Previous Graduate Courses

Readings and discussion of current theoretical and practical issues in Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA), with a goal of understanding how theory should inform classroom praxis. Primary audience is the current teaching staff of GER 101. Taught in English.

“Rage” was the first word of The Iliad and, thus, of European literature. Beginning with the rage of Achilles, which offers a glimpse into antiquity’s universe of conflict, rage––along with variants such as wrath, outrage and hate––has assumed different forms and courses in western culture: divine fury, mortal sin, military frenzy, passion as such or a fatal tear in the social tie. Against this background, the seminar follows a history of affect from antiquity to the present through texts and sources that explore the diverse patterns of this passion’s escalation: its political, theological, aesthetic and psychological dimensions. Taught in English and German.

This seminar offers a critical survey of recent trends in media theory with an eye to their relevance to questions of aesthetic form and to systems of cultural production generally. Topics include cultural techniques, disability, media archaeology, elemental media, infrastructuralism and network theory, assemblage theory, biomedia, affect, and digital embodiment. Participation in research colloquium at the conclusion of the course. Taught in English.

While it is a truism that literature speaks of society, calling the social sciences literary seems unsound. How did this asymmetry evolve and what are its poetic, epistemic, and theoretical effects? This seminar traces the literature-sociology-nexus from its 1800 origins to today. We will read sociological case-studies by novelists and experimental fictions by sociologists, study analyses by Simmel, Lukács, Lenk, Barthes, Bourdieu, Lepenies, and Sapiro and investigate key crossovers such as the Collège de Sociologie, the Frankfurt School, ethnographic surrealism, sociology of literature, affect studies, critical fabulation, and autofiction. Taught in English.

An intensive introduction to salient methods in the study of literature and film that will expose students to a diverse range of analytic approaches. Featuring seminar presentations by faculty members from the Department of German, topics include rhetoric, theory of the lyric, narratology, history and theory of literary form, filmic techniques. Seminar presentations and discussions, focused on seminal works of scholarship, aim to equip students with a critical vocabulary and to cultivate interpretative skills. Required seminar for graduate students in the Department of German and open to other interested graduate students. Advanced undergraduates may contact instructor concerning enrollment. Taught in English.