Courses

How did bawdy tales of peasants using magic to climb the social ladder get transformed into moral lessons for children?  The answer lies in Romanticism and its appropriation of the imagination as a force for social transformation.  As Romantics edited older tales for juvenile consumption they wrote new ones for adults. This new fiction created the matrix for modern pop genres like fantasy, science-fiction, murder mysteries, and gothic horror.  To understand this paradigm shift in modern culture, we will read, discuss, and write about a variety of texts the Romantics collected, composed, or inspired, including poetry and film, in addition to classic fairy tales and academic scholarship on the topic.

Full details for GERST 1109 - FWS: From Fairy Tales to the Uncanny: Exploring the Romantic Consciousness

Germany's capital is a city that constantly reinvents itself. This course will offer a glimpse into Berlin's rich history in the 20th and 21st centuries—from the rise of the metropolis during the Weimar Republic to the rubble after WWII to today's multifaceted, multicultural, forward-looking capital. We will explore points of view, images, and perceptions of Berlin and its people in the literary productions of writers such as Siegfried Kracauer, Alfred Döblin, Kurt Tucholsky, Wolfdietrich Schnurre, Monika Maron, Wladimir Kaminer, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Kathrin Röggla. We will discuss changing identities (nation, class, gender, and ethnicity, for example), consult works of literary critics and scholars, practice attentive reading and writing, and learn to construct evidence-based arguments of our own.

Full details for GERST 1121 - FWS: Writing Berlin

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, poems, 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

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

1968 marked a turning point in German history. Protesting students upended the social, cultural, and political order with a utopian vision of revolution that ended in a decade-long wave of domestic terrorist violence. This intermediate language course examines four primary texts in four different media (historical fiction, avant-garde film, popular music, multimedia art) that treat the myth of 1968. As we study these texts in historical context, we will expand our oral and written command of idiomatic German through systematic grammar review and enriched vocabulary practice.

Full details for GERST 2020 - Literary Contexts and Texts: The Myth of 1968

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

Big names, Big ideas, and Big events are associated with German culture and thought: Luther, Faust, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Mozart, Beethoven, Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Einstein, Kafka and Thomas Mann; Enlightenment; World Wars and Reunification; European Union, and Migration and Refugees:  In this course, we shall cover the broad spectrum of both the long tradition of German culture and thought, and examine the wide range of political, literary, sociological, and artistic topics, themes, and questions that are of urgent contemporary concern for Germany, Europe, and beyond. Guest lecturers will introduce you to the wide and exciting field of German Studies. Topics include: the age of enlightenment; literatures of migration and minorities; avant-garde art; philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory; Weimar and War; Holocaust and its Aftermath; film and media; genres of literature: novel, novella, short story, lyric poetry, anecdote, autobiography; literature and politics; literature and the environment; digital humanities and literatures/fictions of cyber space. In addition, this course will introduce you to the techniques of critical analysis and writing. Authors include among many others: Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, Freud, Kafka, Kluge, Marx, Thomas Mann, Rilke, Goetz.  

Full details for GERST 2700 - Introduction to German Culture and Thought

German Print Culture from the Medieval to the Modern employs texts and images in the Kroch Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and Herbert Johnson Museum of Art as a prism to study how printing transformed everyday life in German-speaking Europe by making verbal and visual literacy possible for almost any member of society. Thematic units: Book-Making before the Printing Press; The Printing Press and Reformation; Endless War and Serialized Satire; Romanticism and the Birth of Children's Literature; Bourgeois Book Culture and Political Unification; Popular Press and Propaganda. All discussion, readings, and writing in German.

