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 the discourses of Engels, Benjamin, Arendt, and others, this seminar will employ close readings of philosophical texts to problematize violence’s conceptual history. Through in-class discussions you will learn how violence’s various conceptualizations 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

What does being “genuine to oneself” mean? Can one really know what is authentic, or is all self-presentation a form of pretense? This course delves into the tension between phoniness and awkwardness as it appears in narrative fiction. If one rejects phoniness, one may appear awkward or out of sync with social norms. Yet embracing pretense erodes authenticity. What is the “self” to which one is genuine? Writing in this class is inseparable from critical reading. Assignments include weekly short responses and five 5-page essays. From sentimentalism to satire, readings include presentations of “phoniness”, e.g. Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and Nabokov’s “Pnin”. We will explore how phoniness implicates aesthetic, moral, and economic values.

Full details for GERST 1129 - FWS: Phoniness and Awkwardness

How can we reorganize society based on principles of shared resources, direct democracy, gender equality, and mutual aid? For centuries, radical thinkers have responded with the same answer: the commune. In this seminar, we will consider socialist, anarchist, and feminist proposals for how to live and work outside of the confines of the single-family home. The readings will cover a wide range of genres and historical periods: from first-hand accounts of the Paris Commune of 1871 to fictional communes in utopian literature and reports on intentional communities in the Ithaca area. In this seminar, students will gain experience writing in various genres. They will refine their writing skills through regular revisions and targeted exercises to develop their voice, use of sources, and close readings.

Full details for GERST 1131 - FWS: The Commune

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 II is the second in a three-class sequence that will enable students to meet their Arts & Sciences language requirement in Yiddish. It provides a further introduction to, and deepening of, reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. In addition to language competence the course will build understanding of Ashkenazi Jewish culture through songs, humor, holiday traditions, literature, and other cultural products.

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. Taught in German.

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. Taught in German.

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. Taught in German.

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. (HC)

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 critical thinking skills. We will discuss different perspectives of the German Reunification and its implications then and today. The highlight of the course will be an intercultural encounter with students from the Bielefeld Universitat in Germany. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 3080 - Walking the Line: East and West Germany Then and Now

From Neuschwanstein’s fairy tale palace and faux ruins at Sanssouci to Bauhaus functionality, German architectural ideas shape how people live, work, and socialize in German-speaking areas and beyond. This course will explore the planning and construction of German environments at historical junctures from 1750 through today to investigate how architecture and urban design inform values and shape societies. How do built environments reflect social commitments, and what do architectural styles signal about how we want or ought to live together? What makes a space a place? How do migration and climate change stress design, and how can architecture respond? By examining German design principles, movements, and debates, we will investigate the construction of community and place in German-speaking areas as relevant more widely. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 3211 - Sharing Space: Fantasy and Form in German Architectural Imaginations

A humanoid robot, an attic portal to another world, a haunted small town, an instance of time travel gone wrong—we will encounter all of these (and more) in this course on science and speculative fiction. Instructed in German, this course centers texts in German and/or about Germanophone spaces. Students will read novels, short stories, and poems; look at zines, comics, and webcomics; play through video games; and watch films. Class discussions will address topics like colonialism, climate change, escapism, dystopia/utopia, and formations of gender, sexuality, race, and nation. We will explore how narratives make use of worldbuilding, immersion, plot devices, and formal elements to unfurl these futuristic and fantastic places. Taught in German.

Full details for GERST 3212 - Germanophone Science and Speculative Fiction

“Talking trash” usually seeks to devalue its target through pejorative language or slander. Yet it’s also a way to separate self and other, or establish order by distinguishing use and waste. When is trash a helpful byproduct? What can we learn about a society from the things it rejects or discards? How might trash become a site for philosophy and art, and if it can be viewed as beautiful, should it be? This seminar explores poetic and popular “trash talk” that employs metaphors about garbage, its landscapes (landfills, wastelands), and its cognates (excess, abject, refuse, waste) to investigate what values and alternatives arise from the parts of society deemed unvaluable and the parts of life determined unviable. Taught in English.

Full details for GERST 3514 - Trash Talk: Garbage and Beauty

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. Weekly film screening, TBA. Taught in English.

Full details for GERST 3550 - Political Theory and Cinema

Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors. Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives. As unbound energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life. Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology. Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.

Full details for GERST 3561 - Freud and Psychoanalysis

This course examines the stories, literary examples, and metaphors at work in elaborating capitalist society and its “hero,” the modern economic subject: the so-called “homo oeconomicus.” We will examine the classic liberal tradition (e.g., Locke, Smith, Mill) alongside its later critiques (e.g., Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Brecht) as well as more recent feminist, Black, and indigenous interventions (e.g., Federici, Davis, “land-grab university” research). Throughout we will create a dialogue between texts, both across centuries (e.g., Locke on Property with Indigenous Dispossession; Balzac’s Pere Goriot with Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century) as well as across genres (e.g., Nomadland with Geissler’s Seasonal Associate). At stake are the 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 – as well as the people they often leave out: women, people of color, the working class. The seminar will include working with an archive, collection, or museum at Cornell. Taught in English.

Full details for GERST 3610 - Fables of Capitalism

Disciplines as different as anthropology, literary studies, philosophy, and sociology have developed a strong interest in the theory and practice of friendship in recent years; friendships are seen on TV, Facebook is based on the concept of “friends” connecting. Whereas definitions of friendship traditionally emphasized proximity, similarity, and mutuality, new readings and representations find distance, difference, and asymmetry at the core of this relation. The seminar will explore friendship as a radically different form of relationship and community. Taught in English.

