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, but others are welcome. In English.

Our seminar gives an overview of Deutsche Romantik as one of the dominant intellectual movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The focus lies on the new ideas and technical innovations generated through the collaboration between young and ambitious intellectuals and writers. Jena, Heidelberg, and Vienna are just the most famous places of this collective work.

In Latin rhetorics, the notion of prose designated the straightforward (pro + versus) succession of metrically unbound speech. In the 18th century, this notion of prose was metaphorized and became a key concept in self-descriptions of modernity. Friedrich Schlegel claimed that “prose is the true nature of the moderns”, and Hegel defined modernity as the “world state of prose”. The seminar explores the transformation of notions of prose, reflections on the relation between poetry and prose and negotiations of the prose of the world in literary prose in exemplary readings of literary and theoretical texts from antiquity to the 19th century.

This seminar attempts to understand the rise of modernism in French and German literature, architecture, painting, and photography as part of the processes of modernization that dominated Europe in the era of commodity capitalism. Topics to be considered include Baudelaire and the transformation of Paris, aestheticism and symbolism as forms of retreat, aesthetic urbanism in turn-of-the century Berlin, and modern tensions between individual subjectivity and public life.

This seminar subjects the surviving German films by Fritz Lang to a variety of critical interrogations – narratological, techno-historical, cultural-theoretical – within the context of Weimar cinema. A combination of close film analyses and readings in film history, theory and aesthetics serve to both reassess and complicate the retrospective teleology of Siegfried Kracauer’s canonical account of this formative and deeply heterodox period in German media history.

Film screenings on Mondays 7:00 – 9:00 pm.