehension work.
At the end of the year, students will be able to communicate
successfully about everyday topics. This is the first half of a
year-long course whose first semester grade is normally a temporary one.
Neither semester may be elected independently without special written
permission. The final grade submitted at the end of the course work in
GRMN 0200 covers the entire year and is recorded as the final grade for
both semesters.
CRN 14148 S01 MWF 11:00-11:50 & Tu 12:00-12:50
CRN 14149 S02 MWF
12:00-12:50 & Tu 12:00-12:50
CRN 14150 S03 MWF 1:00-1:50 & Tu
12:00-12:50
GRMN0300 Intermediate German I
Jane
Sokolosky
Focuses on deepening students' understanding of modern German culture by
reading texts and viewing films pertinent to Germany today. Intended to
provide a thorough review of German grammar and help students develop
their writing, reading, listening, and speaking skills. Frequent writing
assignments. Four hours per week. Recommended prerequisite: GRMN 0200.
CRN 14151 S01
MWF10:00 -10:50 & Th 12:00 - 12:50
CRN 14152 S02 MWF 1:00-1:50 & Th
12:00-12:50
GRMN0500F Twentieth Century German Culture
Kristina Mendicino
A broad exploration of twentieth-century German culture using many kinds
of written and visual texts (e.g. literature, journalism, film, art).
While continuing to work on all four language skills (speaking,
listening, reading, writing) students will gain more intensive knowledge
about German culture, society, and history. In German. Recommended
prerequisite: GRMN 0400. WRIT
CRN
14909 S01 MWF 10:00-10:50
CRN 16122 S02 MWF 9:00-9:50
GRMN0750B Tales of Vampirism and the Uncanny
Thomas Kniesche
This course compares literary texts of horror and haunting in English
and German Romanticism. The psychoanalytic foundations of vampirism are
discussed to enable students to boldly go beyond mere fandom and engage
these texts on a more sophisticated level. Readings by Walpole,
Coleridge, Poe, Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann and others. In English.
Enrollment limited to 20 first year students. FYS
CRN 14910 S01 Tu Th 10:30-11:50
*NEW COURSE
GRMN1200C Nietzsche - The Good European
David Krell
Nietzsche prided himself on his
transnational identity. He loved German literature and was himself a
writer of the first rank. Yet he was critical of the culture and the
politics of his nation and he loved the literatures and cultures of many
other nations. We will study his philosophical works with a view to his
criticisms of Deutschtum and his affirmation of other
traditions—starting with the Greeks, for by profession he was a
classicist. We will also study Nietzsche’s journeys—for he was convinced
that the places in which he thought and wrote were essential to his
thinking and writing.]
CRN 16173 S01 W 3:00-5:20
GRMN1320H Klassik und Romantik
Thomas Kniesche
Both German Classicism and Romanticism can be read as responses to
revolutionary changes in the areas of politics, economics, philosophy,
and the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). But whereas Romanticism was an
all-European movement, 18th century classical literature and aesthetics
were a uniquely German phenomenon. How did both schools of thought and
literature view the onset of modernity and how did they respond to it?
What was similar and what was different in their respective ideas of how
to deal with the changing times? Texts by Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin,
Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and others. In German. Prerequisite: GRMN
600.
CRN 15077 S01 TuTh 1:00-2:20
GRMN1340N Literature and Multilingualism
Zachary Sng
Has literature ever really been monolingual? Has it not spoken, from the
outset, with a split tongue? We will examine a range of authors from
the twentieth century in this seminar for whom speaking is always
speaking otherwise: speaking about the other, speaking as other,
something other than merely speaking. Literary examples might include
Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, W. G. Sebald, Yoko Tawada. We
will also look at a selection of theoretical writings from Derrida,
Deleuze and Guattari, Freud, Benjamin, and others. Reading knowledge of
German helpful but not required. DVPS
CRN 15303 S01 MWF 11:00-11:50
*NEW COURSE
GRMN1450E Ghostly, Manifest: Heine, Marx, Hoffmann and Freud
Kristina Mendicino
As historical materialism emerges in the nineteenth century, the ghost returns again and again in the writing of the period. What does this coincidence manifest, when the ghost inaugurates Marx’s Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, or when Heine summons in his poetry the specters of Romanticism––themselves, as he says elsewhere, reawakened manifestations of the ghostly poetry of the Middle Ages? What does this coincidence imply for thinking about temporality, history, and writing? We will engage such questions, which have been investigated in recent decades by Derrida and others, through close readings of Heine, Marx, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Freud. In German. Prerequsite: GRMN0600; or instructor's permission.
CRN TBA S01 MWF 2:00-2:50
*NEW COURSE
GRMN1450H Images of America in German Literature
Dirk Oschmann
What was, has been, and is America to Germans? Some believe America to
be moving in the right direction, and others imagine America as
thoroughly evil from the very beginning. Literature, however, does not
say this or that. It displays complex images, plays with prejudices,
idols, ideals, and stereotypes to show their inner mechanisms and
conceptual limits. And, of course, it generates images and
counter-images. By examining some canonical texts on this topic, the
seminar reconstructs the major perceptions, attributions and ascriptions
with which German authors over times have envisioned the United States –
even without travelling there.
