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

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

A dragon-slayer wins a kingdom—then loses everything to betrayal. A young fool wanders into King Arthur’s court and embarks on a quest for the Holy Grail. The Nibelungenlied and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, two masterpieces of medieval German literature, shaped the Western imagination long before Tolkien or Wagner. In this seminar, we will ask what these violent, strange, and moving texts reveal about nobility, loyalty, men, women, and moral growth. Close reading will be our method: slowing down to notice how a text thinks through imagery, structure, and silence. Essay assignments progress from descriptive observation to interpretive argument, with revision and peer review central to the process. No prior knowledge of the Middle Ages is required—only a willingness to read carefully.

Full details for GERST 1132 - FWS: Epic, Romance, and Fate: Medieval Germanic Literature

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. Taught in German.

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. Taught in German.

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. Small group work increases each student’s opportunity to speak in German and allows for more individualized feedback and support. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 1230 - Expanding the German Dossier

Elementary Yiddish I is the first in a three-class sequence that will enable students to meet their Arts & Sciences language requirement in Yiddish. It provides an introduction to reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. Yiddish contains a wealth of embedded knowledge about Ahkenazi Jewish life, both historical and contemporary. In addition to language competence the course will build understanding of this legacy through songs, humor, holiday traditions, literature, and other cultural products.

Full details for GERST 1776 - Elementary Yiddish I

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. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 2000 - Germany: Intercultural Context

Intended for intermediate students, this is the third in a three-course sequence, designed to enable students to meet the College of Arts & Sciences language requirement. Students will increase their understanding of the language in cultural context and will further develop their capacity to produce both spoken and written Yiddish.

Full details for GERST 2005 - Intermediate Yiddish

Babylon Berlin is the most expensive and elaborate television series in German history. The neo-noir police procedural set in a mythical Berlin of 1929 was already a global hit when it entered its current, fifth season of production. This fourth-semester course is designed to improve your linguistic proficiency and cultural competency by investigating the innovative media that gave birth to the myth of Berlin as metaphorical Babylon: pulp fiction, the New Objectivity in art, sound film, and the distinctly German genre of pop music that conquered the cabarets and dance halls: the Schlager. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 2020 - Literary Texts and Contexts

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. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 2040 - Perspectives on German Culture

This class offers students a selective introduction to the work of Hannah Arendt, one of the most brilliant, maddening, controversial, and unclassifiable political thinkers of the twentieth century, through a sampling of her writings from the 1940s into the 1970s paired with writings on related themes by some of her contemporaries. Topics and pairings will change from year to year but may include the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government, ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and politics, the intersections between capitalism, bureaucracy, and technology, the meanings of fundamental ideas like ?freedom? and ?power,? the political significance of modern art, literature and culture, revolutionary politics in Europe and North America, racism and antisemitism, violence, war, and civil disobedience, among others. (GOVT-PT)

Full details for GERST 2655 - Hannah Arendt And

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, Kracauer, Benjamin.

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

This course offers a new way of understanding both the Holocaust and the broader history of modern Europe—from the ground up. Moving from Greece to France, and from Amsterdam to Moscow, we explore how Jewish communities experienced dictatorship, occupation, and genocide between 1918 and 1948. Students gain a full introduction to World War II and the Holocaust while working directly with diaries, letters, and survivor testimonies to see history through the eyes of its victims. Bridging the disciplines that meet in Jewish Studies, the course examines how violence, belonging, and moral choice shaped everyday life in one of the most turbulent eras of Jewish and European history. Along the way, students build critical interpretive skills, deepen their historical literacy, and learn how historians analyze personal narratives to understand large-scale events.

