Courses

Link to UO catalog

Spring 2024

German and Swedish Language Courses

GER 103 First Year German (5 credits) CRNs: 31963, 31965. A continuation of the 101-103 series designed to provide you with a foundation in German language and culture. You will learn to communicate in German using the four skills: listening, speaking, writing, and reading. Through videos, readings, and class discussions you will be introduced to various aspects of culture in German-speaking countries.

GER 203 Second Year German (4 Credits) CRNs: 31966, 31967. This course fulfills the Arts and Letters (A&L) requirement. This is the sixth quarter of a two-year sequence designed to provide you with a foundation in German vocabulary, grammar, and culture. In German 203, you will have the chance to expand your vocabulary and your knowledge of structures in a unifying context with engaging cultural topics brought to you in readings and videos.

GER 313 Intermediate Language Training (4 credits) Colombo
CRN: 31974. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters requirement. Extensive practice in speaking and writing German, and complex grammatical structures in writing.

Literature & culture Courses

GER 223 Germany: A Multicultural Society (4 credits) Quintero Plata
CRN: 31968 + Discussion, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L); Identity, Pluralism, and Tolerance (IP); and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements.

GER 252 War, Violence, Trauma (4 credits) Vogel
CRN: 31973, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L); International Cultures (IC); and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements.

SCAN 344 Medieval Hero & Monster (4 credits) Young
CRN: 35323, taught in English. This course satisfies the International Cultures (IC); and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements.

GER/SCAN 345M Food, Culture, Identity in Germany & Scandinavia (4 credits) Vogel
CRN: 35319/35324, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L); International Cultures (IC); and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements.

GER 368 Themes in German Literature: 19th and 20th Century Cultures of Shaking Up Taboos and Censorship (4 credits) Ostmeier
CRN: 35320, taught in German. This course fulfills the Arts and Letters (A&L) requirement. Discussions and reactions to literary and other controversial cultural expressions (journalism, visual arts, and film) of the early 20th century. The texts and art we discuss (dramas, poems, newspaper articles and critical manifestos) engage with social ideologies and hierarchies, sexual taboos, and the power and oppression of the masses in the fight for authenticity and freedom of the individual. As part of our work in class we will enliven historical controversial debates. This course will be taught in German.

GER 407 Sem: Tyranny Redux (4 credits) Calhoon
CRN: 31980, 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.

Winter 2024

German and Swedish Language Courses

GER 102 First Year German (5 credits)
CRNs: 22297, 22298, 22299. A continuation of the 101-103 series designed to provide you with a foundation in German language and culture. You will learn to communicate in German using the four skills: listening, speaking, writing and reading. Through videos, readings and class discussions you will be introduced to various aspects of culture in German-speaking countries.

GER 202 Second Year German (4 Credits)
CRNs: 22300, 22301. This course fulfills the Arts and Letters (A&L) requirement. This is the fifth quarter of a two-year sequence designed to provide you with a foundation in German vocabulary, grammar, and culture. In German 202, you will have the chance to expand your vocabulary and your knowledge of structures in a unifying context with engaging cultural topics brought to you in readings and videos.

GER 312 Intermediate Language Training (4 credits) Hoeller
CRN: 22310. This course satisfies one Arts and Letters requirement.  Extensive practice in speaking and writing German, and complex grammatical structures in writing.

GER 411 Advanced Language Training (4 credits) Vogel
CRN: 25803.

Literature & culture Courses

GER 222 Voices of Dissent in Germany (4 credits) Chorley-Schulz
CRN: 22304 + Discussion, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L); Identity, Pluralism, and Tolerance (IP); and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements.

