Past Undergraduate Courses

From Hitler to Hollywood: German Refugees and American Film
GRMN 22500/ENGL 28105/HIST 22205/CMST 22501
Against the background of Hollywood’s changing attitudes toward Hitler’s Germany, this course will explore the links between fascism, emigration and film through the perspective of the refugee community in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s. Retracing one major escape route from Central Europe to America, we will examine filmic and literary attempts to capture the experience of a displaced person, endangered, defenseless and unwelcome everywhere. The social and professional situation as well as the political activities of Hollywood's approximately eight hundred, mainly Jewish European refugees will be studied along with a discussion of the extent of the film exiles’ impact on American filmmaking and politics during this period. We will consider impressions of short and long-term returnees to Germany after the war and attempt to clarify the controversial issue of this mass migration’s artistic, political and intellectual legacy in Hollywood.
Spring 2009, Katharina Loew

The Plays of Bertolt Brecht
GRMN 27509
Bertolt Brecht is perhaps the most important dramatist of German literature of the 20th century. Not least of all, his plays—as well as his theory of theatre—reflect the development of the modern media such as radio and film. But whereas—at least since the late twenties—Brecht’s plays are at the peak of aesthetic modernism, some of them also move into the direction of political totalitarianism. In this course we will investigate whether or not this is a contradiction. Readings will include Brecht’s major plays (Baal, Trommeln in der Nacht, Die Dreigroschenoper, Der Flug der Lindberghs, Die Maßnahme, Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, and Der gute Mensch von Sezuan), as well as some of Brecht’s theoretical texts. Readings in German (and English); discussion in German.
Spring 2009, Uwe Hebekus.

Walking in Literature
GRMN 23509
Since Horaz coined the term sermo pedestris (‘walking speech’) to designate the specific pace of metrical prose in opposition to the ‘flight’ of poetic speech, literature has known the analogy between ways of walking and ways of talking. However, it is only from the late 18th century onwards that the previous aristocratic walk (“der Spaziergang”) has become a widespread cultural practice and consequently a model of both esthetic experience and narration. Be it the German romantic wanderer, the French flâneur or modern walkers like Franz Kafka, Robert Walser or Thomas Bernhard, the “Spaziergang” as a literary motif has always been both less and at the same time more than a mode of physical locomotion: less, because a written walk only takes place at the desk, on paper, and more, because the imaginary stroll coincides with the advancement of the narration and with the act of writing itself. Thus, the literary walk has always served to overlay the esthetic experience of ‘nature’ or ‘city life’ with poetological reflections. The course will trace the question of whether there is a systematic tie between cultural practices of walking and certain forms of writing, hence if there is a ‘poetics of the walk’ in German literature. Readings will include Friedrich Schiller, Der Spaziergang; Ludwig Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (excerpt); Adalbert Stifter, Der Waldgänger; Franz Kafka, Der plötzliche Spaziergang; Robert Walser, Der Spaziergang; Thomas Bernhard, Gehen; as well as theoretical texts by Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau. The course will be given in German.
Winter 2009, Susanne Lüdemann

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
GRMN 26209
This seminar is devoted to an intense, close reading of one of German literature’s most famous novels, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. We will use this novel, which gave the genre of the “Bildungsroman” its name, to reflect what it means to get an education – not only for Goethe’s protagonist but, more importantly, for you here and now, at the University of Chicago. Readings and discussions in English.
Winter 2009, Christopher Wild

