German
- CLA 506/HLS 506/COM 502/GER 507: Greek Tragedy: Oedipus: Tragedy, Philosophy, PsychoanalysisClose reading of Sophocles' Oedipus the King and sections of Oedipus at Colonus in dialogue with the history of thought on Greek tragedy. Authors may include Aristotle, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Arendt, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon, Vernant, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari,Butler, Honig.
- COM 535/ENG 538/GER 535: Contemporary Critical Theories: Marx's Capital: Reading Volume 2Capital, 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read vol. 2 intensively and supplement it with important works that sustain or develop its theses (inter alia: Marx's unpublished chapter on subsumption, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Negri, Aiwha Ong, Neferti Tadiar).
- GER 101: Beginner's German IThe 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.
- GER 102: Beginner's German IIContinues 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. GER 102 will be offered again in spring 2022.
- GER 105: Intermediate GermanDevelops 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understanding, production skills, and receptive skills), using a combination of language-oriented work and cultural/historical content, including film and texts.
- GER 107: Advanced GermanContinues 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.
- GER 207: Studies in German Language and Style: Society, Politics, and Culture in Germany, 1890-1945This 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, 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.
- GER 209: Introduction to German Literature after 1700This 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.
- GER 300: Junior Seminar: Research in German Studies, Theory and PracticeHow do the activities of research and interpretation differ when the object is a poem, a 17th century canvas, a radio broadcast or a film, an urban renewal plan, or the draft of a new state constitution? This introduction to the wide range of approaches and methods for the study of German literature, culture and media will hone the research and writing skills necessary to develop a substantial piece of independent scholarship. Through close readings of theoretical texts and primary sources the seminar will focus on issues of authorship and argument, the "gay sciences" of the archive, and the subtleties of producing clear and persuasive prose.
- GER 303: Topics in Prose Fiction: Media of LiteratureThe seminar will pose the question of literature's media and media in literature. Our concern will not only be the medial preconditions (such as scripts, presses and postal networks) which made possible the emergence of literary cultures. The seminar will also explore the ways in which literary texts refer to media and media technologies. Whether it be perceptual media (e.g. telescopes) or pictorial media (e.g. paintings), communications technologies (telegraphs and telephones) or symbolic codes (money) -- through these constellations, we can investigate how literature defines its aesthetic self-understanding and its own communicative power.
- GER 306: German Intellectual History: Gender and Sexuality in German Culture and ThoughtThis 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.
- GER 307/ECS 307: Topics in German Culture and Society: Cultures of Melancholy: Literature, Art and ScienceOscillating between insanity and furor divinus, the concept of melancholy has been linked to genius and creativity from Aristotle through the medieval concept of acedia, to literary work around 1800 and into the 20th Century. The course will trace the development of melancholy in its diverse relations to visual art and literature, and to different medical, philosophical, astrological, religious and psychological discourses. By focusing especially on the impact melancholy has on sign systems and on the imagination, it explores melancholy not only as a topic of literature and visual arts, but as a basic component of expression as such.
- GER 316/LIN 316: Second Language Acquisition and PedagogyThe course will introduce students to recent theories of instructed second language acquisition (SLA) by way of critical reading and discussion, and to pedagogical practice in language teaching by way of participating in one-on-one ESL tutorials with community members, in collaboration with ProCES, during the semester. There are also plans for a collaborative project with ESL teachers during the 2022 Wintersession, subject to COVID-related travel restrictions.
- GER 323: Fairy Tales: The Brothers Grimm and BeyondWhat do fairy tales do? Seminar explores this question through the famous Brothers Grimm and their Children's and Household Tales (1812/1815). Focus is on the first edition and the baffling and fabulous narratives that were censored, refined, and polished by the Grimms in later editions. Students examine fairy tales' function: how they instruct, amuse, warn, initiate, and enlighten; how they humanize and conquer the bestial and barbaric forces that terrorize us; and how they have disguised social anxieties about gender and sex. Continued reception of the genre in Romantic, Weimar, and Post-War periods also examined. Taught in English.
- GER 403/EAS 403: Studies in Comparative SurveillanceSurveillance has long provoked a wide range of social responses, from the embrace of promises of security to a rejection of a threat to civil liberties. Why can some countries impose such social control while others cannot? Does this dynamic change when the monitoring is instead trans-national, be it in the form of more systemic logics of "surveillance capitalism" or of the new global tracking imperatives provoked by the current pandemic? This team-taught seminar in comparative surveillance studies will examine the complex cultural, political and techno-historical dimensions of new forms of social control in the Americas, Europe and Asia.
- GER 506: Second Language Acquisition and PedagogyReadings and discussion in classroom application of SLA theory. Focus on quantitative as well as interpretive analysis. Primary audience is the current teaching staff of GER 101. In English.
- GER 517: Modernism and Modernity: Art / Work. On the relation between modern aesthetics and laborNew forms of so-called postfordist labor in the information society and service economy bear a remarkable resemblance to the ways the artist and artistic processes have been understood in aesthetic discourse since the 18th century. This course explores the relation between art and labor from two angles. 1) A historic overview of the development from ancient concepts of leisure to a modern understanding of work as anthropologically crucial and the role played by art and aesthetics. 2) Contemporary theories of new capitalism, forms of subjectivity and discourses of creativity in connection to literary texts.
- GER 520/COM 556: Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory: From Minimalism to Maximalism: Scale in Literature, the Arts, & MediaWhat happens when the sizes and proportions of aesthetic artefacts are changed? Are such quantitative shifts merely superficial in character or do they cause substantial and qualitative alterations of the phenomena concerned. The seminar discusses concrete case studies drawn from a broad spectrum of disciplines in the humanities and provides an opportunity to examine how individual artifacts and their social circulation respond to scaling. Moreover, an attempt is made to compare process of scaling in the major arts and media and thus to establish scaling as a new perspective in the analysis of culture more generally.
- GER 521/COM 512: Topics in German Intellectual History: Hans Blumenberg and 20th Century ThoughtHans Blumenberg has long been recognized as a cultural theorist of major significance, and yet confusion still persists as to the developmental arc of his career and a number of its governing themes. Focusing on his literary theoretical texts, along with cultural and media theoretical as well as properly philosophical ones, this seminar explores Blumenberg's dialogue with, among others, Arendt, Cassirer, Goethe, Husserl, and Valéry. We will also discuss Blumenberg's reflections on such related issues as rhetoric, small forms, the novel, secularization, and modernity.
- GER 523/MOD 523: Topics in Media StudiesThis seminar offers a critical survey of recent trends in media theory with an eye to their relevance to questions of aesthetic form and of representation in general. We focus specifically on six approaches around which work in media theory has coalesced in the last two decades: cultural techniques, disability studies, media archaeology, elemental media, network theory, and assemblage theory.
- GER 526: Topics in German Literature: The Plagues of LiteratureThe link between plague and social catastrophe has shadowed the history of Western literature since the Iliad -- as a theme, a liminal experience and a challenge to representation. These conjunctures call up a spectrum of related problematics and inquiries: the role of medical knowledge, the relationship between infection and immunity, our reservoir of metaphors and images of the epidemic, the aesthetics of terror, states of emergency and enclaves of protection. The seminar focuses on literary sources from antiquity to the recent present.