GER 251 Sexuality (4 credits) Marlan
CRN: 22309, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L); Identity, Pluralism, and Tolerance (IP); and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements.
German language discourses of gender and sexuality have had enormous influence on the cultural and political landscape of modernity. Some of the inaugural moves to classify, understand, and sometimes pathologize modes of sexuality in arise in the German tradition, as do the initial seeds of resistance, often sometimes in the very same thinkers. This course explores a range of discourses in film, literature, medicine, sexology, and psychoanalysis, paying particular attention to the ways in which sexuality and power intersect with political ideologies and identifications. 

SCAN 343 Norse Mythology (4 credits) Young
CRN: 25805, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L); International Cultures (IC); and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements. Also fulfills a Folklore elective.

GER 355 German Cinema: History, Theory, Practice (4 credits) Hoeller
CRN: 25801, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L); International Cultures (IC); and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements. Also fulfills Core C requirement for Cinema Studies students.

GER 367 Themes in German Literature (4 credits) Calhoon
CRN: 25802, taught in German. This course fulfills the Arts and Letters (A&L) requirement. In this course, we will examine narratives remarkable for their brevity. Our general theme will be the short-circuit (Kurzschluss)—a slip in communication whose consequences are suited to the limited ambit that typically circumscribes these miniature tales. The stories in question are often only a few pages long, with some being much shorter. Certain pieces by Frank Kafka comprise but a sentence or two. This radical absence of length enables us to work closely with the texts in question, attending to their grammatical character and to the interconnectedness of grammar and style. These stories also present the advantage that we can increase or reduce the number of assigned readings mid-course depending on the strength of your German reading skills. Readings and discussion in German. These texts, in addition to being small, are funny, entertaining, brilliant, weird, and they will make you glad that you learned German well enough to enjoy them. I look forward to our work together.

GER 407 Sem: Modernism/Language Crisis (4 credits) Ostmeier
CRN: 22319, 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.

Fall 2023

German and SWEDish language Courses

GER 101 First Year German (5 credits)
CRNs: 12134, 12135, 12136, 12137. This series is designed to provide you with a foundation in German language and culture: you will learn to communicate in German using the four skills: listening, speaking, writing and reading. Through videos, readings and class discussions you will be introduced to various aspects of culture in German-speaking countries. 101-103 are structured according to international standards (ACTFL and EFR proficiency guidelines) to provide you with transparency and clear goals and to signal to you, other universities, and employers around the world that you have mastered basic German.

GER 201 Second Year German (4 Credits)
CRNs: 12138, 12139. This course fulfills the Arts and Letters (A&L) requirement. This is the fourth quarter of a two-year sequence designed to provide you with a foundation in German vocabulary, grammar, and culture. In German 201, you will have the chance to expand your vocabulary and your knowledge of structures in a unifying context with engaging cultural topics brought to you in authentic readings and engaging videos. You will learn to discuss in German and continue to prepare for participating in the larger academic and intellectual discourses at the University of Oregon and beyond.

GER 311 Intermediate Language Training (4 credits) Hoeller
CRN: 12146. This course satisfies one Arts and Letters requirement.  Extensive practice in speaking and writing German, and complex grammatical structures in writing.

Literature & culture Courses

GER 221 Postwar Germany: Nation Divided (4 credits) Lehmann
CRN: 12140, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L), International Cultures (IC), and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements.
This course is an introduction to the literature and history of political, social, and public dissent in postwar Germany (1945 to the present). The course examines ideas about East and West Germany and unified German culture and society as revealed in a range of historical narratives, films, novels, poems, philosophical essays, memoirs, and reportage. How do these reveal changing ideas in Germany about the connection between past and present, about division, democracy and capitalism, authority, rebellion, and the desire for unity? The stories and essays by major German authors from East and West explore topics that represent how Germans see themselves today. They also illuminate ongoing debates about controversial issues in the immediate postwar period, during the division and after the unification of Germany. Contemporary issues such as diversity, gender, class, anti-Semitism, and multiculturalism are also covered.