Full details for GERST 3075 - Print Matters

Who read what, how, and why in the past? Is reading today categorically different? How does globalization affect what is read by many people locally? Is the vast segment of so-called popular literature merely a product of the "culture industry," or could kitsch, for example, be understood as something more subversive? This class investigates the emergence and historically varying constructions of "imagined communities" of German-speaking readers. Looking at examples of bestsellers from Martin Luther to the present, the course offers an overview of literary and cultural history with a focus on: the history of literacy; literary institutions like authorship, publishing houses, libraries, and literary criticism; the (often gendered) differentiation between high and low/mass culture; various print media; genres like the romance novel, SciFi serials, mysteries, and dystopic thrillers.

Full details for GERST 3225 - Bestseller

An introduction (without prerequisites) to fundamental problems of current political theory, filmmaking, and film analysis, along with their interrelationship.  Particular emphasis on comparing and contrasting European and alternative cinema with Hollywood in terms of post-Marxist, psychoanalytic, postmodernist, and postcolonial types of interpretation.  Filmmakers/theorists might include: David Cronenberg, Michael Curtiz, Kathryn Bigelow, Gilles Deleuze, Rainer Fassbinder, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Marleen Gorris, Werner Herzog, Alfred Hitchcock, Allen & Albert Hughes, Stanley Kubrick, Fredric Jameson, Chris Marker, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Gillo Pontecorvo, Robert Ray, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, George Romero, Steven Shaviro, Kidlat Tahimik, Maurizio Viano, Slavoj Zizek.  Although this is a lecture course, there will be ample time for class discussions.

Full details for GERST 3550 - Political Theory and Cinema

This course examines the stories, literary examples, and metaphors at work in elaborating the modern economic subject, the so-called "homo oeconomicus." We will examine material from Locke, Smith, Defoe, and Mill through Marx, Nietzsche, Brecht, and Weber, up to current the neoliberal subject and its critiques (Foucault, Bataille). The course focuses on narrative and figurative moments in theoretical texts as well as crucial literary sources (novels, novellas, and plays) as they collectively develop the modern economic paradigms of industry, exchange, credit-debt, and interest. The course thus addresses both literary and theoretical sources, particularly the stories and examples told to justify the liberal order as well as its guiding metaphors such as the invisible hand; Schuld as both debt and guilt; investment (in oneself, in one's future); and the intersection of religious and secular economies.

Full details for GERST 3610 - Fables of Capitalism

Topic: "At the Borders of Language: German Poetry" The course is based on an historical survey of German poetry. We will examine the conventions and limits of the genre as well as the specific uses of language that German poetry has developed. What mode of saying is involved in lyric poetry? How is it distinguished from the epic and the dramatic genres, respectively? In order to answer these questions, we will closely read a wide array of poets, including such seminal figures as Hölderlin, Goethe, Schiller, Meyer, Trakl, Rilke, Benn, Brecht, Celan, Bobrowski, Bachmann as well as contemporary poets.

Full details for GERST 4100 - The Seminar

Discussion of an advanced topic in German philosophy.

Full details for GERST 4370 - Topics in German Philosophy

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

Full details for GERST 4510 - 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

Designed to familiarize students with current thought and theories in the field of applied linguistics and language pedagogy.  Introduces different models of foreign language methodology and presents and discusses various practices for the foreign language classroom.  Special consideration is given to topics such as language acquisition phases, planning syllabi, creating tasks, designing classroom tests, and evaluating students' performance.  Participants conduct an action research project.

Full details for GERST 5070 - Teaching German as a Foreign Language: Principles and Practices

The tradition of tragic thought has had an enormous impact on theories of modernity. This seminar will explore the ways in which models of the tragic (and tragedy) have influenced the formation and theoretical orientation of disciplines such as literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies and law. Central questions for inquiry: why does Modernity still refer to prominent figures of Antiquity--such as Antigone and Oedipus--when discussing social--and kinship relations?  How does tragic thought help us articulate fundamental problems of belonging, community, identification, emotional bonds, questions of power and its performative force on stage and in matters of state?  Authors include: Hölderlin, Aristotle, Sophokles, Lessing, Shakespeare, Freud, Heidegger, Butler, Loraux, Derrida, Scheler, Nietzsche, Vernant, Kristeva, Bowlby, Benjamin, Heiner Müller, Botho Strauss. Readings and discussion in English.