Full details for GERST 2721 - The Holocaust in Europe:A Victim-Centered History

As Schiller's famous treatise on the stage as moral institution (1784) depicts it, Germanophone theater fulfills a particularly strong moral, pedagogical, public task. The landscape of German theater is unique because of a political commitment to (and subsidies for) this, the maybe most social art form. The course will explore the particular history of German theater and the texts that form its aesthetic and theoretical basis (Schiller, Brecht). How does the form of the drama change with historical and political changes (from identification or catharsis to alienation and participation)? How does theater change when not "text" but "performance" becomes a focus, pushing against the 4th wall, and spilling onto the streets? Authors/performers include: Friedrich Schiller, Bertolt Brecht, Marieluise Fleisser, Heiner Müller, Kathrin Röggla, René Pollesch, Dinçer Güçyeter/Hakan Savas Mican. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 3105 - Performance, Theater and Politics

Manifestos provoke, estrange, condemn, inspire, and mobilize. In this seminar, we will examine the manifesto as a genre at the intersection of politics and aesthetics. From revolutionary manifestos (communist, anarchist, antifascist) to avant-garde manifestos (Dada, Futurist, Surrealist, Symbolist, Situationist) and contemporary feminist and ecological manifestos, we will consider: how are collective identities forged through the construction of “us” vs. “them”? How does the manifesto combine visual, textual, and oral elements? What do manifestos tell us about the context in which they emerged? We will explore the manifesto from multiple perspectives throughout the semester, including as a historical document, political intervention, artistic innovation, utopian vision, and performative speech act. Taught in German. This course may be counted towards the requirement for 3210-3499 level language in the major.

Full details for GERST 3245 - Manifestos

More than thirty years after the end of the Soviet Union, we have the distance needed to view the twentieth-century state socialist project from a historical perspective--even as Cold War tropes are revived amid another major confrontation with Russia. In this course, we will analyze memoirs, oral histories, historical fiction, films, and TV shows that look back at this period. How do the makers of these works use genre as a political as well as artistic tool? What are the political implications of comedy, cosplay, or melodrama when applied to communism? How does the portrayal of this period change as state socialism recedes into the distance? Texts from Russia, Ukraine, Germany, the Balkans, the UK, and the United States. All works will be in English. For an additional credit unit, students who can read Russian can (optionally) enroll in RUSSA 4491 for related practice in reading and discussions in Russian. (HIST-HEU)

Full details for GERST 3612 - Remembering Socialism: Literature and Film After the End of History

This seminar will explore the unique “Kafkaesque” universe of metamorphoses, labyrinthine systems of law and (in)-justice, and uncanny societies of humans and animals. Focusing on Franz Kafka’s novels and tales, we will examine topics such as: the relationship between body and pain; society and the individual; authority and hierarchy; fathers and sons; writing and living; language and home; music and politics; and religion and persecution. Placing Kafka first within the socio-cultural context of Jewish-German-Czech Prague (and discussing problems of multicultural-lingual identity), we shall follow his literary journey to his vision of America (one of his novels). At the center of our discussions will be: the effect of his work on literature, film, and theatre. We shall also discuss the effects of his work on contemporary theories of psychoanalysis, law, performance, modernism, architecture, and literature. Texts include novels and novellas: the Trial, the Castle, America, the Penal Colony, Metamorphoses, the Judgment, the Country Doctor, The Burrow, Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk. Films by the Coen brothers and David Lynch; theoretical readings by Camus, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari, Bataille, Blanchot, Benjamin and others. Readings and discussions in English.

Full details for GERST 3800 - Kafka's Worlds: Castles, Trials, and Tribulations

This is an introduction to the three 'master thinkers' who have helped determine the discourses of modernity and post-modernity. We consider basic aspects of their work: (a) specific critical and historical analyses; (b) theoretical and methodological writings; (c) programs and manifestos; and (d) styles of argumentation, documentation, and persuasion. This also entails an introduction, for non-specialists, to essential problems of political economy, continental philosophy, psychology, and literary and cultural criticism. Second, we compare the underlying assumptions and the interpretive yields of the various disciplines and practices founded by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud: historical materialism and communism, existentialism and power-knowledge analysis, and psychoanalysis, respectively. We also consider how these three writers have been fused into a single constellation, 'Marx-Nietzsche-Freud,' and how they have been interpreted by others, including L. Althusser, A. Badiou, A. Camus, H. Cixous, G. Deleuze, J. Derrida, M. Foucault, H.-G. Gadamer, M. Heidegger, L. Irigaray, K. Karatani, J. Lacan, P. Ricoeur, L. Strauss, S. Zizek.