GER 250 The Culture of Money (4 credits) Schuman
CRN: 12145, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L), International Cultures (IC), and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements. This is an interdisciplinary humanities course that combines intellectual history with the history of German business. We explore challenging primary sources in a variety of media - including literature, music, art, philosophy and film - to better understand the relationship between economic and cultural trends from the Protestant Reformation through the present. In addition to learning about relevant and engaging content, students will develop skills in rigorous intellectual inquiry, public speaking, storytelling/content synthesis, and executive functioning. 

SCAN 251 Text and Interpretation (4 credits) Fischer
CRN: 14647, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L), International Cultures (IC), and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements.  

SCAN 259 Vikings through the Iceland Sagas (4 credits) Young
CRN: 14648, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L), International Cultures (IC), and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements. 

GER 357 Nature, Culture, and the Environment (4 credits) Hoeller
CRN: 16413, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L), International Cultures (IC), and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements. This class will explore how visual artworks have influenced people’s understanding of nature and how art has long been an essential part of environmental activism. We will trace the connection between visual art and conceptions of nature in German-speaking countries moving from Romanticism in the late 18th/early 19th century to contemporary forms of artistic environmental activism. We will discuss artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, Gustav Klimt, and Julian Charrière while also engaging in our own exploration of nature and the environment around us through visual and creative means. This class will engage aspects and provide relevant content pertaining to the field of visual arts, art history, and environmental studies.

GER 407 Seminar:  Fantasy, Nature, and Technology (4 credits) Ostmeier
CRN: 12153. 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.

Summer 2023

German and SWEDish language Courses

GER 101-103 Beginning German (5 credits each)
GER 101, CRN: 42541. Offered June 26-July 16  ASYNC WEB
GER 102, CRN: 42542. Offered July 17-August 6  ASYNC WEB
GER 103, CRN: 42543. Offered August 7-August 27  ASYNC WEB
Asynchronous summer courses designed to provide you with a foundation in German vocabulary, grammar, and culture. You will learn to speak and communicate in German and prepare for participating in the larger academic and intellectual discourses at the University of Oregon and beyond. Videos, readings, and discussions introduce various aspects of culture in German-speaking countries. The course is structured with the independent American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and the European Frame of Reference (CEFR) and fully transferable to other universities around the world. By the end you'll be able to introduce yourself, talk about yourself and others, tell time in German, ask questions, talk about daily routines, talk about likes and dislikes, etc.  Our goal is to reach novice-high to intermediate-low proficiency levels. This is a fun course that also uses music videos, magazine and newspaper clippings, and German TV shows to help you learn.

GER 201-203 Intermediate German (4 credits each)
GER 201, CRN: 42544. Offered June 26-July 16  ASYNC WEB
GER 202, CRN: 42545. Offered July 17-August 6  ASYNC WEB
GER 203, CRN 42546. Offered August 7-August 27  ASYNC WEB
Asynchronous summer courses designed to expand your speaking, listening, reading, and writing abilities by engaging in cultural topics brought to you in authentic readings, videos, songs, TV shows, movies, etc. You will learn how to participate in discussions in German, how to shop for an apartment, talk about your dream job, how to use social media in German, etc. In the end, your proficiency will reach intermediate-mid to intermediate-high levels according to the independent American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and the European Frame of Reference (CEFR) proficiency guidelines to provide you with clear goals and transparency. The course results are fully transferable to any university around the USA and the world.

Literature and Culture Courses

GER 223 Germany: A Multicultural Society (4 credits)  Vogel
CRN: 41718, taught in English. Offered July 24-August 20  ASYNC WEB
Germany, like the United States, is a multi-cultural society and the materials examined in German 223 focus on this aspect of German culture and society, challenging you to engage with relevant contemporary issues connected to the creation of (national) identity. We study German positions on race/ethnicity, class, religion, and the like as we explore the way migration and immigration have inflected more traditional positions on these subjects. We discuss both dominant cultural values and the varieties of cultural inflections within Germany, reflecting on both the continuities as well as the changes within the literary, social, and political narratives used for the creation of a (national) identity in Germany. You will gain insight to how countries other than the United States address cultural differences, xenophobia, and the continuously evolving question of (national) identity. Through a select core of critical readings we will analyze the impact of cultural forms (books, films, etc.), on the shaping of identity. We will thus gain an appreciation for the politics of artistic representation, and learn to recognize the ways in which a nation or region’s culture may function both as a site for social control and social change. Fulfills Arts & Letters, Global Perspectives, and Global Context requirements.