CRN 15804 S01 TuTh 9:00-10:20
GRMN1800A Berlin: Dissonance, Division, Revision
Marc Redfield
In the twentieth century, Berlin was the city where Western political
conflict took its most dramatically visible form. This course studies
the history, culture, and literature of Berlin, focusing in particular
on the seven decades between the failed 1919 revolution and the fall of
the Wall in 1989. Literature and cinema will be emphasized (Benjamin,
Döblin, Isherwood, Kästner, and other authors; several films from the
silent era onward), but attention will also be paid to political
history, to the history of art and cabaret, and to Berlin's architecture
and urban space.
CRN 14518 S01 MWF 10:00-10:50
[Cross-listed with Comparative Literature. Interested students should register for COLT1813J.]
SWED0300 Intermediate Swedish I
Ann Weinstein
Continuing Swedish
CRN 15974 S01 Tu Th
4:00-5:20
Primarily for Graduate Students
GRMN2081A Realism, Idealism & Modernity (II)
Paul Guyer
This course continues discussion of realism and idealism as alternative
responses to the challenges of modernity. We begin with Schelling's
System of Transcendental Idealism and selections from Hegel; subsequent
authors include Nietzsche, a Neo-Hegelian such as F.H. Bradly, a
Neo-Kantian such as Ernst Cassirer, a pragmatist such as John Dewey or
C.I. Lewis, and more recent philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap, Thomas
Kuhn, Jurgen Habermas, and others. We will especially consider how
recent versions of conceptual relativism such as Kuhn's draw on both the
realist/idealist traditions to model the modern scientific outlook.
Undergraduates with instructor permission. HMAN 2970H helpful but not
required. Enrollment limited to 20.
CRN 15484 S01 W 3:00-5:20
[Cross-listed with Humanities. Interested students should register for HMAN2970J.]
GRMN2500A Rethinking the Bildungsroman
Marc Redfield
Studies the history and theoretical complications of the idea of the
Bildungsroman and "Bildung". The first meetings will unpack the notion
of aesthetic education through close readings of Schiller's aesthetics
and Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister. We'll then go on to examine some
classic 19th-century German, French, and English novels (Père Goriot, Middlemarch, L'education sentimentale), plus one or two less well-known novels such as Der grüne Heinrich, and one or two 20th century novels such as Der Zauberberg.
Secondary readings will engage a variety of theoretical issues and
approaches (deconstructive, feminist, Foucauldian, postcolonial).
CRN 14521 S01 M 3:00-5:20pm
[Cross-listed with Comparative Literature. Interested students should register for COLT2520G.]
*NEW COURSE
GRMN2660P The Essay: Theory and Praxis
Dirk Oschmann
An essay, Lukács once said, is not yet form, but form on the way to
becoming form. It is something in between: between art, science, and
philosophy, between reason and intuition, between "precision and soul"
(Musil). We will begin with the idea of the essay in Montaigne and
Francis Bacon, and trace its development in Germany's intellectual and
literary history from around 1870 till 1960. We will try to understand
why, during this period, the essay became the preferred medium of
thought and one of the dominant forms of reflecting on great Westerns
narratives as well as important contemporary discourses.
CRN 15655 S01 T 4:00-6:20
*NEW COURSE
GRMN2660S Inheriting (in) Modernity
Gerhard Richter and David Krell
This seminar will devote itself to the vexing question of what an intellectual and cultural inheritance is and how one should respond to its demanding complexities. How do we relate to a tradition, a legacy, a canon, an estate, a previous way of thinking and being? The readability of an inheritance and its many ghosts can be confronted in a rigorous fashion only in the moment when this very readability threatens to break down and the idea of a straightforward understanding is suspended. Readings include Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Bloch, Benjamin, Heidegger, Adorno, and Derrida. (Taught in English).
Courses offered in other departments (all in English)
COLT1210-S01 Introduction to the Theory of Literature (Z. Sng) MWF 1:00-1:50
COLT1430L-S01 Voices of Romanticism (S. Bernstein (MWF 11:00-11:50
COLT1810N-S01 Freud: Writer and Reader (S. Stewart-Steinberg) Th 4:00-6:20
HIST1030-S01 The Long Fall of the Roman Empire (J. Conant) TuTh 1:00-2:20
HIST1230-S01 European Intellectual History: Exploding the Modern (M. Gluck) MWF 10:00-10:50
HIST1972V Modernity, Jews, and Urban Identity in Central Europe, 1867-1938 (M. Gluck) TuTh 9:00-10:20
HIST1976Z Charlemagne: Conquest, Empire, and the Making of the Middle Ages (J. Conant) Th 4:00-6:20
HIST1978T-S01 Fin-de-Siecle Paris and Vienna (TBA) W 3:00-5:20
RELS1738-S01 Religion, Music, and Politics, 1750 to the Present (T. Lewis) W 3:00-5:20
