Previous Graduate Courses

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in three forgotten modernist, feminist, German-language writers: the German-Jewish philosopher and poet-critic Margarete Susman, friends with Simmel, Bloch and Celan; the incisive court reporter and novelist Gabriele Tergit, also German-Jewish; and the antifascist Swiss travel-writer and novelist Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a queer icon. What binds these three women together is that all three of them were among the most alert chroniclers of their time, tracking its many upheavals: the social and political revolutions of Weimar Germany, the rise of the Nazis to power, the Shoah.

This seminar explores recent debates about the ecological dimension of Marx’s critique of political economy. At a time when global ecological disasters appear as the most glaring manifestation of capitalism’s contradictions, new readings are challenging the cliché of Marx’s myopic productivism and elaborating the environmental theory latent in his concept of human-nature metabolism. We will focus on debates surrounding the concept of ‘metabolic rift,’ the connection between fossil fuel extraction and social control, and the convergence of these perspectives with ecofeminism, critiques of racial capitalism, and environmental aesthetics.

This course covers the three major historical moments of documentary work from its emergence in the interwar avant-gardes to its rediscovery in the 1960s and the contemporary documentary turn. With an eye toward the specific political conditions, technologies, and formal conventions that established the boundary between reality and representation at each of these three moments, this seminar considers: deskilling and the industrialization of writing; the contest between literature and technical media; the emergent properties of mass culture; changing conditions of authorship; documentation, the archive and forensic investigation.

Rhythm is often taken for granted as an aesthetic form or natural phenomenon—from the form of a poem to the pulse of a beating heart. Yet not only does the concept of rhythm have a history, but a ‘rhythmic episteme’ (Janina Wellmann) has historically shaped many discourses, some of them politically problematic, particularly where the concept of life is at stake. This seminar examines rhythm in aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical discourses with a focus on the periods around 1800 and 1900 and the role of rhythm in later theoretical projects from poststructuralism to new materialism.

This course offers a rare chance to study great works of medieval German Romance together with early modern English epic-romance. The two traditions do connect, not only through European-wide romance narrative culture, but also through growing Anglo-German cultural interaction. We address three major, world-class narrative poems, and also extracts from others and many far shorter works (songs, lyric poems, mystical and aesthetic treatises) in the light of historical and theoretical discussion of sexual difference, dissidence, erotic knowledge, and their religious and political indices.