GER 354 German Gender Studies: Nothin' But A "G" Thing - Gender, Race, and German Hip-Hop (4 credits)  Robinson
CRN: 42548, taught in English. We will use German hip-hop to consider race and gender in Germany. Offered June 26-July 23  ASYNC WEB
German hip-hop is a space that has traditionally been defined by male performers. However, queer, and female artists such as Die P and Leila Akinyi are emerging, whose performances call into question the masculinity inherent within hip-hop. Using cross-cultural comparisons with American hip-hop, we will broaden our understanding of how minority hip-hop performers are redefining who gets to participate in hip-hop as they also work to redefine monolithic ideas of "Germanness". Drawing on intersectional, black feminist scholarship, we will focus our studies on the lived experiences of hip-hop performers and Germans of color as we engage with questions surrounding gender and race within Germany. Fulfills Arts & Letters and Global Perspectives requirements.

GER 355 German Cinema (4 credits)  Vogel
CRN: 41719, taught in English. Offered June 26-July 23  ASYNC WEB
In this course, we will examine various facets of German cinema from its beginnings to the present. We discuss Expressionist Film, Nazi Film, Post WWII German Film of the Rebuilding Era, New German Cinema, and Contemporary German Cinema as we examine in depth film aesthetics through the analysis of film form and style for each period. Our course aims to provide students with a fluency in and understanding of film’s unique language as it evolves technologically, historically and generically. You will learn to recognize and describe formal choices and techniques, engage in close readings of films, attend to the greater aesthetic significance and stakes of formal choices and innovations evident within a particular film, directorial oeuvre, period or movement. Understanding form as an extension of content, we analyze conventions of narrative film, the employment of formal techniques like the close-up, point of view, framing and the use of sound as they function within particular filmic contexts and as they function within film’s systemic languages (like that of continuity editing and genre). Concentrating on questions evoked from early cinema to the present about film’s specificity as an art and technological ability, we will consider the changing role of the spectator in relation to the moving image, film’s relationship to reality including its reporting and construction of the “real,” as well as how film aesthetics have been employed to build ideology and to break with it. Sample films come from different genres (drama, documentary, comedy, horror, and Science Fiction). Fulfills Arts & Letters, Global Perspectives, and Global Context requirements.

Spring 2023

German and Swedish Language Courses

GER 103 First Year German (5 credits)
CRNs: 32856, 32857, 32858. A continuation of the 101-103 series designed to provide you with a foundation in German language and culture. You will learn to communicate in German using the four skills: listening, speaking, writing and reading. Through videos, readings and class discussions you will be introduced to various aspects of culture in German-speaking countries.

GER 203 Second Year German (4 Credits)
CRNs: 32859, 32860. This course fulfills the Arts and Letters (A&L) requirement. This is the sixth quarter of a two-year sequence designed to provide you with a foundation in German vocabulary, grammar, and culture. In German 203, you will have the chance to expand your vocabulary and your knowledge of structures in a unifying context with engaging cultural topics brought to you in readings and videos.

GER 313 Intermediate Language Training (4 credits)
CRN: 32867. This course satisfies one Arts and Letters requirement.  Extensive practice in speaking and writing German, and complex grammatical structures in writing.

SWED 203 Second Year Swedish (4 credits) Howard
CRN: 35970. This course fulfills the Arts and Letters (A&L) requirement. Review of grammar, composition, and conversation. Readings from contemporary texts in Swedish.

