Graduate Program

For a listing of current courses, see our COURSES page.

PAST COURSES

FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS:

GRMN 2320 “1700” (Katherine Goodman)

Comparing language (rhetoric, style), literature (poetry, drama, novel), and other cultural phenomena (theater, dictionaries, emblem books, professionalization), we will consider shifts in cultural paradigms from the early modern to the modern period. Grimmelshausen and Gellert; Gryphius and Gottsched; Opitz and Haller. Readings in German. Discussion in German or English.

GRMN 2660 Interdisciplinary Studies: “On the Sublime” (Zachary Sng)

Survey of major theories of the sublime from antiquity to modern times, with emphasis on German, British, and French texts from the 18th to 20th centuries. Authors to be read include Longinus, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Neil Hertz. Readings and discussions in English, with optional readings in original languages provided. Open to seniors with instructor's permission.

GRMN 2460 Modern German Literature: “German Literature 1945-1967” (Thomas Kniesche)

Examines the literature and the literary debates in postwar Germany, East and West. Authors to be discussed include those of the Gruppe 47 and those excluded from the group in the West; Brecht, Seghers, Becher and the new generation in the East. Emphasis on cultural politics and the role of literature in postwar German society (the work of the mourning, political restoration).

GRMN 2660 Modern German Literature : “Nationalism” (Roberto Simanoswki)

This course examines the rise of German nationalism in literature and writing in 18th and 19th century and discusses the issue of national identity and multiculturalism. The course will also consider globalization and terrorism in the 21st Century. Readings among others by Lessing, Herder, Jean Paul, Fichte, Arndt, Kleist. In German.

GRMN 2660CSocialism and the Intellectuals (Carol Poore)

The international socialist movement was born in Germany, and many of Germany's most important intellectuals were attracted to its striving for social justice. Against the background of 19th century politics and theory, the course focuses on the Weimar Republic, the cultural politics of the German Democratic Republic and the New Left in the Federal Republic, and developments since reunification. Authors may include Heine, Marx, Hauptmann, Brecht, Müller, C. Wolf. Readings in German, discussions in English and/or German.

GRMN 2460B German Literature 1968-1989 (Thomas Kniesche)

Discussion of major trends in literature written in German: New Subjectivity, postmodernism, feminist literature, the role of mythology, post-histoire. Authors to be discussed include Botho Strauss, Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, among others.

GRMN 2660D Aesthetics of the Spectacle (Roberto Simanowski)

The seminar focuses on figurations of mass culture, culture industry and diversion as conceptualized primarily by Enlightenment thinkers, Frankfurt School, French Situationism, French postmodern philosophy and contemporary German debate. Special attention will be paid to "Autonomieästhetik", "Engagement" and the new "cultural underclass" in Germany. Readings include texts by Pascal, Fichte, Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno, Debord, Baudrillard, Jameson, Nolte and many others. In German.

For undergraduate and graduate students:

GRMN 1340G Contemporary German Literature (Roberto Simanowski)

Pop-literature is obsessed with brand names, young female authors depict melancholic city-singles, books report about "Generation Golf" and "Generation Ally", Ossis say goodbye to Lenin, Lola runs through Berlin to rescue her boyfriend. How is unified Germany doing? What do Germans read and see? The course will examine both German literature and films of the last decade. In German.

GRMN 1440M Digital Aesthetics (Roberto Simanowski)

We discuss intermediality, multilinearity, interactivity, programming as features of digital literature and art, investigate the relationship between text, image, and performance, and read classical texts on and analyze various examples of digital aesthetics. Keywords: text machines, hyperfiction, kinetic concrete poetry, painting with words, visual writing, text-image-transfer, mapping art, digital performance, digital photography, transgenic art, neo-baroque spectacle. Courses in literary theory or visual art would help. In English.

GRMN 1440N Das Kunstmaerchen: The Literary Fairy-tale in the Nineteenth Century (Zachary Sng)

"Das Kunstmaerchen" or literary fairy-tale occupies a central place in the literature of late romanticism. Focusing on major examples from writers such as Tieck, Eichendorff, and Brentano, we will examine how the content and the representational structure of these texts contribute to debates on categories like the "natural," the "fantastic," and the "moral." In German.

GRMN 1660BBerlin: A City Strives to Reinvent Itself (Carol Poore)

Contemporary Berlin buzzes with energy, yet this metropolis is characterized by the legacy of fascism and divided government. The city as cultural space will be interrogated in interdisciplinary ways. Topics range from Weimar culture and Nazi architecture to the Cold War and German reunification.

GRMN 1660R Freud (Thomas Kniesche)

Introduction to Freud's theories of the unconscious and its manifestations, Freud's thinking on culture and aesthetics, his theory of sexuality, his view of religion, and of fascism.

