Graduate Courses

Link to UO catalog

Spring 2024

Literature & teaching Courses

GER 507 Sem: Tyranny Redux (4 credits) Calhoon
CRN: 31982, taught in English. Over these past few years we have seen the aspirations of a major party reduced to the personal needs of its new figurehead—a leader whose guiding sense of grievance and betrayal, whose incitements to violence and concomitant fear of appearing weak, whose claims to absolute political sovereignty, not to mention a disdain for religion that endears him to the faithful, have invited comparisons to prior authoritarian regimes, Germany’s Third Reich in particular. This seminar is designed to examine the current cultural and political moment under the lens of critical methods and analyses that arose before, during, or in the wake of the earlier one.

GER 606 Prac Language Teaching (1-12 credits) Vogel
CRN: 31986.

GER 606 Practicum (1-12 credits) STAFF
CRN: 31987.

SCAN 606 Practicum (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 34433.

GER 625 Translations-Transformations (4 credits) Chorley-Schulz
CRN: 35321.

Thesis / Dissertation / Reading Courses

GER 503 Thesis (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 31981.

GER 601 Research (1-6 credits) STAFF
CRN: 31983.

GER 603 Dissertation (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 31984.

GER 605 Reading (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 31985.

SCAN 605 Reading (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 34432.

Winter 2024

Literature & teaching Courses

GER 507 Sem: Modernism/Language Crisis (4 credits) Ostmeier
CRN: 22321, taught in German. Breaking with the established past and risking the new becomes the motto for poets and authors of the 20th Century: “Antigone” is revised, Reformation and Renaissance are battled, and the limits of language are exposed. Selected poems, dramas, and manifestos will be discussed as condensed reflections and enactments of aesthetic, political, social, and philosophical crises. Authors include B. Brecht, R. Rilke, H. v. Hofmannsthal, and Ingeborg Bachmann.

GER 606 Prac Language Teaching (1-12 credits) Vogel
CRN: 22325.

GER 606 Practicum (1-12 credits) STAFF
CRN: 22326.

SCAN 606 Practicum (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 24755.

Thesis / Dissertation / Reading Courses

GER 503 Thesis (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 22320.

GER 601 Research (1-6 credits) STAFF
CRN: 22322.

GER 603 Dissertation (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 22323.

GER 605 Reading (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 22324.

SCAN 605 Reading (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 24754.

Fall 2023

Literature & teaching Courses

GER 507 Seminar:  Fantasy, Nature, and Technology (4 credits) Ostmeier
CRN: 12156. Non-Human Dynamics in Fantastic, Humanoid and Virtual Realities call the nature/culture divide, posed by the Enlightenment (Descartes, Julien Offray de La Mettrie), into question. Course discussions will focus on the marvelous and the uncanny in Romanticism, the fantastic and weird in expressionist films (“Golem,“ “Metropolis” in the context of ) and in contemporary AI Thrillers (“Her” and “I am your Man”). We will ask how the virtual challenges our concepts of humanity throughout time and partakes in post humanist and transhumanist debates. Where does simulation end, and human authenticity start and stop? We will focus on marvelous transitions in the Grimms’ tales, on uncanny and weird moments in texts by ETA Hoffmann toFranz Kafka and Emma Braslavski. Theoretical readings include texts by Isaac Asimov, Ray Kurzweil, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Kittler, Manfred Frank, Timothy Morton, Slavoj Žižek. Analytical and creative public humanities projects are welcome. This class will be taught in English and German.

GER 607 Seminar: Gender Race Class (4 credits) Chorley-Schulz
CRN: 12162. On the international stage, Germany is praised as the paragon of a successful national reckoning with and atonement of Nazi crimes. This class 1) studies the complicated evolution of reunified Germany’s committed on national project on Holocaust memory evolving from two intricately enmeshed but competing Cold War memory projects in East and West and 2) critically investigates its dangerous pitfalls and disturbing consequences concerning questions of colonialism, racism, antisemitism, and fascism today. It concludes with a workshop on the 2022 documenta fifteen, one of the world’s most important international art exhibitions, which presented arguably one of the most infamous transgressions of the parameters of German Holocaust memory. With guest speakers with professional involvement in documenta fifteen, students will explore what this controversy reveals about the dire state and future of Germany’s project of coming-to-terms with its violent past. Readings will be available in English; original German texts will be offered in German as well. Seminar discussions and writing assignments will be in English, graduates of the German Department are encouraged to fulfill assignments in German.
 

Thesis / Dissertation / Reading Courses

GER 503 Thesis (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 12155.

