Courses

Singing boys. Dancing horses. Waltzing debutantes. Those fortunate enough to live in a city where each day begins with a pastry and ends with a two-liter bottle of wine must live a charmed existence! Not according to Freud. After decades of treating the morbid Viennese, he concluded that human nature must be torn between two warring forces: a love instinct and a death drive. In this FWS we'll explore both sides of Vienna's enigmatic character, its life-affirming hedonism and its self-destructive nihilism, through the lens of narrative fiction on page and on screen. Along the way, we'll learn to read and view more critically by writing our way through the best literature and cinema of the multi-ethnic metropolis on the Danube.

Full details for GERST 1122 - FWS: Love and Death in Vienna

Violence is a complex concept with a nuanced history. Beginning with Kant and progressing through philosophers such as Friedrich Engels, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, this seminar will employ close readings of philosophical texts to explore how various conceptualizations of violence have shaped the political, religious, and scientific landscapes of modern life. In addition to learning this discrete body of knowledge, you will use weekly writing activities and assigned essays to develop your own critical voice. By semester's end you will have gained a critical eye towards the institutional dilemmas of contemporary life, and through those eyes you will be empowered with the voice to change it.

Full details for GERST 1126 - FWS: Philosophies of Violence: Conceptualizations of Force from Kant to Zizek

A basic understanding of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is a prerequisite for participating in critical debates in the humanities and social sciences. Our seminar will explore key terms in the revolutionary models of critical analysis these thinkers pioneered: historical materialism, post-metaphysical philosophy, and psychoanalysis.  This will mean articulating points of contrast as well as convergence.  Discussions and writing exercises will focus on texts that created the discursive framework for critiquing society and culture today.  Our method will proceed from the premise that critical reading, thinking, and writing are inseparable moments in the same operation of critique.  The question that guides that method will be: Do alternative ways of thinking exist in opposition to the ones we view as natural, inevitable, or universal?

Full details for GERST 1170 - FWS: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud

Students develop basic abilities in listening, reading, writing, and speaking German in meaningful contexts through interaction in small group activities. Course materials including videos, short articles, and songs provide students with varied perspectives on German language, culture, and society.

Full details for GERST 1210 - Exploring German Contexts I

Students build on their basic knowledge of German by engaging in intense and more sustained interaction in the language. Students learn more advanced language structures allowing them to express more complex ideas in German. Discussions, videos, and group activities address topics of relevance to the contemporary German-speaking world.

Full details for GERST 1220 - Exploring German Contexts II

Students continue to develop their language skills by discussing a variety of cultural topics and themes in the German-speaking world. The focus of the course is on expanding vocabulary, reviewing major grammar topics, developing effective reading strategies, improving listening comprehension, and working on writing skills. Work in small groups increases each student's opportunity to speak in German and provides for greater feedback and individual help.

Full details for GERST 1230 - Expanding the German Dossier

Intended for advanced beginners. Builds further competence in reading, writing, oral comprehension, speaking and grammar. Course material is presented and discussed in the context of Ashkenazi Jewish culture.

Full details for GERST 1777 - Elementary Yiddish II

Students examine important aspects of present-day German culture while expanding and strengthening their reading, writing, and speaking skills in German. Materials for each topic are selected from a variety of sources (fiction, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet). Units address a variety of topics including studying at a German university, modern literature, Germany online, and Germany at the turn of the century. Oral and written work and individual and group presentations emphasize accurate and idiomatic expression in German. Successful completion of the course enables students to continue with more advanced courses in language, literature, and culture.

Full details for GERST 2000 - Germany: Intercultural Context

This course aims at sharpening your awareness of personal and cultural subjectivity by examining texts in a variety of media against the backdrop of cultural, political, and historical contexts.  We will focus on improving your oral and written expression of idiomatic German by giving attention to more sophisticated aspects of using enriched vocabulary in a variety of conversational contexts and written genres. Materials will include readings in contemporary prose, newscasts, research at the Johnson Art Museum, and interviews with native speakers on a topic of contemporary cultural relevance.

Full details for GERST 2040 - Perspectives on German Culture

Learn German and understand German business culture at the same time. This is a German language course that examines the German economic structure and its major components: industry, trade unions, the banking system, and the government. Participants will learn about the business culture in Germany and how to be effective in a work environment, Germany's role within the European Union, the importance of trade and globalization, and current economic issues in Germany.  The materials consist of authentic documents from the German business world, TV footage, and a Business German textbook.

Full details for GERST 2060 - German in Business Culture

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, "Thinking Media" offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, German Studies, Information Science, Literatures in English, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data.

Full details for GERST 2703 - Thinking Media

This 1-credit optional course aims to expand the students' vocabulary, and advance their speaking and reading skills as well as enhance their knowledge and deepen their cultural understanding by supplementing non-language courses throughout the University.

Full details for GERST 3013 - German Language Across the Curriculum (LAC)

This course is aimed to increase your linguistic competencies in German, your cultural awareness, as well as your critical thinking skills. We will discuss internet-relevant topics from a German perspective, and examine different cultural aspects of the German Internet. The highlight of the course will be an intercultural encounter with students from the Bielefeld Universität in Germany.