Singer and Bellow: Jewish Novelists of the 20th Century
GRMN 23709/33709, YDDH 23709/33709, CMLT 22801/32801, ENGL 28909/48917
The American novelist Saul Bellow and the Yiddish storyteller I.B. Singer, two of the most innovative writers of the twentieth century, created artful fiction that articulated the search for a spiritual realm in a starkly secular world. They both rejected political and religious utopias, which they vehemently exposed in their work. Their writings encompass the major seismic changes in modern Jewish life in the twentieth century: migration, urbanization, war, Holocaust, marital breakup, sexual freedom, alienation, and exile. In this course we will compare and contrast the novels of Bellow and Singer. Both came of age as writers in the polarized political and cultural climate of the interwar period. They were indebted to the Eastern European Jewish culture in Yiddish that continued to inspire them. The Yiddish-American context will be discussed in connection with their only collaboration in print, Bellow’s translation of Singer’s short story “Gimpel the Fool,” which became the latter’s introduction to a mass readership in English. We will examine how Bellow and Singer developed a neo-conservative world view that articulated their disillusionment with modernity and the political and cultural isms of the twentieth century. The secularization of Jewish life became the backdrop against which the two writers created individual characters who, often in monologue form, elaborated on their discontent with modernity and quest for spiritual meaning. Both writers were at the forefront of the Jewish literary renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s. We will examine how they artistically addressed the aftershock of the Holocaust in their novels of the 1960s, Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1969) and Singer’s Enemies: A Love Story (1972). Bellow and Singer reinvented the novel as a poetic universe of self reflection that gave voice to the Jewish urban experience. As such, to quote Murray Baumgarten, they created “city scriptures”; novelistic styles that aspired to “higher” transcendental meanings beyond the market driven conditions of modern life. The novels of these two belated neo-Romanticists encapsulate the central intellectual and spiritual ferments of their times: the secularization of Jewish life and its impact on the individual in the break-up of traditional religious life, the urban experience, and the destruction of European Jewry in World War II.
Winter 2009, Jan Schwarz.

Comparative Fairy Tale. The Brothers Grimm, H. C. Anderson, and Asbjørnsen and Moe.
GRMN 28500, NORW 28500, SCAN 28500, CMLT 21600, HUMA 28400
In this course, we compare familiar examples from two national traditions of the fairy tale, those of the Brothers Grimm (German) and H. C. Anderson (Danish), with examples from the less familiar Norwegian tradition of Asbjørnsen and Moe.
Winter 2009, Kimberly Kenny.

Politics and Drama from Schiller to Hebbel.
GRMN 29700
With the crisis of absolutism and the rise of the bourgeois class in the 18th century, politics has to reconfigure itself. Questions such as the legitimation of sovereignty, the reach of governmental power, the limits of revolution, the state of exception, and the role of aesthetics in the new political order are asked and answered anew – not least on the stage, the century’s most charged public space. The course aims to trace the path of political drama in these changing currents, many of which are as prevalent today as they were then. Readings will include Voltaire’s Brutus, Schiller’s Don Karlos, Kleist’s Prinz von Homburg, Büchner’s Dantons Tod, Manzoni’s Adelchi, Hebbel’s Gyges und sein Ring alongside excerpts from theoretical texts by Verri, Kant, Fichte, Hegel; Habermas, Foucault, and Agamben. Readings and discussion in German.
Fall 2008, Christiane Frey

Psychopathology in Literature and Medicine around 1900.
GRMN 23000.
Whereas in the literature of realism, the narration of psychopathological phenomena is rather rare, early and classical modernity is increasingly interested in psyches that deviate from the norm in extreme ways. Lunatics no longer play bit parts, but become central to literary texts. This seminar will deal with literary and psychiatric representations of insanity and compare the different patterns of narration in psychiatry and literature. Alongside psychiatric patient histories, we will discuss literary texts such as Wilhelm Jensen’s „Gradiva“ (1903), Carl Spitteler’s „Imago“ (1906), Alfred Döblin’s „Die Ermordung einer Butterblume“ (1910), Arthur Schnitzler’s „Flucht in die Finsternis“ (1931), and Leo Perutz’ „St. Petri-Schnee“ (1933). The focus of the seminar will be on the interrelation of medical knowledge and narrative structures. This should provide us with an opportunity to consider broader epistemological questions concerning the validity and implementation of what one might call claims of knowledge. The course will be conducted in German.
Spring 2008, Yvonne Wübben and Christiane Frey.

Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain.
GRMN 24900, FNDL 20811.
We will read this monumental novel by one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers in conjunction with a number of philosophical texts that informed Mann’s work (e.g., Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Max Weber). Topics include the issue of time and temporality; new media; disease and illness; death and eros; and literary realism. Readings and discussion in English.
Spring 2008, Robert Buch.

