Previous Graduate Courses

Readings and discussion in classroom application of SLA theory.  Focus on quantitative as well as interpretive analysis. Primary audience is the current teaching staff of GER 101. In English.

Franz Kafka was once called an expert on questions of power. That peculiarity is the focus of this seminar. Guided by exemplary topics - the architecture of labyrinths and text-labyrinths, the machine and the apparatus, guilt and the law, animal figures, family dramas, the worlds of objects - we will primarily discuss Kafka’s stories and novels as attempts at a literary analysis of power. At issue, therefore, is the relationship between narrative strategies and the political dimension of this literature. At the same time, the seminar will offer a discussion of modern narrative theories and the ethics of literature.

Walter Benjamin—a humanist, social-scientist, and media theorist in one—is among the most original thinkers of the 20th century. This seminar is a deep introduction to his work and its wide influence from the Frankfurt School to deconstruction and anthropocene thought. We will study Benjamin’s philosophies of language and of art; his theories of media experience, of urban and architectural space, and of childhood; his critiques of violence and of history; his studies of surrealism, Kafka, Brecht, and the baroque; as well as his style of writing, form of thought, and coining of concepts such as storyteller, dialectical image, and aura.

Animation is a central concept to understand the interaction between culture, technology and cultural techniques. Film is a major case for a technologically based cultural practice. We will follow the anthropological concepts of animation from animism in Freud and Lévi-Strauss through the technical use from dolls to robots and animation/animated films. Aim is to better understand the relation between animation of the inanimate and the technical enhanced animation of the spectator and user of technology.