Full details for GERST 3080 - Against and Beyond the Digital in German

This seminar continues the rigorous trajectory of language study by introducing students to longer literary texts and full-length movies; by introducing students to theoretical, critical, academic discourses in German; 2) introduces students to the rich archive of German-speaking theoretical, literary, and cinematic engagement with the question of work's place in the life of individuals and society: From Marx and Engels, via Weber's analysis of Protestant ethics as basis for the rise of capitalism, Kracauer's depiction of the new class of employees in the Weimar Republic, to the diverging valorizations of workers in the 2 Germanies; up to current discussions about the precarity of work, the post-pandemic "great refusal", and the renewed emphasis on gendered differences regarding waged work and care work. We will pay particular attention to questions like: How are work and workers represented? Who speaks for the workers? Can we imagine work differently?

Full details for GERST 3340 - Working Through Working

The medieval past often returns in modern media with a critical twist. This course explores the imagination of the Middle Ages in modern films, video games, and other popular media. It introduces classic medieval films (Dreyer, Bergman, Buñuel), theories of medievalism (Huizinga, Balázs, Eco), and recent tabletop and video games from the German-speaking world and beyond. Working primarily with visual and interactive materials, we will discuss questions of aesthetics, identity, and representation; the dialectics of tradition and innovation; and the mobilization of the past in service of the present.

Full details for GERST 3545 - Imagining the Middle Ages: Films, Games, and Media

Shortly after the 2016 election, The New Yorker published an article entitled "The Frankfurt School Knew Trump was Coming." This course examines what the Frankfurt School knew by introducing students to Critical Theory, juxtaposing its roots in the 19th century (i.e., Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud) with its most prominent manifestation in the 20th century, the Frankfurt School (e.g., Kracauer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse) alongside disparate voices (Arendt) and radical continuations (Davis, Zuboff, Weeks) as they engage with politics, society, culture, and literature (e.g. Brecht and Kafka).   Established in 1920s and continued in exile in the US during WWII, the interdisciplinary circle of scholars comprising the Frankfurt School played a pivotal role in the intellectual developments of post-war American and European social, political, and aesthetic theory: from analyses of authoritarianism and democracy to critiques of capitalism, the entertainment industry, commodity fetishism, and mass society. This introduction to Critical Theory explores both the prescience of these diverse thinkers for today's world ("what they knew") as well as what they perhaps could not anticipate in the 21st century (e.g., developments in technology, economy, political orders), and thus how to critically address these changes today.

Full details for GERST 3620 - Introduction to Critical Theory

What makes a German world? The defeat of the Third Reich in 1945 and the collapse of communist Europe in 1989 were geopolitical events that still reverberate in German culture, as authors consider the ever-changing imaginative contours of German worlds by literary means. Transnational migration and minority struggles represent other pivotal markers of global change in the 20th and 21st centuries. This course examines how imaginative contours of German worlds have been reshaped in literary fiction since 1945 through the lens of migration and minorities. Special attention will be paid to Jews, Turks, and Black Germans; some attention will also be paid to literary phenomena involving other minorities and migration experience, including that of Eastern Europeans who have immigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany.  

Full details for GERST 4002 - Changing Worlds: Migration, Minorities, and German Literature

Marx, never reading Freud, produced analysis of ideology and fetishism as class struggle; Freud, barely mentioning Marx, produced critique of socialism and communism. Freudo-Marxism began 1920s: Austria/Germany (Adler, Gross, Reich); Russia/USSR Bakhtin Circle (Vološinov). Subsequently: Fromm, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, Fanon, C. L. R. James, Lacan, Althusser, Timpanaro, Deleuze & Guattari, Derrida, Castoriadis, Kofman, Karatani, Žižek, Kordella, Butler—across frontiers. Recent titles: The Capitalist Unconscious (Tomsic), The Invention of the Symptom (Bruno), Marxism and Psychoanalysis (Pavon-Cuellar), Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present (Löwy), Marx and Freud in Latin American Politics, Psychology, and Religion in Times of Terror (Bosteels), The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make (Matory). We begin with Marx and Freud.

Full details for GERST 4255 - Freudo-Marxism: Theory and Praxis

Undergraduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

Full details for GERST 4520 - Independent Study

The Reading Course is administered by the director of the honors thesis. It carries 4 hours credit, and may be counted towards the work required for the German Major. The reading concentrates on a pre-determined topic or area. Students meet with their honors advisor about every two weeks throughout the term. Substantial reading assignments are given, and occasional short essays are written.

Full details for GERST 4530 - Honors Research

The thesis is to be written on a subject related to the work done in GERST 4530.  A suggested length for the thesis is 50-60 pages.

