Why do non-binary pronouns make (some) people so angry? How do pronouns regulate our relation to the world, to one another, and to gender? This seminar investigates the history of theoretical reflection on and literary experimentation with pronouns. How does the constitution of the "I" grant access to the symbolic order? How does second-person address produce ethical relationality? How can the enunciation of the "we" avoid coercion and instead model flourishing, robustly multiplicitous community? Can the singular "they" circumvent the traps of gendered language? Readings in poetry, gender theory, linguistics, philosophy, political thought.

Capital, vol. 2--the least well-known volume of Marx's opus--may paradoxically now be the most pertinent in global contemporaneity. In terse and highly formalized terms, it theorizes the total subsumption of society under interlocking yet clashing circuits of capital. It also gives a powerful account of how the system reproduces itself in and through the negotiation of its inherent crises. We read vol. 2 intensively and supplement it with Marx's writing on subsumption and Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital.

Through a comparative focus on the concepts of dialectic and difference, we read some of the formative theoretical, critical and philosophical works which continue to inform interdisciplinary critical theory today. Works by Lukács, Adorno, Jameson, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida, Arendt, de Man and Benjamin are included among the texts we read.

The course lays a foundation for functional acquisition of German. Class time is devoted to language tasks that will foster communicative and cultural competence and will emphasize 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.

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understanding, production skills, and receptive skills), using a combination of language-oriented work and cultural/historical content, including film and texts.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. Taught in German.

This course will tackle exemplary works of modern German society and culture, including literature, art, film, essays, speeches, and autobiographies. It offers an introduction to the most important events and issues from the first half of the century: the foundation of the German state, the German Colonial Empire, Berlin as a modern metropolis, World War I, the rise of National Socialism. Intensive practice in spoken and written German with an emphasis on vocabulary acquisition and complex syntactical forms.

This course has four goals: 1) to introduce students to key authors, genres, and movements in German literary history between 1770 and the present; 2) to provide an opportunity to deepen interpretive skills through reading and discussion of representative texts; 3) to encourage students to explore theoretical approaches to cultural material; and 4) to provide intensive practice in spoken and written German.

This course offers an introduction to German critical thought, focusing on theories of knowledge that have profoundly shaped modern intellectual discourse. Beginning with the philosophical revolution sparked by Kant's examination of the limits of human knowledge, we will explore how thinkers such as Hegel and Marx analyzed knowledge's historical and material conditions and grapple with Nietzsche's and Freud's discovery of the unconscious. Classical sources will be read alongside modern thinkers, including Arendt, Foucault, and Angela Davis. Our overarching goal is to introduce key concepts of critical thought and probe their relevance today.

This introduction to methods for the study of German literature, media, and culture will hone the research skills necessary to develop a substantial piece of independent scholarship. Combining methodological reflection with practical training and experimentation, we will probe such questions as: What is at stake in "reading" texts and other media closely or at a distance, historically or with an eye to form? How does one find, organize, distill, and respond to extant scholarship? What distinguishes a strong research question or hypothesis? And which intermediate steps lead from the cursor blinking on a blank page to a polished research paper?

The interrogation of the irrational that was undertaken by German Critical Theorists in the aftermath of the Shoah has once again become deeply topical today. After reconstructing this critical discourse, the seminar will scrutinize the jargons of authenticity and interiority in a range of current cultural discourses, while adding new perspectives from feminist theory, new materialism, and aesthetics. By mobilizing the stylistic forms, vocabularies, and philosophical frameworks of critical theory, the seminar seeks to expose and understand the contemporary resurgence of the irrational.

The seminar is going to deal with the history of crime in (mostly) German literature and offers close readings of some of the most prominent crime stories since the end of the eighteenth century.

Modern citizens' struggle for liberty produced a radical literary tool of defense: the novella. Part everyday life, part sudden event, these short forms gave advice to those fighting the Man: How can outcasts question authority? What is a feminist plot? Can resistance be a reader response? We will discuss and read how these stories organize, formulate, and intensify real-world arguments through fictional protagonists in examples from the Americas and Europe, esp. 19th-century Germany. Alongside key theories, we will assess how novellas clarified and complicated issues of civil liberties, politics, religion, racism, gender, law, and the media.

The relationship between body and machinery, technology and biology is often thought in terms of the mechanical doll, the animated robot and other hybrid figures. Science fiction films offer double visions of the gendered body: women are masters/slaves of the technology and still symbolic bodies of the biological surviving of the human species. We will explore mediated visions in films and other media of different kinds spanning a bridge between SciFi-films and performance art, along with theoretical texts (like Haraway et al.) on the problem of the merging of technology and body.

Can experiences of looking at works of art shape not only how we think and feel and see, but also what we understand ourselves to be, as human beings? Two great 20-c. writers, poet Rainer Maria Rilke and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, believed they could. How did Freud's inquiries into aesthetic experience and the ways artists perceive the world inform the development of psychoanalysis? What moved Rilke to transform his writing in light of what he saw in modern art? Course focuses on the significance of art, and of practices of writing about art, in lyric poetry, experimental prose, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural analysis.

"Weimar" stands in for a potential that was lost, for the problem of revolution and reaction. A century after the Weimar Republic's apex, we first pick up on the negative political analogy between pre-fascist Weimar and our time: the U.S. as a "new Weimar," "the crisis of parliamentary democracy," the rise of White Supremacy, the "agitator," and the danger of pluralization. Second, we will study the positive analogies between Weimar as an era for revolution and experimentation. Embracing the materiality of the body and the built world - in dance, architecture, sexuality studies, and social history - we also aim to dis-analogize Weimar.

Readings and discussion of current theoretical and practical issues in Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA), with a goal of understanding how theory should inform classroom praxis. Primary audience is the current teaching staff of GER 101. In English.

Franz Kafka was once called an expert on questions of power. That peculiarity is the focus of this seminar. Guided by exemplary topics - the architecture of labyrinths and text-labyrinths, the machine and the apparatus, guilt and the law, animal figures, family dramas, the worlds of objects - we primarily discuss Kafka's stories and novels as attempts at a literary analysis of power. At issue, therefore, is the relationship between narrative strategies and the political dimension of this literature. At the same time, the seminar offers a discussion of modern narrative theories and the ethics of literature.

Walter Benjamin--a humanist, social-scientist, and media theorist in one--is among the most original thinkers of the 20th century. This seminar is a deep introduction to his work and its wide influence from the Frankfurt School to deconstruction and anthropocene thought. We study Benjamin's philosophies of language and of art; his theories of media experience, of urban and architectural space, and of childhood; his critiques of violence and of history; his studies of surrealism, Kafka, Brecht, and the baroque; as well as his style of writing, form of thought, and coining of concepts such as storyteller, dialectical image, and aura.

Animation is a central concept to understand the interaction between culture, technology and cultural techniques. Film is a major case for a technologically based cultural practice. We will follow the anthropological concepts of animation from animism in Freud and Lévi-Strauss through the technical use from dolls to robots and animation/animated films. Aim is to better understand the relation between animation of the inanimate and the technical enhanced animation of the spectator and user of technology.

This course provides a survey of the major works in the philosophy of technology from the nineteenth century to today. Rather than start with the Aristotelian distinction between techne and episteme, our inquiry instead begins with the division between manual and cognitive labor in the industrial workplace. What questions does modern production pose of metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology? The answer demands a philosophy of technology that also conceives of technology itself as philosophy and that confronts the prospect of machine intelligence.