Graduate Seminars

The German Program’s graduate course offerings vary from year to year, and except for an annual seminar on pedagogy and one on research methods, we rarely offer the same seminar twice. To give an idea of the types of courses offered in the program, here are a few of the graduate seminars recently taught by faculty in the German Program:

Current Issues in German Lit. and Media: Islam in Germany/Europe

This interdisciplinary course explores contemporary controversies around Islam in Germany by examining their representation in a wide range of cultural "texts," such as fiction, film, websites, political texts, newspapers, magazines, television, fiction. While the focus is on controversies that arise in the German context, we will carefully place the issues in relevant European as well as other transnational contexts. We will also inform our analyses with multiple disciplinary perspectives. Topics may include: Language and identity, headscarf debates, experiences of violence, terrorism, religious institution, public space. Taught in English. Students will have option of completing some work in German if they choose.

Applied Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching Methodology.

This course provides a knowledge of the aspects of German linguistics that are important for teaching German and a survey of foreign language teaching methods and second language acquisition research. 

The Face of Time: the Ruins of Modernity.

This course is devoted to three major works of German modernism: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, August Sander’s People of the 20^th Century, and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas.  In spite of their status of torsos, all of them having been left unfinished at their authors’ death, these works still haunt us with their ambition of showing us the “face of time.”  By looking at these monumental ruins, we will try to catch a glimpse of the ruins of modernity itself.

Frankfurt School and Critical Theory. 

An introduction to the philosophy and cultural criticism of key Frankfurt School thinkers, especially Benjamin and Adorno. We will also consider more recent developments in Critical Theory by Habermas and others, as time permits.

The German Literary Fairy Tale.

This course examines the development of the German Kunstmärchen from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century and beyond, with particular emphasis on romantic literary theory and on historical events such as the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the rise of cultural nationalism.  The Kunstmärchen’s relationship with the oral fairy tale and with the Grimms’ collection of fairy tales will also be addressed, as will be late nineteenth and twentieth-century contributions to the Kunstmärchen genre.  Authors including Wieland, Musäus, Herder, Goethe, Tieck, Brentano, the Grimms, Eichendorff, Keller, and Storm.

The German Novel: Musil, Kafka, Mann.

In this course, we will read three major novels by Musil, Kafka, and Mann, and we will acquaint ourselves with the traditions of literary criticism that have attempted to come to terms with their work. We will draw parallels among the three very different novels, departing from one common trait: the placement of an institution at the center of each novel: a boarding school, a sanatorium, and a castle. Besides the goal of familiarity with these three major works and authors, the course aims to develop students’ skills for discussing literary texts and for using and writing literary criticism. 

Goethe’s Faust

We emphasize Goethe’s Faust parts I and II, but the course begins with Marlowe’s reworking of the original Faust material, includes Byron’s Manfred and selections from Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, before concluding with Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. The Faust theme has intrigued students of literature and thought for many centuries, and it serves as a metaphor for the modern condition. How does one assign a value to the human soul, if Christianity is not accepted as the supreme authority? What happens to notions of the good life in the age of Enlightenment? How are human beings disposed to conceive of their essence “after the death of God?” How does evil manifest itself in the twentieth century? How does the dualism of the here and now versus the here-after influence humanity’s habitation of the Earth?   

Nietzsche: Literature and Values

We will read and closely examine most of Nietzsche’s works, starting with the romantic metaphysics of The Birth of Tragedy, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra with its iconoclastic representation of the major doctrines (eternal recurrence, superhuman, will to power), and concluding with Beyond Good and Evil and the late aphoristic works. We will also consider Nietzsche’s turbulent life and times as we explore the writings of one of the most influential thinkers of the modern era. Frequently engaging samples of the abundant secondary literature on Nietzsche, we will establish a reliable method for reading his works and assessing their impact on modern and postmodern culture. Issues relating to the earth and Nietzsche’s pioneering thought on human beings in relation to the earth will be foregrounded. 

Paul Celan.

This seminar will focus on the poetry and prose of Paul Celan (1920-1970), whose brief career was marked by controversy, critical acclaim, illness, and tragedy. Our approach will be to track Celan’s career from the earliest period of Gruppe ‘47 through the 1950s and the 1960s. Figures who influenced Celan intellectually include Hölderlin, Brecht, Adorno (“nach Auschwitz Gedichte zu schreiben...”) and Heidegger, but he was also receptive to a broad range of philosophical, religious and aesthetic writing including Martin Buber (Ich und Du). In this seminar students will draft reports on critical books about Celan (20%), present an annotated bibliography on a research topic (20%), and submit a research paper (60%). The language of the seminar will be German, whenever feasible, and students must be able to read German and English criticism.

Foucault: Power and Literature.

What can the work of Michel Foucault teach us about reading literature?  Our seminar will be framed by this question; it will be an introduction to Foucault as well as an investigation of Foucault’s relevance for literary studies.  The seminar also has a practical aim: to develop students’ skills at using theoretical concepts and secondary literature to discuss texts, literary or otherwise. The first part of the semester will be devoted to understanding three key concepts in Foucault’s texts: madness, disciplinary power, and biopower. The second part of the semester will address the problem of using theoretical concepts and secondary literature to read literary texts.  We will read five twentieth-century novels, mostly in German, that thematize madness, power, disciplinary institutions, and sexuality, and our discussions will focus on how to use Foucault not just for thematic analysis but for an understanding of how literary language itself functions.  In other words, we will not merely look at how these novelists wrote “about” sexuality or madness but how, in their texts, literary language is implicated in the production of the truths of madness, sexuality, and the self. 

Bibliography and Methods of Research.