Full details for GERST 4540 - Honors Thesis

Marx, never reading Freud, produced analysis of ideology and fetishism as class struggle; Freud, barely mentioning Marx, produced critique of socialism and communism. Freudo-Marxism began 1920s: Austria/Germany (Adler, Gross, Reich); Russia/USSR Bakhtin Circle (Vološinov). Subsequently: Fromm, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, Fanon, C. L. R. James, Lacan, Althusser, Timpanaro, Deleuze & Guattari, Derrida, Castoriadis, Kofman, Karatani, Žižek, Kordella, Butler—across frontiers. Recent titles: The Capitalist Unconscious (Tomsic), The Invention of the Symptom (Bruno), Marxism and Psychoanalysis (Pavon-Cuellar), Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present (Löwy), Marx and Freud in Latin American Politics, Psychology, and Religion in Times of Terror (Bosteels), The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make (Matory). We begin with Marx and Freud.

Full details for GERST 6255 - Freudo-Marxism: Theory and Praxis

The aim of this course is to investigate the relationship between history and images, by considering, the work of an outstanding representative of twentieth-century critical theory.  Siegfried Kracauer left a rich body of works spanning from the sociology of mass culture to film criticism and the philosophy of history.  This seminar will analuze his theory of images by following his intellectual trajectory from Europe to the United States.  We will read his early essays on photography an reification, as well as his well-known works on film theory and history (From Caligari to Hitler, Theory of Film; and History: The Last Things Before the Last).  Thus, we will inscribe Kracauer into his historical and intellectual context, shaped by other thinkersof images such as Th. W. Adorno, W. Benjamin, E. Panofsky, and M. Schapiro.

Full details for GERST 6355 - Images and History: Siegfried Kracauer

Examination of programmatic concepts of Poetic Realism in literature and theory. Special focus on the relationship between aesthetic theory and literary production (Hegel, Vischer, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche). Course will discuss the tension between the "prosaic" and "poetic" by investigating the status of topics such as "love," "adventure," and domesticity; suburban and garden spaces; the aesthetization of "work" and the "reality" of industrialization. Further attention will be paid to artistic developments that anticipate literary periods such as Naturalism, Expressionism and the Avant-garde. Questions of nationalism, science, and generic issues will be discussed in comparison to European developments of Realism. Seminar will also focus on contemporary re-elaborations of the Realist project: in relation to psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and current theories of memory, community, and spatial structures (architectonic or mnemonic). Authors include: Hegel, Vischer, Tieck, Keller, Droste-Hülshoff, Freytag, Fontane, Schmidt, Meyer, Raabe, Nietzsche, Freud, Stifter, Storm.

Full details for GERST 6370 - 19th Century Fiction: The Realist Project

This course examines Friedrich Hölderlin's philosophical, poetological, and poetic work, recognized only belatedly as among the most insistent, consequential, and haunting contributions to German letters. We will pay close attention to Hölderlin's philosophical development, in particular his critiques of Fichte's Science of Knowledge and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters. Taking their departure from these critical positions, Hölderlin's subsequent treatments of aesthetic and poetological questions became the ground of a rigorous and revolutionary philosophico-poetic practice. We will examine Hölderlin's major aesthetic and poetological writings (including the "Oldest System-Program," the authorship of which is still debated). These theoretical tenets are enacted in such poetic texts as the Empedocles drama, the translations of Oedipus and Antigone, and Hölderlin's stunning lyric poetry. Throughout, we will read Hölderlin's philosophical positions in relation to his poetry and trace the move from philosophy to poetic theory and practice. Of particular importance for our inquiry will be the meticulous reading of Hölderlin's views on the method of poetry, the difference between poetic genres, the change of tones, and the notion of intellectual intuition. On this basis, we will also debate the claims of some of Hölderlin's most incisive readers. Readings may include Allemann, Binder, de Man, Haverkamp, Heidegger, Henrich, Krell, Ryan, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nägele, Ryan, Sattler, etc.

Full details for GERST 6820 - Hölderlin: Philosophy, Poetry

New forms of German literature emerged in the wake of transnational labor migration, especially after 1989. Taking leave of a sociological model that interprets this literature only in terms of intercultural dialogue, this course juxtaposes prose fiction about cultural contact and critical theories of difference with two primary goals in mind. Students will be introduced to representative examples of contemporary German literatures of migration, and critical modes of conceptualizing cultural contact in Germany will be compared in relation to each other and in tension with the literary field. Focus on German literature of Turkish migration complemented by readings reflecting other transnational phenomena such as postsocialism, postcolonialism, globalization, refugees, world literature.

Full details for GERST 6960 - Rites of Contact: Emergent German Literatures and Critical Method

Graduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

Full details for GERST 7540 - Independent Study

The course consists of a bi-weekly workshop series focusing on a range of interdisciplinary topics and sponsored by the Institute for German Cultural Studies (IGCS). Speakers include prominent scholars in the field of German Studies (understood in a wide, interdisciplinary sense) and advanced graduate students, who discuss their work-in-progress based on pre-circulated papers. Besides attending the workshops, course participants meet with the instructor for two additional sessions devoted to pursuing the ties between the topics and disciplinary fields showcased by the speakers and the students' own work. The course is thus intended both as a survey of disciplinary approaches in German and Humanities Studies and as a framework that allows graduate students to hone professional skills (presenter and panel respondent, newsletter contributor, etc).

Full details for GERST 7541 - Colloquium