Previous Graduate Courses

Seminar explores the bawdy adventures of animals, students, priests, and adulterous wives in the wide world of medieval short tales, both in verse and prose. Participants will examine select German Mären from the new and comprehensive edition of German Verse-Couplet Tales published in 2020. These will be read alongside analogues in medieval French, Italian, and English and their varying historical and manuscript contexts. Attention also given to Latin (fables) and Arabic influences. Concluding with Grimms’ fairy tales, seminar provides preparation for students who may teach fairy tale courses in future. Readings and seminar discussion in English.

Seminar explores turns to psychoanalysis in the history, theory, and criticism of art and literature. Reading psychoanalytic writings by Freud, Ferenczi, Lacan, Klein, Laplanche, and others, paths and detours lead to problems of terminology, translation, mediation. Addressing works of art and literature, questions arise about how those works might be understood as instances of psychoanalytic criticism and/or critiques of psychoanalysis. A need for critical reflection on the meaningfulness of psychoanalytic theories for current scholarship in the humanities is a guiding concern of this seminar. Seminar guests include practicing psychoanalysts. Taught in English. Reading knowledge of German and/or French desirable but not required.

The concepts of action, activity, and agency are key targets of research paradigms from Actor-Network Theory to New Materialism, Affordance theory, and praxeological approaches to literary and media studies. This seminar examines excerpts from the intellectual history of those concepts, asking how they are elaborated and problematized in various contexts and what exactly their critics reject or take for granted (e.g. anthropocentric, patriarchal, white supremacist, or other assumptions). Readings draw on the histories of philosophy, drama, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, design, sociology, gender studies, performance studies, and science studies. Readings and discussion in English.     

What does it mean to think trans- not as a marker of identity or political stance, but as an impulse toward crossing and altering form(s)? This course is an introduction to a generative principle of literature and art, expressed metaphorically by the prefix trans- (“across, beyond”). How does trans- operate in poetic language and other forms of art resisting stability to bring about “the new“? Trans- points to processes and mutations, as suggested by its iterations. While “transgression” peaked in theory around 2000, “translingualism” is still flourishing. We will engage with the potential of trans- from “translation“ to “corecore“. Seminar discussions in English.

According to Mark Fisher, a ghost is characterized by the fact that it “cannot be fully present: it has no being in itself but rather marks the relationship to a no longer or not yet.”  It is what insistently makes itself felt in the present, even though it no longer exists or does not yet exist. Indeed, the present is haunted by the past as much as it is by unrealized visions of the future. At a time when a culture of amnesia threatens to enclose the horizon of the future, critical ghost studies become even more relevant. This seminar explores contemporary “hauntologies” (Derrida), probing their aesthetic and political implications. Since all readings and class discussion will be in English, proficience in German is, while desirable, not required.

This seminar reflects on the collapse of leadership (Benjamin, Jelinek, Labatut) and on the question of what political action might look like that does not take the classic, centralized form of leadership. We find inspiration in German moments of counter-history (the Peasant Wars, Council Republics, environmental movement), in anarchist writing (Landauer, Graeber, Robinson), in the pedagogical and psychoanalytical setting (Rancière, Walser, Bion), in small organizations approaches to worker’s rights, housework and childcare, queer rights (Sander, Federici, Rackete), and finally in the arts of leaderlessness. (Romanticism, Dickinson, Melville). Seminar discussions in English.