SWED 405 Reading: Third Year Swedish (1-16 credits) Howard
CRN: 35528.

Literature and Culture Courses

GER 223 Germany: A Multicultural Society (4 credits) Vogel
CRN: 35957 + Discussion, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L); Identity, Pluralism, and Tolerance (IP); and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements. Examines the multiethnic complexities of German, Austrian, and/or Swiss societies through the writings of African, Turkish, or Jewish Germans as well as contemporary films on the topic. This course introduces students to the political and social challenges faced by post-unification Germany.

GER 252 War, Violence, Trauma (4 credits) Vogel
CRN: 35962, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L), International Cultures (IC), and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements.

SCAN 351 Periods in Scandinavian Literature: Romanticism (4 credits) Howard
CRN: 35967, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L) requirement. Arising out of the context of the French and American Revolutions, Romanticism as a movement rejected Enlightenment ideals of neoclassicism and rationality to embrace instead principles of imagination, emotion, and individuality. With an emphasis on literary innovation, representations of the natural world, and the expression of powerful feelings, Romantic literature in Scandinavia was both interested in the folkloric traditions of its past as well as the creation of a new literature defined by formal experimentation and generic hybridity. In this course, we will trace the history of this literary and artistic movement in Scandinavia, examining the influences from beyond its borders that gave it shape as well as those characteristics that identify it as distinctly Scandinavian. We will read poetry and fiction by nineteenth-century writers from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland in order to understand Romanticism’s unique presence in Scandinavian literature. Authors may include Hans Christian Andersen, Elias Lönnrot, Viktor Rydberg, C. J. L. Almqvist, Adam Oehlenschläger, Esaias Tegner, and Selma Lagerlöf. In addition to our reading of key texts from this period, we will also look at examples of Romantic painting, music, dance, and other aesthetic forms. Primary readings will be supplemented with critical essays on literary theory and history.

GER 360 Poetry, Plays, & Prose: German Science Fiction (4 credits) Klueppel
CRN: 35963, taught in German. This class follows a selective chronology of textual examples from the late 19th century (Kurd Laßwitz) to the third decade of the 21st century in order to trace and comprehend the development of a genre, its seminal texts, and its connection to and its negotiation of global trends in SF like industrialization in the early 20th century, the dangers of nuclear power, the Anthropocene, artificial intelligence and surveillance capitalism, time travel, and Afrofuturism. The goal of this course is to gain an appreciation of a German studies genre that is often swept under the carpet. Hence, students can reflect about questions, ideas, and concepts of SF that are extraordinarily prevalent, and are encouraged to critically think with what the future holds. This course is taught in German, though some of the readings and related discussions can be held in English.

GER 407 Sem: Bio/Necro Politics (4 credits) Stern
CRN: 32872, 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.

Winter 2023

German and Swedish Language Courses

 
GER 102 First Year German (5 credits)
CRNs: 22169, 22170, 22171.
 
GER 202 Second Year German (4 credits)
CRNs: 22172, 22173.
 
SWED 202 Second Year Swedish (4 credits)
CRN: 26049.
 
GER 312 Intermediate Language Training (4 credits)
CRN: 22176.

Literature and Culture Courses

 
GER 220M and SCAN 220M Existentialism in Literature and Philosophy (4 credits) Librett
Inside-Out course taught at the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem, OR. Admission to the course by application only.
Human life is finite, and we live in a world of (increasingly) uncertain values: what will you do to make your life as meaningful as possible?  “Existentialism”—the focus of this course--is a philosophy of radical freedom and radical self-responsibility.  It enjoins us to create our own ethical and aesthetic values without however forgetting that we live with and for others. This existentialist approach to life was developed in works of philosophy, fiction, and art from the 19th through the 20th century.  We examine central works by German and French speaking authors, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Franz Fanon.   
 