Full details for GERST 3630 - Friendship: Other Loves, Other Selves

This course will explore Holocaust survivor testimonies, from the multilayered history of their recording across the globe and their increasing institutionalization after the 1980s to their current uses and future promises, including digital methods. How can we approach, use, and make sense of what amounts to 20 years of uninterrupted listening? This seminar will offer a hands-on, interdisciplinary approach to these largely untapped archives around the world, probing them through the lens of history, film and media studies, trauma studies, cultural studies, and memory studies. Throughout the semester, students will each pick one video testimony to work on individually. Collectively, the course will develop tools to make these video testimonies not only a lasting memorial, but a proper object of study at the global level. Taken together, we will offer a tentative answer to an urgent question: what is the future of Holocaust and atrocity testimony, now that the last generation of survivors is passing away?

Full details for GERST 3825 - The Past and Future of Holocaust Survivor Testimonies

An introduction to the arboreal humanities, this course examines the status of trees and forests at the intersection of ecological, aesthetic, artistic, and literary concerns. In addition to scientific texts and scholarly treatises, we will read popular accounts and literary works that examine the being of trees and forests in relation to and as conditions of possibility of human culture. Taught in English.

Full details for GERST 4225 - Arboreal Humanities: Ecology, Aesthetics, and Literature

The premodern world played a crucial role in the formation of postmodern theory. ‘Biblical exegesis’, ‘negative theology’, ‘inner experience’, and other premodern concepts and practices were taken up by postmodern authors including Ingeborg Bachmann, Georges Bataille, Italo Calvino, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, and Robert Musil. Each week we will read one modern author in dialogue with one premodern author, such as Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Hildegard of Bingen, and Mechthild of Magdeburg, among many others. The aim of our comparisons will be to interrogate the legacy of what Bruce Holsinger calls the “premodern condition.”

Full details for GERST 4471 - Premodern-Postmodern

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

Emphasis on development of the specialized vocabulary of student's field of study. Taught in English.

Full details for GERST 6320 - Reading Academic German II

This seminar explores the writing of revolutionary moments, when the course of history is interrupted and announces a new path, one that can be realized, betrayed, or compromised. What are the strategies for capturing, condensing, and making legible events that have an often unrecognized pre-history, an explosive moment, and various aftermaths? How do literary and theoretical strategies differ? After a quick look at the Peasants War and its theorizations by Bloch, Engels, and the Wu Ming collective, the course focuses on the long nineteenth century in Europe (including its colonies) and its series of revolutionary convulsions: the French Revolution (Buechner, Weiss, Kant, Hegel, Burke, Tocqueville), the Haitian Revolution (Kleist, CLR James, Hegel, Buck-Morss); the weavers uprising of 1844 (Hauptmann, Heine, Kollwitz); the 1848 revolutions (Marx, Flaubert, Tocqueville), and the Paris Commune of 1871 (Kristin Ross).

Full details for GERST 6395 - Writing Revolution: France, Haiti, 1848 Europe, and the Paris Commune

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

The premodern world played a crucial role in the formation of postmodern theory. ‘Biblical exegesis’, ‘negative theology’, ‘inner experience’, and other premodern concepts and practices were taken up by postmodern authors including Ingeborg Bachmann, Georges Bataille, Italo Calvino, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, and Robert Musil. Each week we will read one modern author in dialogue with one premodern author, such as Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Hildegard of Bingen, and Mechthild of Magdeburg, among many others. The aim of our comparisons will be to interrogate the legacy of what Bruce Holsinger calls the “premodern condition.”

Full details for GERST 6471 - Premodern-Postmodern

What is illness? What is health? The human body seems to vacillate between these dichotomous versions of its existence. This seminar traces the cultural/historical developments/traditions that define illness, disease, well-being, treatment, cure and approaches to death. We will approach the topic at the intersections of medicine, philosophy, psychology and literature. Authors will include: Herodot, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Galen, von Bingen, Burton, Paracelsus, Kant, Novalis, Herder, Hegel, Stifter, Dostojevskij, Tolstoj, Nietzsche, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Freud, Foucault, Susan Sontag et al.

Full details for GERST 6511 - Illness as Metaphor

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. The readings are provided in German (and French or Italian in some cases) and in English translations, when these exist. Discussion and papers in English. Students from all disciplines are welcome.

Full details for GERST 6630 - Nietzsche and Heidegger

“Prophetic Realisms” explores the notion that certain literary texts – those that are deeply embedded in the socio-economic totality of the world they build – not only provide insight into the present world, but also anticipate the shape of things to come: the tendencies and trajectories of coming historical formations. The latent is already manifest so that, strangely, one of the proving grounds of literature is history. This idea is very pronounced in Georg Lukacs’ 1930s writing on Realism, but also shared by his antagonists in the ‘Expressionist Debates,’ such as Ernst Bloch: the one point they agree on is literature’s ability to ‘anticipate’ historical developments. This idea is expressed, in a different way, by Erich Auerbach’s 1937 essay “On the Serious Imitation of the Everyday” and 1938 essay “figura”. In this course we will look at these 1930s writings, constellating them with the 1830s texts that harken back to as anticipating the direction of capitalism (Balzac, but also Stendahl), alongside the early 1900s novels anticipating the rise of fascism (Heinrich Mann, but also Fallada), and finally juxtaposing them with science fiction since the 1960s, including theoretical reflections on them with respect to ‘prediction’, such as Philip K Dick, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood. We are interested in moments when historical time seems to become ‘concentrated,’ hence the axes of 1830/1930/2030.

Full details for GERST 6730 - Prophetic Realisms: Literature and the Shape of Things to Come, 1830-1930-2030

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