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.

Introduction to Middle High German language and literature 1100-1300. 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 and also include visits to Rare Book Room and Art Museum (in person, if feasible).

The literary author, filmmaker, and social theorist Alexander Kluge has produced a body of work since 1962 that functions as a seismograph for the culture of the Federal Republic of Germany. Focusing on work produced before the German "reunification," we examine Kluge's main works in literature, film, theory, and video on their own terms and in comparison to other important work by his contemporaries. A particular emphasis of the seminar is the manner in which Kluge represents an important branch of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, a branch that departs from the better known branch initiated by Jürgen Habermas.

Do aesthetic practices harbor radical political potential, or have they been co-opted by the creative economy's imperative of relentless aesthetic innovation? This seminar explores a formative motif of German critical thought: the notion that some feature of art or aesthetics--the plenitude of aesthetic experience, the indeterminacy of aesthetic judgment, or unconstrained artistic form--prefigures political freedom. We will trace this motif from Schiller's political reading of Kant to the Frankfurt School's engagement with avant-garde art and conclude by interrogating the status of aesthetics in contemporary theory and culture.