Designed for both undergraduates and graduate students, this course will focus on reading major "modern" poets and writings on poetics, in French, German, English and Spanish, with additional readings in theory of modernity, poetry, and the arts written by several of the poets we read. These include: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rilke, Celan, Garcia Lorca, Borges, Bishop and Ashbery. Secondary readings will include essays by major theorists and critics who consider the larger questions of representation, temporality, visuality, and language underlying poetic practice.

This course offers a rare chance to study great works of medieval German Romance together with early modern English epic-romance. The two traditions do connect, not only through European-wide romance narrative culture, but also through growing Anglo-German cultural interaction. We address three major, world-class narrative poems, and also extracts from others and many far shorter works (songs, lyric poems, mystical and aesthetic treatises) in the light of historical and theoretical discussion of sexual difference, dissidence, erotic knowledge, and their religious and political indices.

The course lays a foundation for functional acquisition of German. Class time is devoted to language tasks that foster communicative and cultural competence by emphasizing listening and reading strategies, vocabulary acquisition, authentic input, and oral production. Conducted in German.

Continues the goals of GER 101, focusing on increased communicative proficiency (oral and written), effective reading strategies, and listening skills. Emphasis on vocabulary acquisition and functional language tasks: learning to request, persuade, ask for help, express opinions, agree and disagree, negotiate conversations, and gain perspective on German culture through readings, discussion, and film.

Intensive training in German, building on GER 101 and covering the acquisitional goals of two subsequent semesters: communicative proficiency in a wide range of syntax, mastery of discourse skills, and reading strategies sufficient to interpret and discuss contemporary German short stories, drama, and film. Intensive classroom participation required. Successful completion provides eligibility for GER 107.

Develops deeper proficiency in all areas (cultural understanding, production skills, and receptive skills), using a combination of language-oriented work and cultural/historical content, including film and texts.

Continues improvement of proficiency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing using texts, online media, and other sources as a basis for class discussion. Grammar review is included. Conducted in German.

This course examines the history and culture of pre-modern central Europe through the lens of a wide range of literary works produced in German-speaking contexts. Confronting and revising preconceived notions about the medieval and pre-national 'primitive' past, we will discover together the epic accounts of multilingual Franks and Goths, the sophisticated ethos of medieval courts, women writing in the service of God and kings, and the history of German as a poetic language. Readings and discussion in English, working with translations from Old High German, Old Saxon, medieval Latin, Middle High German, Early Modern German, and Yiddish.

This course traces German cultural and political history since 1945, examining key developments and debates, including the aftermath of Nazi rule; violent clashes between students and government; the ideological rivalry between two German states up to reunification; migration and transnational cultures; and Germany's role in Europe. The course facilitates advanced competence in written and oral German, but also develops analytical competencies in historical and critical argumentation across a range of primary and secondary sources, including poetry, prose, essays, films, artworks, and performances.

Through careful readings of a wide range of media theoretical texts from the late 19th to early 21st-century, this class will trace the development of critical reflection on technologies and media such as orality, writing and the printed page, pre-cinematic optical devices, photography, film and television, gramophones, telephony and radio, as well as drones, surveillance and social media. Topics include the relationship between representation and technology, the historicity of perception, the interplay of aesthetics, technology and politics, and the transformation of imagination, literacy, communication, privacy, reality and truth.

This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to gender and sexuality in German culture and thought. Moving between texts and films with an explicit focus on gender and sexuality and those with a more surreptitious, figurative gendered logic, we will analyze literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics, and documents from sexuality studies. Indeed, the German tradition demonstrates in a compelling way that gender and sexuality are at stake in all cultural production. The German Geschlecht -- meaning at once sex, gender, stock, race, lineage, generation -- points to the impossibility of delimiting the question of sexuality.

How do films structure values and desires? What is propaganda? Is there a politics of narration? These and other deeply contemporary questions of media history and theory will be explored through an interdisciplinary interrogation of key works of expressionist, documentary, proletarian, avant-garde, queer, horror, and paranoid-thriller cinema (both silent and sound) produced in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Films and texts will be subjected to close readings, situated in their socio-political, media-historical and cultural context, and examined in light of the reigning debates in film criticism and aesthetics.

How do adults learn new languages? Why do some people learn new languages easily, while others struggle? What can language teachers do to make the learning experience as successful as possible? The course addresses these and related questions by providing a critical introduction to recent theories of instructed second language acquisition (ISLA). We will reflect on these issues through readings and discussion, and we will engage them on a practical level through one-on-one ESL tutorials with participants from the greater Princeton community, in collaboration with ProCES.

This course explores the vibrant literary culture of postwar Austria. We will examine how literary works contributed to--and subverted--the construction of an Austrian national identity; what role texts like Thomas Bernhard's "Heldenplatz" played in Austria's belated confrontation with its Nazi past; and why Austria produced a distinctive form of avant-garde writing whose most prominent representative, Elfriede Jelinek, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004. Our readings will also give us occasion to critically reflect on the stakes of categorizing literary works according to national, ethnic, or linguistic identity.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in three forgotten modernist, feminist, German-language writers: the German-Jewish philosopher and poet-critic Margarete Susman, friends with Simmel, Bloch and Celan; the incisive court reporter and novelist Gabriele Tergit, also German-Jewish; and the antifascist Swiss travel-writer and novelist Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a queer icon. What binds these three women together is that all three of them were among the most alert chroniclers of their time, tracking its many upheavals: the social and political revolutions of Weimar Germany, the rise of the Nazis to power, the Shoah.

This seminar explores recent debates about the ecological dimension of Marx's critique of political economy. At a time when global ecological disasters appear as the most glaring manifestation of capitalism's contradictions, new readings are challenging the cliché of Marx's myopic productivism and elaborating the environmental theory latent in his concept of human-nature metabolism. We focus on debates surrounding the concept of 'metabolic rift,' the connection between fossil fuel extraction and social control, and the convergence of these perspectives with ecofeminism, critiques of racial capitalism, and environmental aesthetics.

This course covers the three major historical moments of documentary work from its emergence in the interwar avant-gardes to its rediscovery in the 1960s and the contemporary documentary turn. With an eye toward the specific political conditions, technologies, and formal conventions that established the boundary between reality and representation at each of these three moments, this seminar considers: deskilling and the industrialization of writing; the contest between literature and technical media; the emergent properties of mass culture; changing conditions of authorship; documentation, the archive and forensic investigation.

Rhythm is often taken for granted as an aesthetic form or natural phenomenon--from the form of a poem to the pulse of a beating heart. Yet not only does the concept of rhythm have a history, but a 'rhythmic episteme' (Janina Wellmann) has historically shaped many discourses, some of them politically problematic, particularly where the concept of life is at stake. This seminar examines rhythm in aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical discourses with a focus on the periods around 1800 and 1900 and the role of rhythm in later theoretical projects from poststructuralism to new materialism.