Fall 2023
Literature & teaching Courses
GER 507 Seminar: Fantasy, Nature, and Technology (4 credits) Ostmeier
CRN: 12156.
GER 607 Seminar: Gender Race Class (4 credits) Schulz
CRN: 12162.
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
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
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
Thesis / Dissertation / Reading Courses
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.
Winter 2022
Literature & teaching Courses
GER 507 German Cinema and Psychoanalytic Film Theory (4 credits) Librett
CRN: 23895. German Cinema, known from its beginnings as a tradition that privileges the powerfully expressive "image," offers a rich frame for the exploration of how the moving image represents, involves, and affects both the psyche of the viewer and the structure of the society to which the viewer is subject. In this course, we will examine together a selection of films spanning the German tradition from the early 20th century to today, while we retracing the development of psychoanalytic film theory from its origins in first-generation analytic thinkers such as Otto Rank, through the two phases of Lacanian theory down to today (from Christian Metz and early Jacqueline Rose to Slavoj Zizek). To provide the necessary background for the film theory readings, we will take our time reading carefully some fundamental texts by Sigmund Freud himself, as well as a couple of essays by Jacques Lacan. Class discussions will be held in English; readings will be made available in the original language and in English. An additional one-hour discussion section will be held weekly auf Deutsch for German Majors who are taking the course for German Major credit. (We will find a time that is convenient for all students who are taking the course from this angle.) The core readings will be shared in common by all students in this seminar, but some secondary or tertiary readings and some further writing expectations will be added for graduate students.
GER 608 Making Differences (4 credits) Stern
CRN: 23903. This year’s colloquium focuses on a genealogy depicting the development of different notions of difference both historically and theoretically. In other words, our course of study intends to open perspectives on specific aesthetic, political, scientific, and philosophical movements and how they conceive of “race,” “otherness,” the foreign,” “the border,” “the human,” the “civilized,” “the natural,” and the like. Since this is such a broad topic, we will begin by looking at specific notions of the “human” and its “others” through the lens of emerging conceptions of modernity, lineage, civilization, and progress, and then the colloquium participants will be asked to choose relevant text in either the German or Scandinavian corpus to test through the theoretical lens of philosophies of difference, race, gender, nationality, de-coloniality and the like. Students will be responsible for a presentation and a 10–15-page essay. Texts will be in both German and English.
GER 503 Thesis
CRN: 23899.
GER 601 Research
CRN: 23900.
GER 603 Dissertation
CRN: 23901.
GER 605 Reading
CRN: 23902.
GER 609 Practical Language Teaching (1-16 credits) Vogel
CRN: 23904.
GER 609 Practicum
CRN: 23905.
Fall 2021
Literature & teaching Courses
GER 507 Seminar: Tyranny Redux (4 credits) Calhoon
CRN: 12867. Concentrated in the person of Donald Trump are nativist and undemocratic tendencies that not only preceded his presidency but seem only to have gained in strength following his electoral defeat in November 2020. 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. Key readings to include: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence; S. Freud, Totem and Taboo and Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Max Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family”; Alexander Mitscherlich, Society Without the Father; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism; Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies. We will also consider more recent and contemporary writings by Norman O. Brown, Alice Miller, Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder, Christopher Browning, Wendy Lower, Mary Trump, and Bandy Lee. Michael Haneke’s brilliant film The White Ribbon (2009) may prove pivotal to our discussions. Course to be conducted in English, though students may choose to read German texts in German or in translation.
GER 625 Translations/Transformations: Deutschland/Hamlet (4 credits) Klebes
CRN: 16263. When Ferdinand Freiligrath offered the equation “Deutschland ist Hamlet” in an 1844 poem, he was not intent on paying compliments to his native country and its political situation. He also was neither the first nor the last author to identify Shakespeare’s melancholy, tarrying Danish prince as a key point of reference in German literary and intellectual history. In this course we will examine a cross-section of that history of Hamlet reception across cultures, from August Wilhelm Schlegel’s influential translation of Shakespeare’s text and Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre to the transformation of the signifier ‘Hamlet’ in critical and philosophical assessments from Hegel and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Carl Schmitt, and on to 20th-century literary and cinematic adaptations by Heiner Müller, Agustín Calderón, and others. Class discussion and most readings will be in German.
GER 608 Coll Doctoral Presentation (1-2 credits) STAFF
CRN: 12873.
GER 608 Coll Curriculum Develop (4 credits) STAFF
CRN: 12874.
GER 609 Practicum (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 12876.
GER 609 Prac Language Teaching (1-16 credits)
CRN: 12877.
SCAN 609 Practicum (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 15578
Thesis/Dissertation/Reading Courses
GER 503 Thesis (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 12866.
GER 601 Research (1-6 credits) STAFF
CRN: 12869.
GER 603 Dissertation (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 12871.
GER 605 Reading (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 12872.
SCAN 605 Reading (1-16 credits) STAFF
CRN: 15577.