Scandinavian Women’s Literature.
GRMN 24700, NORW 24700, SCAN 24700.
This is a survey course of literature by Scandinavian women writers. We will read and analyze works from Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, beginning with a novel from the 1850’s, when women were struggling to be heard to the near present, when women hold substantial political power in Scandinavia. We will examine how feminist issues and themes in the texts of these Scandinavian women reflect the changes of the past 150 years. Texts include: Isak Dinesen's Babette's Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny, Gerd Brantenberg's Egalia's Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes, Camilla Collett's The District Governor's Daughters, Selma Lagerlöf's Löwensköld’s Ring, Moa Martinson's Women and Apple Trees, Sigrid Undset's Gunnar’s Daughter and Linn Ullmann’s Before You Sleep. All readings in English.
Winter 2008, Kimberly Kenny.

Jewish American Literature Since 1945.
GRMN 27800/37800, YDDH 27800/37800, ENGL 25004/45002, CMLT 29800/39800.
The goal of the course is to expand the conception of the field of Jewish American literature from English-only to English-plus. The course will examine how Yiddish literary models and styles influenced the resurgence of Jewish American literature since 1945, and discuss how recent Jewish American novels have renewed the engagement with the Yiddish literary tradition. Readings are by I.B.Singer, Chaim Grade, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Jonathan Safran Foer, Pearl Abraham and Dara Horn.
Winter 2008, Jan Schwarz.

The German Novella.
GRMN 25907.
Under the thin layer of civilisation, our more barbarous instincts lie hidden in darkness. We have, of course, all learned from an early age not to fish in these murky waters. Literature, however, has developed a genre that centrally, nay, exclusively deals in culture’s ‘other’: the novella. From the 18th century right through to the present day, the German novella has habitually devoted itself to topics that are, quite literally, not fit for good society. In sharp contrast to their scandalous topics, however, the texts themselves cultivate a form governed by the strictest rules of composition and narrative. This course retraces the history of the genre of the German novella and also serves as an introduction to narratology. Readings and discussion in German (Kleist, Die Verlobung in St. Domingo; Keller, Das Meretlein; Georg Büchner, Lenz; Gerhard Hauptmann, Bahnwärter Thiel; Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig; Georg Heym, Der Irre; Arthur Schnitzler, Fräulein Else; Martin Walser, Ein fliehendes Pferd; Gert Hofmann, Die Rückkehr des verlorenen Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz nach Riga; Thomas Hürlimann, Fräulein Stark).
Winter 2008, Frauke Berndt.

Contemporary Norwegian Novel.
GRMN 27000, SCAN 27000.
In this course, we undertake the reading of eight contemporary Norwegian novels (six novels and two novellas) from 1972 to the present. What does this body of texts suggest about the state of Norwegian literature – its quality, preoccupations, style, etc? If post-modern is defined as “incredulity toward meta-narratives” (Lyotard), how post-modern are these texts?
Fall 2007, Kimberly Kenny.

Major Works of Modernism. 
GRMN 29000, CMLT 28700.
This course is centered on several canonical works of classical modernism: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Ein Brie; Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten; Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig; Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung; Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else; Bertolt Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder; poetry by Stefan George, Hofmannsthal, Gottfried Benn, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Georg Trakl; essays by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Robert Musil. On the basis of the works studied we shall endeavor to develop a concept of modernism sufficiently capacious to embrace radically opposed literary and cultural agendas. Readings and discussion in German.
Fall 2007, David Wellbery.

Modern Yiddish Literature: Diaspora and Homecoming.
GRMN 25007/35007 YDDH 25000/35000.
This course will apply various theoretical models of Diaspora literature to the study of Yiddish tales, short stories, monologues, plays, novels and life-writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among the topics addressed in the course are Yiddish humor and satire, literary modernism, the classical Yiddish writers’ image of the shtetl (small Jewish town in Central and Eastern Europe) and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s demon narrators. Readings are by Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Y.L.Peretz. Scholem-Aleichem, Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, Jonah Rosenfeld, I.B.Singer, Chaim Grade, Ester Kreytman, Chava Rosenfarb, Yankev Glathsteyn and Sh. Ansky.
Fall 2007, Jan Schwarz.

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