Previous Undergraduate 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.  Conducted 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.

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skills), using a combination of language-oriented work and cultural/historical content, including film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.

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.  Conducted in German.

This course will tackle exemplary works of modern German society and culture, including literature, art, film, essays, speeches, and autobiographies. It offers an introduction to the most important events and issues from the first half of the century: the foundation of the German state, the German Colonial Empire, Berlin as a modern metropolis, World War I, the rise of National Socialism. Intensive practice in spoken and written German with an emphasis on vocabulary acquisition and complex syntactical forms.

This course has four goals: 1) to introduce students to key authors, genres, and movements in German literary history between 1770 and the present; 2) to provide an opportunity to deepen interpretive skills through reading and discussion of representative texts; 3) to encourage students to explore theoretical approaches to cultural material; and 4) to provide intensive practice in spoken and written German.

This course offers an introduction to German critical thought, focusing on theories of knowledge that have profoundly shaped modern intellectual discourse. Beginning with the philosophical revolution sparked by Kant’s examination of the limits of human knowledge, we will explore how thinkers such as Hegel and Marx analyzed knowledge’s historical and material conditions and grapple with Nietzsche’s and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. Classical sources will be read alongside modern thinkers, including Arendt, Foucault, and Angela Davis. Our overarching goal is to introduce key concepts of critical thought and probe their relevance today.  Lecture-Mondays; Precepts-Wednesdays.

This introduction to methods for the study of German literature, media, and culture will hone the research skills necessary to develop a substantial piece of independent scholarship. Combining methodological reflection with practical training and experimentation, we will probe such questions as: What is at stake in “reading” texts and other media closely or at a distance, historically or with an eye to form? How does one find, organize, distill, and respond to extant scholarship? What distinguishes a strong research question or hypothesis? And which intermediate steps lead from the cursor blinking on a blank page to a polished research paper?

The seminar is going to deal with the history of crime in (mostly) German literature and offers close readings of some of the most prominent crime stories since the end of the eighteenth century. 

Modern citizens’ struggle for liberty produced a radical literary tool of defense: the novella. Part everyday life, part sudden event, these short forms gave advice to those fighting the Man: How can outcasts question authority? What is a feminist plot? Can resistance be a reader response? We will discuss and read how these stories organize, formulate, and intensify real-world arguments through fictional protagonists in examples from the Americas and Europe, esp. 19th-century Germany. Alongside key theories, we will assess how novellas clarified and complicated issues of civil liberties, politics, religion, racism, gender, law, and the media.

The relationship between body and machinery, technology and biology is often thought in terms of the mechanical doll, the animated robot and other hybrid figures. Science fiction films offer double visions of the gendered body: women are masters/slaves of the technology and still symbolic bodies of the biological surviving of the human species. We will explore mediated visions in films and other media of different kinds spanning a bridge between SciFi-films and performance art, along with theoretical texts (like Haraway et al.) on the problem of the merging of technology and body.

Can experiences of looking at works of art shape not only how we think and feel and see, but also what we understand ourselves to be, as human beings? Two great 20-c. writers, poet Rainer Maria Rilke and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, believed they could. How did Freud’s inquiries into aesthetic experience and the ways artists perceive the world inform the development of psychoanalysis? What moved Rilke to transform his writing in light of what he saw in modern art? Course focuses on the significance of art, and of practices of writing about art, in lyric poetry, experimental prose, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural analysis.

“Weimar” stands in for a potential that was lost, for the problem of revolution and reaction. A century after the Weimar Republic’s apex, we first pick up on the negative political analogy between pre-fascist Weimar and our time: the U.S. as a “new Weimar,” “the crisis of parliamentary democracy,” the rise of White Supremacy, the “agitator,” and the danger of pluralization. Second, we will study the positive analogies between Weimar as an era for revolution and experimentation. Embracing the materiality of the body and the built world - in dance, architecture, sexuality studies, and social history - we also aim to dis-analogize Weimar.

What is the exact relationship between literature and history? What does it mean to read literature historically and history as a work of art? The course explores these and related questions through texts from antiquity to the present. We will explore the claim that literature is both more and less than “what really happened”; literary works as an escape from, but also remedy for, historical predicaments; modes of interpretation that allow one to read a single text simultaneously both as historical and fictional; and instances when literature followed historical events or, inversely, served as their blueprint.

Note: This is a HUM470 Course.