Full details for GERST 4250 - Marx, Nietzsche, Freud

After having been reduced to a mere ideological formation of bourgeois origin, aesthetics has recently made a strong comeback in the field of theory. This course probes the reasons for this historical change. From the arguments of the critics we will derive a catalogue of criteria for a viable aesthetics in order to examine how contemporary aesthetic theory relates to cognitive theories, the historicity of art and taste (including specific practices and institutions), and the emancipatory potentials of ethics and politics. Readings may include Adorno, Berger, de Bolla, Bourdieu, Noël Carroll, Cavell, Danto, Derrida, Dickie, Eagleton, Goodman, Guillory, Gumbrecht, Halsall, Luhmann, Lyotard, de Man, Walter Benn Michaels, Obrist, Ohmann, Scarry, Seel, Shustermann, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Williams and others.

Full details for GERST 4509 - Contemporary Aesthetic Theory and Its Discontents

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 approaches in the field of applied linguistics and language pedagogy. Introduces different models of foreign language approaches and discusses various practices for the foreign language classroom. Special consideration is given to topics such as language acquisition progression, planning syllabi, creating tasks and projects, designing classroom tests, and evaluating students' performance. Participants conduct an action research project. Taught in German.

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

From Sigmund Freud to Magnus Hirschfeld, Michel Foucault to Judith Butler, the 20th century witnessed the development of radically new understandings of gender and sexuality. At the turn of the century, sexual identities were established and contested in the emergent sciences of sexology, psychoanalysis, and ethnography, as well as in literary and visual representations. With the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s, the very notion of identity categories was thrown into question. The seminar considers how boundaries between normativity and nonnormativity were continually redrawn in the course of the 20th century through scientific case studies, theoretical texts, literary works, and political speeches. Students will gain an understanding of the historical arc of foundational debates in feminist and queer theory by considering canonical sources as well as the marginalized perspectives of women, working-class, and trans authors. We will examine the relationship between sexual taxonomization and pathologization, as well as the entanglement of Western sexual identities in eugenics discourses and colonial projects.

Full details for GERST 6335 - The Science and Fiction of Sexuality

This required seminar for the new graduate minor in media studies considers media from a wide number of perspectives, ranging from the methods of cinema and television studies to those of music, information science, communication, science and technology studies, and beyond. Historical and theoretical approaches to media are intertwined with meta-critical reflections on media studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Close attention will be paid to media's role in shaping and being shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other politically constructed categories of identity and sociality.

Full details for GERST 6405 - Thinking Media Studies

After having been reduced to a mere ideological formation of bourgeois origin, aesthetics has recently made a strong comeback in the field of theory. This course probes the reasons for this historical change. From the arguments of the critics we will derive a catalogue of criteria for a viable aesthetics in order to examine how contemporary aesthetic theory relates to cognitive theories, the historicity of art and taste (including specific practices and institutions), and the emancipatory potentials of ethics and politics. Readings may include Adorno, Berger, de Bolla, Bourdieu, Noël Carroll, Cavell, Danto, Derrida, Dickie, Eagleton, Goodman, Guillory, Gumbrecht, Halsall, Luhmann, Lyotard, de Man, Walter Benn Michaels, Obrist, Ohmann, Scarry, Seel, Shustermann, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Williams and others.

Full details for GERST 6510 - Contemporary Aesthetic Theory and its Discontents

Old ‘anti-philosophy’ revised appealing to Wittgenstein; ‘non-philosophy’ in Althusserian legacy (Badiou, Žižek). Challenges from classical studies (Loraux, Detienne, Vernant, ‘Hermes the thief’ (Brown), political economy, theology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, natural sciences and mathematics (STEM and AI), gender studies, creative arts, and within philosophy itself: propositions that ‘philosophy’ be replaced by ‘thinking’ (Heidegger) and ‘everyone is a philosopher’ (Gramsci). Philosophical history articulated as ‘his-story’ (Weil, Beauvoir, Kofman, Irigaray), against method’ (Feyerabend),’ ‘method v. truth‘ (Gadamer), ‘transcritique’ (Karatani) ‘writing of the disaster’ (Blanchot), ‘creation and anarchy’ (Agamben), ‘the unnamable’ (Beckett), ‘Saint Paul, a screenplay’ (Pasolini); throughout, ‘the question of style’ (Gramsci) or ‘literary style’ (Silva).

Full details for GERST 6615 - Philosophy for Anti- or Non-Philosophers

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