Graduate Program

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

SELECTION OF PAST GRADUATE COURSES:

IN GERMAN STUDIES

GRMN2340B Poetik der AutorInnen (T. Kniesche)

This course will examine postwar literary aesthetics as put forth in the so-called "Poetikvorlesungen" which several universities in German-speaking countries have instituted since 1959. These lectures have featured important contemporary authors thinking about their work - from poetic practices and aesthetic theories to biographic considerations and the technicalities of writing literature in today's world.

GRMN2460B German Literature 1968-1989 (T. Kniesche)

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

GRMN2660 On the Sublime (Z. 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 include Longinus, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Neil Hertz.

GRMN2660C Socialism and the Intellectuals (C. 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 include Heine, Marx, Hauptmann, Brecht, Müller, C. Wolf.

GRMN2330A Vision & Narration in the 19th century (Z. Sng)

Examines a number of theoretical questions about vision and narration, and to trace the ways in which they are worked out in the German-language literary writings from around 1811-1920. Authors include Hölderlin, Kleist, Hoffmann, Stifter, Mörike, Storm, Hofmannsthal, and Rilke.

IN RELATED DEPARTMENTS

COLT2520F: Theories of the Lyric (S. Bernstein)

Through readings of recent critical discussions of the lyric genre, we will explore more general methodological problems of literary theory. Questions to be raised include: the role of form, structure and tropes in analyzing poetry; problems of subjectivity and voice; the relation between poetry, history and politics; the function of reading; and the problematic "objectivity" of criticism. Readings from Jakobson, Benveniste, Jauss, Johnson, De Man, Lacoue-Labarthe, Agamben and Badiou. Focus on poets Baudelaire, Shelley, Yeats, Hölderlin, Celan.

COLT2820S Poetry after Kant (K. Mclaughlin)

Begins with the intensive study of a selection of writings by Kant focused especially on force and conflict in politics and aesthetics. This study, along with relevant readings from more recent work, will provide the basis for an approach to this topic in nineteenth-century poetry. Readings of Kant, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben, leading to several "case studies" of 19th--century poetry, including works by Hölderlin, Baudelaire, and Matthew Arnold.

COLT2820P Aesthetics & the 18th-Century Subject (Z. Sng)

The debates about taste, judgment, beauty, sentiment, and sensation in the eighteenth century gave rise to the discourse of aesthetics as we know it today, but they also exerted a powerful influence on how knowledge, virtue, and subjectivity were imagined in the post-enlightenment period. In this course, we will examine some of the founding texts of aesthetic theory from the era (including Locke, Smith, Burke, Lessing, and Kant), and then turn to consider how aesthetic questions informed and were taken up by Goethe's narrative of subject-formation in his Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

MCM2100G Freud and Lacan (M. Doane)

Readings of major texts by Freud and Lacan, stressing relations between language, subjectivity and sexuality, and the feminist use and/or critique of psychoanalytic concepts. We will also look at texts by other theorists (e.g. Melanie Klein, Heinz Kohut).

PHIL2090A Kant on Self-Knowledge (K. Dunlop)

Our main reading will be the "Paralogisms" section of the Critique of Pure Reason, with attention to its (early modern) historical context.