GER 222 Voices of Dissent: Representations of the Holocaust in History, Literature, and Film (4 credits) Vogel
CRN: 25674, taught in English. This course offers an introduction to the events of the Holocaust. We discuss questions surrounding its representation in various forms (historical prose, memoir, fiction, film). Students discuss how we can adequately represent the scale of violence, trauma, and suffering, how we can understand and/or explain the events of the Holocaust, what the advantages and disadvantages for comprehension/explanation belonging to various modes of representation are, and how language influences how we can “know” and what we can “learn” from the Holocaust.
 
GER 251 Sexuality (4 credits) Hoeller
CRN: 25769, taught in English. The turn of the 20th century has been one decisive moment in Western sexuality discourses, the turn of the 21st century has been another. This course traces the changes and new understandings of the dynamics of sexuality in Germany and Austria at both turns of the century and the years following them and historically as well as culturally contextualizes sexuality discourses. We will examine pioneering and oftentimes provocative works from German artists and scientists of the time to explore changing sexual norms as well as resistance to and upheaval of such norms. Topics include sexuality in psychoanalytical thought, literary and cinematic explorations of sexuality, and homosexual and transgender rights and visibility.
 
SCAN 325 Scandinavian Children's Literature (4 credits) Howard
CRN: 25774, taught in English. This course introduces students to the study of children’s literature from the countries of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. We will begin by examining the origins of Scandinavian children’s literature in early folk and fairytales and trace its evolution through the nineteenth and twentieth century in stories and picture books up to the present. We will read works by some of the most well-known children’s book authors to come out of the Nordic countries, including Astrid Lindgren, Tove Jansson, Elsa Beskow, Hans Christian Andersen, Selma Lagerlöf, and Sven Nordqvist. Students will be introduced to theoretical readings in the study of children’s literature, and we will examine these stories in their historical, pedagogical, and social contexts. The emphasis of the course will be on analysis and interpretation of these texts and how they reflect the child’s changing position in society with regard to ethnicity, gender, and power constellations. We will also pay particular attention to how children’s literature has re-imagined fairy tale structures and motifs, and how supernatural figures like elves, trolls, and mermaids are transformed throughout Scandinavian children’s literature.
 
SCAN 353 Women Writers: The Baroness, the Beggar, and the Minimalist (4 credits) Stern
CRN: 25775, taught in English. This year’s course on Scandinavian Women’s Writing will look at three storytellers who tell their tales very differently. We will start with the Danish Baroness Karen Blixen who often wrote using a male pseudonym, Isak Dinesen. Her fascination with the art of the short story and fondness for puzzle like forms and twisting turns of fate will color out first exploration. After this, we will stay in Denmark, turning our attention to the brutal honesty of Tove Ditlefsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy, where she tells the story of her own life with an unsparing eye. The directness of Ditlefsen’s memoirs stands in sharp contrast to the ornate structures of Blixen’s tales. We will also read a series of short stories by Ditlefsen and explore the relationship between a life lived and a life as it is written. Our third stop brings us to our own moment in time and the Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug who writes micro-stories, some as short as a paragraph. These epigrammatic works depict daily life in a seemingly magical way. We will end the course by reflecting how women’s writing changed from the mid twentieth century to our own digitally saturated world. Books include: Isak Dinesen: Seven Gothic Tales and Anecdotes of Destiny, Tove Ditlefsen: The Copenhagen Trilogy, and Gunnhild Øyehaug: Knots.
 
SCAN 354 Scandinavian Short Fiction (4 credits) Howard
CRN: 25776, taught in English. This class will introduce students to Scandinavian literature through the genre of the short story. Students will read stories by authors from Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland from different literary periods (from the eighteenth century up to the present) in order to gain an understanding of the social, historical, and political context of these nations and how they are taken up in the genre of the short story. Students will read stories by authors such as Isak Dinesen, August Strindberg, Selma Lagerlöf, Pär Lagerkvist, Peter Høeg, Sigrid Undset, and the darker more adult works of beloved children’s authors Hans Christian Andersen and Tove Jansson. In addition to studying the form of the short story, students will also be introduced to different literary movements within Scandinavian literature such as: realism, Gothic fiction, feminist fiction, Romanticism, etc.
 