GER 601 Research (1-6 credits) STAFF
CRN: 12157.

GER 603 Dissertation (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 12158.

GER 605 Reading (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 12159.

SCAN 605 Reading (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 14655.

GER 606 Practicum (1-12 credits) STAFF
CRN: 12160.

GER 606 Prac Language Teaching (1-12 credits) Vogel
CRN: 12161.

SCAN 606 Practicum (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 14656.

Spring 2023

Literature and Teaching Courses

 
GER 507 Sem: Bio/Necro Politics (4 credits) Stern
CRN: 32878, taught in English. The recent Covid crisis elicited governmental responses that illustrate that Michel Foucault’s notion of bio power is the theoretical pharmakon of our day. On the one hand governmental policies aimed to preserve life; on the other hand, sovereign decisions exposed the vulnerability of “essential workers,” who in the United States were most often low paid workers experiencing pre-existing social pressures. A few years before the crisis, the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe proposed that Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between sovereignty and life needed a supplement. Through a reading of Frantz Fanon, Mbembe proposed the notion of the necropolitical, which can be quickly defined as the sovereign right to decide who may be subjected to conditions of separation and enmity that endanger life. In other words, in this course we will look at the intersection between bio power and necropolitics while paying close attention to an alternative approach. Instead of going through Agamben’s notion of bare life, we will open up a genealogy that pairs European thought to Africana philosophical discourse. We will begin with Nietzsche, exploring his ideas about morality and exclusion, then turn to Fanon’s essay “On Violence” to speak to racialized aspects of enmity and separation. Then we will read Foucault’s writings on the bio-political and Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics. We will conclude by tying our conceptions to the relationship between difference, biopolitics, necropolitics and environmental degradation through a reading from Aesthetics, Necropolitics, and Environmental Struggle, a collective publication of the Critical Art Ensemble, and we will conclude with a reading of Françoise Vergés A Feminist Theory of Violence. This class will be in English. German versions of the Nietzsche texts provided upon request.

GER 606 Prac Language Teaching (1-12 credits) Vogel
CRN: 35965.

GER 606 Practicum (1-12 credits) STAFF
CRN: 35966.

SCAN 606 Practicum (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 35969.

Thesis / Dissertation / Reading Courses

 
GER 503 Thesis (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 32877.

GER 601 Research (1-6 credits) STAFF
CRN: 32880.

GER 603 Dissertation (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 32881.

GER 605 Reading (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 32882.

SCAN 605 Reading (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 35277.

Winter 2023

Literature and Teaching Courses

 
GER 507 Seminar -- Aesthetics and Critique: Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (4 credits) Librett
CRN: 22181, taught in English. Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790)—his principal work on aesthetics and teleology--is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and influential philosophical texts of the last three centuries in any philosophical subdiscipline.   Knowledge of this treatise is a prerequisite to any understanding of the subsequent history of aesthetic theory, as well as German Idealism more generally.  We’ll spend half the term reading the Critique of Judgment, exploring the beautiful and the sublime (the aesthetic), as well organic nature (the teleological), as modalities of reflexive judgment.   We will then look at a three highly significant 19th and 20th century transformations of the Kantian conceptualization, which we can characterize as rhetorical, psychological, and political displacements, respectively.  First, we’ll consider the German romantic theory of « wit » and «irony » in Jean Paul and Friedrich Schlegel.  Second, we’ll study Sigmund Freud’s modernist appropriation of this German romantic aesthetics of wit in his « Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious. »   Third, we’ll explore Hannah Arendt’s proposal that Kant’s aesthetic theory prepares the foundations for a productive political philosophy.  With this last, perhaps we come full circle: whereas Kant’s aesthetic theory is often considered to be the first full articulation of the separation of aesthetics from politics—the creation of an autonomous aesthetics through the notion of disinterested pleasure—Arendt’s reading of Kant reverses this movement, discovering precisely in his aesthetics a basis for a new politics. Graduate students will be invited and expected to explore, in addition to the primary texts, some major secondary literature on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, from the analytic and/or continental traditions, according to the given student’s interests.
 
GER 607 Subject, Consciousness, Mind: Kritik verstehen (4 credits) Klebes
CRN: 25991. In this course we will attempt to map out pivotal moments in the conceptual history of the term Kritik from the preface of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft to the present. What utimately follows from the strategic restriction of knowledge to an avoidance of errors and category mistakes? And is Hegel right when he likens this approach to trying to go swimming while avoiding the water? Among our stations on the way will be the ‘metacritical‘ responses by Kant’s immediate contemporaries (Jacobi, Hamann, Herder) as well as Hegel’s objections; philological Kritik and criticism in Schleiermacher and Matthew Arnold; Kritische Theorie in the 20th century (Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno) along with its antipodes (Heidegger, Hermeneutics), and on to present discussions of Critical Race Theory. Class discussion and most readings in German.

