Courses

The course lays a foundation for functional acquisition of German. Class time is devoted to language
tasks that foster communicative and cultural competence by emphasizing listening and reading strategies,
vocabulary acquisition, authentic input, and oral production. Conducted in German.

Continues the goals of GER 101, focusing on increased communicative proficiency (oral and written), effective reading strategies, and listening skills. Emphasis on vocabulary acquisition and functional language tasks: learning to request, persuade, ask for help, express opinions, agree and disagree, negotiate conversations, and gain perspective on German culture through readings, discussion, and film production. Conducted in German.  Taught by Staff.

Intensive training in German, building on GER 101 and covering the acquisitional goals of two subsequent semesters:  communicative proficiency in a wide range of syntax, mastery of discourse skills, and reading strategies sufficient to interpret and discuss contemporary German short stories, drama, and film.  Intensive classroom participation required.  Successful completion provides eligibility for GER 107. Taught by Staff.

Develops deeper proficiency in all areas (cultural understanding, production skills, and receptive skills), using a combination of language-oriented work and cultural/historical content, including film and texts. Taught by Staff.

Continues improvement of proficiency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing using texts, online media, and other sources as a basis for class discussion.  Grammar review is included. Conducted in German.

This course traces German cultural and political history since 1945, examining key developments and debates, including the aftermath of Nazi rule; violent clashes between students and government; the ideological rivalry between two German states up to reunification; migration and transnational cultures; Black German activism; Germany’s role in Europe. The course facilitates advanced competence in written and oral German, but also develops analytical competencies in historical and critical argumentation across a range of primary and secondary sources, including poetry, prose, essays, films, artworks, and performances.

Through careful readings of a wide range of media theoretical texts from the late 19th to early 21st-century, this class will trace the development of critical reflection on technologies and media such as orality, writing and the printed page, pre-cinematic optical devices, photography, film and television, gramophones, telephony and radio, as well as drones, surveillance and social media. Topics include the relationship between representation and technology, the historicity of perception, the interplay of aesthetics, technology and politics, and the transformation of imagination, literacy, communication, privacy, reality and truth. Taught in English.

This introductory class will explore the work of writers, artists and filmmakers emerging from the global experience of migration in the 21st century and the new forms of hybridized expression they have invented to deal with their uprooting. How do migrant authors challenge and reshape their languages? What is the relationship between the polyphonic character of such writing and the struggle for identity or what one might call “migrantity”? Marcel Proust says “beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language”: shouldn’t literature created in multiple foreign languages be thus at least twice as lovely as that written in just one idiom? Taught in English.

What do fairy tales do? More than children’s entertainment, they instruct, amuse, warn, initiate, and enlighten. Throughout history, they have functioned to humanize and conquer the bestial and barbaric forces that terrorize us. They have also disguised social anxieties about gender and sex. The history and social function of fairy tales will be explored in the context of Germany in the 18th-20th centuries. Texts include selections from the Grimms’ Marchen, as well as from the literature of the Romantic, Weimar, and postwar periods. Taught in English.

What is contemporary art? What defines its contemporaneity? And in which sense can it be called art when it defies categories of modernist art theory? How to define the plural of art when the old art genres have dissolved into countless hybrid forms? And what follows from the artistic destabilization of the border between art and non-art? What are the aesthetic and political implications of an art that addresses its audience and its institutional frameworks as well as questions of globalization, digitalization, historiography, and ecology? The seminar will discuss these problems by looking at philosophy, art criticism, and artist writings. Taught in English.  

Bodies are subjected to countless rules, norms, laws, and expectations on a daily basis. What happens when they don’t measure up or when they don’t comply? This course considers a selection of unruly bodies in Germanophone literature and time-based media - from bodies that elude stable identities and categories to bodies that are othered, pathologized, criminalized, disciplined, corrected, punished, or excluded. We will encounter monsters, animals, fiancés, salesmen, dancers, businessmen, lawyers, schoolchildren, refugees, and aging or delinquent women. Taught in German.

How do adults learn new languages? Why do some people learn new languages easily, while others struggle? What can language teachers do to make the learning experience as successful as possible?  The course addresses these and related questions by providing a critical introduction to recent theories of instructed second language acquisition (ISLA). We will reflect on these issues through readings and discussion, and we will engage them on a practical level through one-on-one ESL tutorials with participants from the greater Princeton community, in collaboration with ProCES. Taught in English.

Although ‘childhood’ is a rather new concept, from the outset artists have been eager to exhaust its representational potential, theorists tried to define children’s perspective, temporality, sexuality, ways of knowing, and institutions regulated but also protected children. With a timeframe from 1800 to the present, special emphasis will lie on NS, the anti-authoritarian movement of the 1960s as well as on Germany’s aspiration today to foster children’s autonomy. We will take up literary and aesthetic objects alongside material culture (children’s books, playgrounds) and pedagogical discourses (science, institutions, educational textbooks). Taught in German.