GER 355 German Cinema: Weimar Cinema and Its Legacies (4 credits) Calhoon
CRN: 25770 (plus Discussion Sections), taught in English. German cinema after the First World War enjoyed a golden age, garnering international acclaim for both its technical and artistic innovation. Films deemed “Expressionist,” such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, are perhaps the most recognizable, but they represent only one stylistic subset of the films produced during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). The rise of National Socialism and the pull of Hollywood combined to prompt a large-scale migration of filmmaking talent to the United States. Once in America, Austrian-born Wilhelm “Billy” Wilder set a course for both film noir (Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity) and comedy (The Seven-Year Itch, Some Like it Hot), and cinematographer Karl Freund (Caligari, Metropolis) went on to photograph a range of productions from Dracula to I Love Lucy. These are but two of the many figures to be explored in a course designed to trace key strains of American cinematic culture back to early twentieth-century Germany. The course will proceed along several key tangents, including (1) the issue of exile and the uncanniness of films made by filmmakers not fully “at home” in the U.S., (2) the abiding presence of early German cinema in American films made well after the acme of émigré filmmaking, and (3) the migration of certain trends from Hollywood through the French and German new waves and back again.  
Students in GER 355 will be introduced to the technical vocabulary of film study, and they will be required to demonstrate a working command of this terminology in their written work for the course. They will likewise be introduced to the general landscape of the cinema of the Weimar period, including the socio-political background, and to the various specific styles of German filmmaking, such as Expressionism, “New Objectivity,” and early experiments in both animation and cinematic abstraction. The technical vocabulary will enable them to identify and trace the influence of Weimar cinema on American film culture both before and after the fall of the Weimar Republic in 1933; the social and historical background will help them discern ways in which films made in the US by German émigrés, some of them Jewish, served to process the experience of persecution, exile, alienation, or even nostalgia.
 
GER 361 Literary Movements: Nature Magic in German Fairytales (4 credits) Ostmeier
CRN: 25771. The Grimm Brothers described Fairy Tales as Nature Poetry. Wells, woods, hedges, bones, birds, and other animals are often featured as agents of magic that defy modern civilization. We will examine the tensions between nature, wonder, the environment, and society in tales from the 19th to 21st Centuries. We will focus on Mermaids, Sirens, Undines. Our discussions will place the tales in their cultural contexts and contemporary ecocritical thought. Investigative conversations, brief lectures, excursions, analytical and creative assignments. Class will be conducted in German. View course flyer.
 
GER 406 Practicum: German Teaching (2 credits) Vogel
CRN: 25973. This internship course is designed to offer undergraduate students of German an introduction to the principles of foreign language instruction, especially as they apply to teaching children. Students practice teaching techniques and have the opportunity to teach beginning German to elementary-school or middle-school students. They will have the chance to evaluate their own teaching, the school experience, and/or the curriculum in a final written project.
 
GER 407 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.

Additional Offerings

 
GER 401 Research (1-16 credits)
CRN: 22178.
 
SCAN 401 Research (1-21 credits)
CRN: 24574.
 
GER 403 Thesis (1-12 credits)
CRN: 22179.
 
SCAN 403 Thesis (1-12 credits)
CRN: 24575.
 
GER 405 Reading and Conference (1-16 credits)
CRN: 22180.
 
SCAN 405 Reading and Conference (1-21 credits)
CRN: 24576.
 
SWED 405 Reading and Conference (1-16 credits) Howard
CRN: 24840.
 
SCAN 406 Practicum (1-12 credits)
CRN: 25976.