Thesis / Dissertation / Reading Courses

 
GER 503 Thesis (1-16 credits)
CRN: 22185.
 
GER 601 Research (1-6 credits)
CRN: 22187.
 
GER 603 Dissertation (1-16 credits)
CRN: 22189.
 
GER 605 Reading and Conference (1-16 credits)
CRN: 22189.
 
SCAN 605 Reading and Conference (1-16 credits)
CRN: 24578.
 
GER 606 Practicum (1-12 credits)
CRNs: 25971, 25972.
 
SCAN 606 Practicum (1-12 credits)
CRNs: 25977.

Fall 2022

Literature & teaching Courses

GER 507 Seminar: Representations of Women “Terrorists” in German Film, Literature, and Art (4 credits) Anderson
CRN: 11995, taught in English. In contrast to mainstream West German student protest movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the leadership in radical protest groups included a high percentage of well-educated young women, such as Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof. Ensslin was a pastor’s daughter, and Meinhof had been a respec-ted journalist. Both died while in prison. At the time both became icons of the protest against what many Germans viewed as a patriarchal state in danger of reverting to its militaristic, totalitarian past.  Meinhof, Ensslin, and other women in the Red Army Faction (RAF), Rote Zora, and the 2 June Movement continue to attract both scholarly and popular attention into the reasons for their transformation into “disorderly women.” Their cases are often included in studies that investigate the “phenomenon” of radical women in general, especially women “terrorists.” A series of German films, art exhibits, and narratives since the 1970s have explored the idea of the politically violent woman and her often violent death. They analyze the notion of revolution as a means to create radically new ways of perceiving. 

GER 607 Colloquium (4 credits) Calhoon
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GER 606 Practicum (1-16 credits) STAFF
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GER 606 Prac Language Teaching (1-16 credits) Vogel
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SCAN 606 Practicum (1-16 credits) STAFF
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GER 610 Teaching Methodology (4 credits) Vogel
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Thesis / Dissertation / Reading Courses

GER 503 Thesis (1-16 credits) STAFF
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GER 601 Research (1-6 credits) STAFF
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GER 603 Dissertation (1-16 credits) STAFF
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GER 605 Reading (1-16 credits) STAFF
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SCAN 605 Reading (1-16 credits) STAFF
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Spring 2022

Literature & teaching Courses

GER 507 Naturalism in the North (4 credits)  Gurley
CRN: 33589. For writers in Northern Europe, Naturalism explained the human being as a product of heredity and environment rather than a construction of various social contracts or a product of divine creation. Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species had a profound effect on the literary landscape of Germany and Scandinavia. The noted German paleontologist Heinrich Georg Bronn’s translation of the On the Origin of Species appeared in April, 1860, only months after Darwin’s original publication. And J.P Jacobsen’s translations of Darwin in the early 1870’s were foundational to the movement known as “The Modern Breakthrough” in Scandinavian letters. In this course, we will look at writers who anticipated the movement of Naturalism in the North, those who contested its aesthetic parameters, and finally explore the trajectory of Naturalism in contemporary eco-criticism. Naturalism’s relation to realism, impressionism, and decadence will also be considered. Writers to be discussed include: Georg Büchner, Heinrich Heine, J.P. Jacobsen, Johannes V. Jensen, Gernot Böhme, and Arne Næss.

GER 609 Structure and Form: Mobility and Language in Contemporary German Narrative (4 credits)  Anderson
The course will focus on articulations of the multilingual and the transcultural in contemporary German-language narratives. We will analyze literary texts by writers whose first language may or may not be German. These may include Zafer Senocak, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Rafik Schami, Herta Müller, Yoko Tawada, Christoph Ransmayr, Vladimir Vertlib, Wladimir Kaminer, Sasa Stanisic, Sharon Dodua Otoo, etc. We will approach their texts in the context of theoretical explorations of the mother tongue, the “between,” displacement, travel, and the archipelagic/relationality. The goal is to assess how the texts address such issues in theme, language, form, and structure.

GER 503 Thesis
CRN: 33593.

GER 601 Research
CRN: 33594.

GER 603 Dissertation
CRN: 33595.

GER 605 Reading
CRN: 33596.

GER 609 Practical Language Teaching (1-16 credits)  Vogel
CRN: 33598.

GER 609 Practicum
CRN: 33599.