Full details for GERST 6040 - Tragic Modernity

Reading, translation, and English-language discussion of important texts in the German philosophical tradition. Readings for a given term are chosen in consultation with students.

Full details for GERST 6131 - German Philosophical Texts

Critical-aesthetic models about the role of art and literature in the search for the  active, good, or just life are increasingly under pressure by the conditions of late capitalism, which assimilates ideas that once promised alternative ways of seeing or being: intensity, (a) liveness, singularity, presentness, fiction, documentation, subversion, even contemporaneity, autonomy, or action/activism have  become norms for self-formation and team-work, for erasing the present by banking on futures. This seminar explores recent critical debates in German-speaking literary and art theory responding to this conundrum, attempting to rethink temporalities; notions of action and passivity; movements and collectives; the tension between autonomy and heteronomy; realism, fiction, facts, and documents. We will also investigate contemporary poetry and theater as major sites of experimentation.

Full details for GERST 6235 - Intensity: Recent Critical Models

Discussion of an advanced topic in German philosophy.

Full details for GERST 6241 - Topics in German Philosophy

This course emphasizes the acquisition of reading skills in German, using a variety of prepared and authentic texts.  The follow-up course, GERST 6320 , Reading Academic German II, is offered in the spring.

Full details for GERST 6310 - Reading Academic German I

This graduate course is dedicated to an in-depth exploration of the recent emergence of Posthumanism as a new theoretical paradigm in cultural and literary studies. Hardly a unified theory, Posthumanism draws on a wide variety of precursors and inspirations—in the natural sciences, the philosophy and history of science, the social sciences, and different theory paradigms in the humanities. They all have in common the intention of transcending a worldview that is exclusively premised on human needs and measures. Thus, posthumanist theorizing in the widest sense includes many recent additions to the critical canon, such as eco-criticism and animal studies. It is the underlying hypothesis of this course that much posthumanist thinking is recapitulating—consciously or unconsciously—many of the insights of cybernetics and systems theory, and that tracking this genealogy helps in clarifying the stakes and challenges of posthumanist theory.

Full details for GERST 6315 - Posthumanism, Cybernetics, Systems Theory

This anchor course focuses on major developments in the literature and culture of the German-speaking countries during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Topics to be discussed include the relationship between high-modernism, the avant-garde, and diverse forms of artistic engagement within the context of mass culture and mass politics; the articulation of gender, class, and racialized dimensions in cultural production and reception; and the challenge to traditional notions of authorship, representation, mimesis, and textuality mounted by the proliferation of text- and image-based mass media. Individual works will be drawn primarily from literature and drama, with a special emphasis placed on key concepts that helped define artistic production at this time (Expressionism, Dada, New Objectivity, Constructivism, montage, reportage, epic theater, etc.).

Full details for GERST 6515 - Culture of Weimar and Nazi Germany

This graduate seminar provides a basic introduction to the thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and to the latter's interpretation and appropriation of the former. A major concern is the articulation of philosophy and politics, particularly in the case of Heidegger. We are also interested in the types of argumentation and styles of writing of both thinkers, including in light of the hypothesis that they were working in the ancient tradition of prudent exotericism, viz. that they never wrote exactly what they thought and that they intended their influence to come slightly beneath the level of conscious apprehension. We also consider their impact on the long list of intellectuals across the 'Left-Center-Right' spectrum, including (depending on seminar-participant interest): Adorno, Agamben, Bataille, Badiou, Bourdieu, Butler, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Gadamer, Irigaray, Klossowski, Löwith, Marcuse, Rorty, Leo Strauss, Vattimo, Zupancic.

Full details for GERST 6630 - Nietzsche and Heidegger

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

Full details for GERST 7000 - PIRIP Independent Study

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

Full details for GERST 7530 - 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 7531 - Colloquium