Fall 2022

German and SWEDish language Courses

GER 101 First Year German (5 credits)
CRNs: 11954, 11955, 11956, 11957. This series is designed to provide you with a foundation in German language and culture: you will learn to communicate in German using the four skills: listening, speaking, writing and reading. Through videos, readings and class discussions you will be introduced to various aspects of culture in German-speaking countries. 101-103 are structured according to international standards (ACTFL and EFR proficiency guidelines) to provide you with transparency and clear goals and to signal to you, other universities, and employers around the world that you have mastered basic German.

GER 201 Second Year German (4 Credits)
CRNs: 11958, 11959. This course fulfills the Arts and Letters (A&L) requirement. This is the fourth quarter of a two-year sequence designed to provide you with a foundation in German vocabulary, grammar, and culture. In German 201, you will have the chance to expand your vocabulary and your knowledge of structures in a unifying context with engaging cultural topics brought to you in authentic readings and engaging videos. You will learn to discuss in German and continue to prepare for participating in the larger academic and intellectual discourses at the University of Oregon and beyond.

SWED 201 Second Year Swedish (4 credits) Howard
CRN: 11993.

GER 311 Intermediate Language Training (4 credits)
CRN: 11966. This course satisfies one Arts and Letters requirement.  Extensive practice in speaking and writing German, and complex grammatical structures in writing.

SWED 405 Third Year Swedish (1-16 credits) Howard
CRN: 11994.

GER 411 Advanced Language Training (4 credits) Vogel
CRN: 11974

Literature & culture Courses

GER 221 Postwar Germany (4 credits) Anderson
CRN: 11960 + Discussion, taught in English.  This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L), International Cultures (IC), and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements. The course explores notions about East/West and united German culture and society as reflected in a series of narratives, films, and essays. How do these reveal changing ideas in Germany about the connection between the past and present? The texts and films address issues that have helped shape the ways Germans think today.

GER 250 Culture of Money (4 credits) Klebes
CRN: 11965, taught in English.

SCAN 251 Text and Interpretation: Masks and the Ecstatic Experience (4 credits) Stern
CRN: 11983, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L), International Cultures (IC), and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements.  This class is about stories. It is about how we tell them, what they mean to us, and how narrative permeates the very fabric of our understanding of the world. Considering this and remembering that our "universe" of stories includes narratives that we have been told, have read, and tell ourselves; we can safely say that we are not the authors of our entire sense of the world. This raises several interesting questions about the relationship between the "self" and the "other." It is my hope that we can begin to answer these questions and raise other ones that will enable us to understand better the process through which we try to make sense of the world. With this goal in mind, I have decided to introduce you to a number of works that interrogate the notions of identity, authority, and truth. In other words, we will use the texts in our course as examples for an investigation of how narratives construct or if you prefer, color, our sense of "reality."

SCAN 259 Vikings through the Iceland Sagas (4 credits) Stern
CRN: 11984, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L), International Cultures (IC), and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements.

SCAN 315 Nordic Cinema (4 credits) Howard
CRN: 11985, taught in English. This course satisfies the Arts and Letters (A&L), International Cultures (IC), and Global Perspectives (GP) requirements. Also satisfies Cinema Studies Core C requirement.This course offers a survey of Nordic cinema from the silent era to the present, with a focus on films from the first half of the twentieth century. Films will be viewed and analyzed within their aesthetic and historical contexts.Directors we will study include: Mauritz Stiller, Victor Sjöström, Carl Theodor Dryer, Edith Carlmar, Ingmar Bergman, Alf Sjöberg, and Henning Carlsen.

GER/SCAN 345M Food, Culture, and Identity (4 credits) Vogel
CRNs: 16000/15999, taught in English.

GER 362 Interpretive Models (4 credits) Klebes
CRN: 11968, taught in German.

GER 407 Seminar: Representations of Women “Terrorists” in German Film, Literature, and Art (4 credits) Anderson
CRN: 11972, 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.