Courses Descriptions: Spring 2008
Development of the four language skills of reading, listening, speaking, and writing.
Reading Knowledge of German for Graduate Students
Continuation of 101. Prerequisite: 101.
Intensive review of German grammar as a basis for reading, conversation, and composition. Texts and discussions address issues in contemporary German society. Prerequisite: 102.
Practice in reading, listening, speaking, and writing. Short stories, one longer work (Kafka), and discussions examine aspects of modern life from a German perspective. Prerequisite: 103.
Almost Human: Robots and Cyborgs in German Fiction and Film
The fascination and horror generated by forms of “almost human” beings, from automatons to robots, androids, cyborgs, and bodiless existence, inspire us to wonder who we are, what we are, and where we are going. Today, as fiction seeps into reality, technology continues to erode the dividing line between human and machine. What is the body? How do we define its limits? How artificial are we already? What is next, do we want it, and do we have a choice? Readings and films from early German Romanticism to current stem cell research provide the historical-cultural background that will help students formulate and respond to similar questions in writing exercises, class discussions, and three papers
The goal of this Intermediate Conversation and Composition course is to improve the degree of fluency in the spoken language through conversation, reading and listening. Modern texts will be the point of departure for discussions concerning current topics. (Prerequisite German103)
This course provides an introduction to the context of German business culture and Germany’s current role in the global economy and the European Union. Topics include corporate organization and structure, business correspondence, job applications, telephone skills, trade shows, and procedures in German business today, from inquiries to product shipment and follow-up. Qualifying students may take a prestigious and internationally recognized exam in German for professional purposes, the Goethe-Institut’s Zertifikat Deutsch für den Beruf (ZDfB). The course and ZDfB certificate are excellent prerequisites for future responsibilities in international companies, internships, or positions in German-American businesses. Materials include clips from Stromberg, a satirical comedy series on German office culture today, information from the Internet, and the textbook: "Unternehmen Deutsch: Lehrwerk für Wirtschaftsdeutsch (Lehrbuch)," Stuttgart: Klett Verlag, 2000. The course is conducted in German with occasional English as needed.
This course explores ideas and materials from the earliest records of German culture through the beginning of the 19th century. It combines close readings of texts with broader discussions of social and political history. By the end of the semester, students will be able to identify characteristics of German culture and literature from different periods and discuss why a work might be (or might not be) representative of a given period. The course incorporates an online environment for creative writing (a MOO: Multi-User Domain, Object-Oriented). Course readings, presentations, and discussions are primarily in German.
Continuing practice in reading, listening, speaking, and writing; emphasis on literary terminology and techniques for critical reading of German. Recommended as preparation for more advanced literary study, prose, poetry, and drama. Prerequisite: 213
From Brothers Grimm to Walt Disney. The German fairy tale tradition and its role in American culture. No German required.
The first half of this introduction to and survey of the German Cinema (also called the other Hollywood), will focus on early cinematic classics by such influential directors such as F.W. Murnau (Nosfuratu) and Fritz Lang (M). The second half of the course will concentrate on the new German Cinema up to the present. Internationally renowned films by directors such as Herzog (Aquire), Fassbinder (The Marriage of Maria Braun), and Tywer (Run Lola Run) will be screened and analyzed. Special attention will be paid to the historical and socio-cultural context of the films as well as to the introduction of pertinent theoretical considerations such as narration, staging, cinematography, and editing. Lectures and discussions will be in English. The films are screened in the original German with English subtitles. The course counts toward German and Film Studies majors and minors. No Knowledge of German required. (see poster)
German-Jewish Women Writers.
Examination of themes, forms, and sociocultural issues shaping the work of German-Jewish women writers from the
Enlightenment to the present. Readings and discussions in English.
The Idea of the University
What went wrong with modern universities? Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard University, recently complained about “Our Underachieving Colleges.” Harry Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, entitled his latest book: “Excellence without a Soul. How a Great University Forgot Education.” Contemporary novels show a strange world: Political correctness, harassment, crazy professors, students only interested in sex and drugs. In this seminar, we will explore the history of institutions of higher learning from Greek antiquity to our times, with special emphasis on modern institutions such as the French Ecole normale, the German research university, and English and American colleges. We will study the architecture of the university and read theoretical reflections as well as novels.
This course examines representative literary works and seminal texts from the nineteenth century. Along with the usual suspects Kleist, Keller, and Storm, we will also analyze texts by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, among others. In addition to situating these in a broader political, social context, we will look at these works theoretically. That is, we will investigate the extent to which fictional texts participated in philosophical debates, and conversely, the impact of writings by Marx et al. on literary works and on literary theory.
The hyphen between German and Jewish is meant to signal a problem. Some people have read it as the image of a conversation between German and Jews (“deutsch-jüdisches Gespräch”) during the short period of Jewish acculturation in Germany. Others such as Gershom Scholem prefer to see it as the sign of a cry into emptiness (“Schrei ins Leere”) - the mark of the German failure to respond to, or even to perceive, repeated Jewish overtures. The seminar will begin and end with translations of the first part of the Hebrew bible into German: Moses Mendelssohn’s version from 1783 and the famous and controversial version Buber and Rosenzweig published in 1926. In the weeks between, we will examine texts exemplifying this difficult relationship or reflecting upon it.
Modernity gives rise to various forms of suspicion, including modern forms of resentment and practices of self-discipline (a suspicion of oneself), as well as to an epistemology of suspicion as it is developed in the modern human sciences. The course starts out with an analysis of the detective genre and of the specific transformations it undergoes in modern German literature. In a next step, we will examine literary representations of suspicion within a broader cultural-historical frame: Nietzsche's analysis of resentment in his Genealogy of Morals serves as one point of reference; another is what Carlo Ginzburg has called the "paradigm of clues."
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