Courses

The course lays a foundation for functional acquisition of German.   Class time is devoted to language tasks that will foster communicative and cultural competence and will emphasize listening and reading strategies, vocabulary acquisition, authentic input, and oral production. Taught in German.

Continues the goals of GER 101, focusing on increased communicative proficiency (oral and written), effective reading strategies, and listening skills. Emphasis on vocabulary acquisition and functional language tasks: learning to request, persuade, ask for help, express opinions, agree and disagree, negotiate conversations, and gain perspective on German culture through readings, discussion, and film. Taught in German.

Intensive training in German, building on GER 101 and covering the acquisitional goals of two subsequent semesters:  communicative proficiency in a wide range of syntax, mastery of discourse skills, and reading strategies sufficient to interpret and discuss contemporary German short stories, drama, and film.  Intensive classroom participation required.  Successful completion provides eligibility for GER 107. Taught in German.

Develops deeper proficiency in all areas (cultural understanding, production skills, and receptive skills), using a combination of language-oriented work and cultural/historical content, including film and texts. Taught in German.

Continues improvement of proficiency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing using texts, online media, and other sources as a basis for class discussion. Grammar review is included. Taught in German.

This course traces German cultural and political history since 1945, examining key developments and debates, including the aftermath of Nazi rule; violent clashes between students and government; the ideological rivalry between two German states up to reunification; migration and transnational cultures; and Germany’s role in Europe. The course facilitates advanced competence in written and oral German, but also develops analytical competencies in historical and critical argumentation across a range of primary and secondary sources, including poetry, prose, essays, films, artworks, and performances. Taught in German.

Why have crises of modernity so often manifested as crises of attention? This seminar traces the deep history of attention and its entanglement with modern subjectivity and society. We will explore how the capacity or failure to focus has shaped conceptions of the self, from the rational subject of the Enlightenment to the overstimulated individual in the modern metropolis and the distracted digital user of today. Combining media and discourse analysis with practical exercises, the seminar seeks to cultivate a deeper understanding of how attention is structured in contemporary culture and facilitate a freer relationship with it. Taught in English.

What is German-Jewish thought? Why are so many of the most influential thinkers of modernity German(-speaking) Jews? Think of Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, and Arendt, not to mention writers like Kafka and Celan. In what sense can their writing and thinking meaningfully be described as “Jewish”? How was the position of minoritization conducive to such extraordinary critical insight and literary creativity? Topics to include: secularization, tolerance, and “the Jewish question”; messianism and eschatology; (anti-)Zionism; psychoanalysis and the Jewish joke. Readings from the Enlightenment to the present, with a focus on the 20th century. Most primary texts will be in German, with translations available for non-concentrators. Taught in English.

The magical personal relations associated with the term “charisma” originally referred not to a political category but a dynamic in interwar Germany’s literary cults. How did a poetic phenomenon become a political one? What are the figures, metaphors, or narratives through which the mystery of charisma has been described? We will explore how early 20th c. German culture represented charisma as an occult phenomenon, erotic seduction, drug-like intoxication, a result of financial crisis, or a media effect. We will also study the role of charisma in debates about whether today’s world resembles that of the Weimar years. Taught in German.

How do adults learn new languages? Why do some people learn new languages easily, while others struggle? What can language teachers do to make the learning experience as successful as possible?  The course addresses these and related questions by providing a critical introduction to recent theories of instructed second language acquisition (ISLA). We will reflect on these issues through readings and discussion, and we will engage them on a practical level through one-on-one ESL tutorials with participants from the greater Princeton community, in collaboration with ProCES. Taught in English.

In 19- and 20-c. debates that crossed borders among disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology, art history, philosophy, and political theory, empathy and alienation emerged as key terms to describe relations among human beings, works of art, and commodities. This seminar addresses the dynamics of empathy and alienation across a range of discourses and artifacts. Our explorations of how empathy and alienation were variously conceptualized in psychological aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and critical theory will aim to open new perspectives on recent debates about identity, affect, and human-animal and human-AI relations.