GRMN 1660XRichard Wagner’s Theater (Visiting Max Kade Professor, Prof. Dr. Clemens Risi)

The subject of the seminar will be Richard Wagner’s importance to 19th century theater history. Proceeding from an understanding of the state of opera in 19th-century Germany, France and Italy, we will discuss to what extent Wagner’s influence can be considered ground-breaking. We will read and talk about Wagner’s own writings, among others his texts about music drama, about singers and actors, about staging, about architecture, his ideas on the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, and about the concept of “Gesamtkunstwerk”. We will read, listen to and watch some of his operas and music dramas, among others “Lohengrin” and the tetralogy “Der Ring des Nibelungen” as well as works by predecessors and contemporary composers (Rossini, Bellini, Weber, Meyerbeer).

GRMN 1900A Senior Seminar: The Weimar Republic (1918-1933) (Carol Poore)

Advanced students of German culture will pursue their own interests in researching this fascinating period in German culture and political history. Common readings, general discussions, and individual class presentations will facilitate the development of individual projects. Covered areas include literature, art, music, film, politics, etc. Required for concentrators, written permission required for others.

COLT 1210 Introduction to the Theory of Literature (Susan Bernstein)

An historical introduction to problems of literary theory from the classical to the postmodern. Issues to be examined include mimesis, rhetoric, hermeneutics, history, psychoanalysis, formalisms and ideological criticism (questions of race, gender, sexuality, postcolonialism). Primarily for advanced undergraduates. Lectures discussions; several short papers.

COLT 1811ULiterature and the Arts (Susan Bernstein)

Readings in the apparitions and articulations of the arts in fiction, philosophy, criticism and poetry. Focus on the interaction between language and other media, the figure of the artist, problems of expression and performance. Readings from Diderot, Hegel, Balzac, Hoffmann, Baudelaire, Poe, Nietzsche, Wagner and Mann.

HIST 1220 European Intellectual and Cultural History: Exploring the Modern, 1880-1914 (Mary Gluck)

A sequel to HI 121 focusing on radical intellectual and cultural currents that challenged and destabilized the assumptions of Victorian high culture during the fin de siecle. Through a careful reading of primary texts by Hobhouse, Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud. The course explores issues such as the rise of mass consumer culture, neoliberal and neofascist politics, philosophic irrationalism, psychoanalysis, and the woman question.

JUDS 1980R Heidegger and 20th Century Jewish Thought (Michael Gottsegen)

Martin Heidegger, one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century, exerted a profound, and continuing influence upon many of the century's leading Jewish thinkers, an influence which was especially significant in the case of his Jewish students, among whom were included Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Levinas, Karl Lowith, Herbert Marcuse and Leo Strauss. In this seminar we will read the most significant works of the master and his Jewish students, and gauge the relationship between their respective projects. We will also assess the continuing influence of Heidegger's Jewish students, and of Heidegger himself, on contemporary Jewish thought.

MUSC 1600A Seminar in Music and Critical Theory: Adorno on New Music (Rose Rosengard Subotnik)

A close study of Adorno's Philosophy of New Music, in the new translation by Robert Hullot-Kentor, and selected secondary readings relevant to this work. The course emphasizes notions of canon (the Western musical canon starting with Beethoven); of modernism (as exemplified in music by Schoenberg and Stravinsky); and of an avant garde. It also focuses on relationships between art traditions and popular music; and on problems of writing legitimate (or so-called "authentic") music of any kind in a post-canonic age. An interdisciplinary student body enriches this course; thus, students from all backgrounds with a scholarly interest in any type of music since 1900 or in any of these issues are encouraged to enroll.

COLT 1811S Philosophy and Literature of German Romanticism (Kenneth Haynes)

A fateful collaboration between philosophy and literature was centered in Germany roughly between 1788 (Schiller's 'Gods of Greece') and 1807 (Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit). A survey of the major literature of this period, organized thematically, will serve as an introduction to this complex phenomenon. Authors include (in translation) Fichte, Goethe, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schelling, Schiller, and Tieck.

PHIL 1910C German Idealism ( Michael S. Rohlf)

A study of the major figures and unifying themes of classical German Philosophy, focusing on Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Also includes discussion of such figures as Jacobi, Reinhold, Maimon, Hölderlin, and Novalis.

JUDS 0980JTowards the Future: Secular Messianism and Utopian Hope in 20th Century Jewish Thought (Michael Gottsegen)

In an era in which the dominant voices counsel political realism and warn against the utopian demand for perfect justice, this course will explore the post-traditional, Jewish ideas of radical social transformation that emerged among European Jewish thinkers in the first third of the 20th century, ideas which also inspired the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, and which arguably retain their critical power as wellsprings of secular and religious hope and as an impetus to socio-political activism into the new century. In our study of the genealogy of this radical and critical hope and commitment, we will consider, in turn, the thought of Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Inasmuch as this radical Jewish current also became quite influential upon non-Jewish contemporaries as well, we will also attend to the most influential members of this wider circle.