Previous Graduate Courses

Spring 2025

GER 508

Introduction to Middle High German language and literature 1100-1400.

W
10:00am - 12:50pm
No

Introduction to Middle High German language and literature 1100-1400. Selections from Arthurian romance (Parzival, Tristan), epic (Nibelungenlied), lyric poetry (Minnesang), and mysticism (Meister Eckhart, Mechthild von Magdeburg). Class sessions focus on close-reading and translating original texts. Also planned are visits to Rare Book Room and a local museum. Taught in German.

Old manuscript book opened
GER 516

Topics in 20th-Century Literature : Robert Walser: Experiments in Prose

Th
1:30pm - 4:20pm
No

Robert Walser – one of the last literary modernists to have been rediscovered in recent decades – still forces us to reassess our conceptions of ‘the literary’, the limits of the œuvre, of ‘literary genius’ and ‘madness,’ and of what the ‘materiality’ of the text encompasses. Defeating existing methods and calling for new ones, Walser’s radical experiments in prose challenge us to both study and scrutinize narratological paradigms (such as point of view and free indirect discourse), self-reflexivity, tone, rhetoric and anti-rhetoric. Taught in German.

page of written notes
GER 520

Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory : Thinking with Plants

W
1:30pm - 4:20pm
No

Why the recent wave of interdisciplinary interest in plant life? This seminar explores the turn to plants within and beyond the humanities as a way to rethink natural and artificial intelligence, sociality, gender & sexuality, and the nature of sentience. We will examine writerly techniques that engage plants both as rhetorical strategies and as epistemic devices for defamiliarizing animal-centric perspectives and facilitating insights into multispecies life. Readings from ancient myth, early science, literature, and theory will reveal a wilderness of knowledge, where humans become inverted plants and trees grow downward from the sky. Taught in English.

Diana-Scherer_Interwoven close up image

This seminar explores the depiction of war in European drama since antiquity, with particular emphasis on German-language texts. Our discussions will focus on formal strategies for representing verbal agon and physical violence, the dramaturgy of groups and masses, the impact of changing genre concepts, and the entanglements of war and memory. Drawing on signal works of scholarship on drama and theater, we will ask how conventions of dramatic form including the on-/offstage distinction, teichoscopy, and the messenger’s report complicate the relationship between word and deed, aesthetics and politics. Taught in English.

Line of people in mourning