GERMAN
Language and Reading Courses -- Graduate Courses -- Undergraduate Courses
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Fall 2009
Images of America in German Literature.
GRMN 25809.
Images of America in German Literature
Since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, European imagination has time and again fantasized about the difference between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ worlds. Whereas to many people in the 19th century, America appeared to be the promised land where they could escape from the misery of industrialization and from the backwardness of European politics, others very soon conceived the United States as the incarnation of all the evils of modernity: unleashed capitalism, cultural uprooting, and the rule of the crowd. America as both a positive and a negative utopia has also been reflected in German literature, from Goethe’s “Auswandererbund” (in “Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre”) to Kafka’s novel “Der Verschollene”, and beyond. The course will trace images of America in German literature through the 19th and 20th centuries. It will focus on America as a phantasmagoric space, i. e. as a projection screen where European concepts of identity, of ‘Bildung’, of politics, but also of space itself and its esthetic representation are challenged.
Readings will include Goethe, Karl May, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Wolfgang Koeppen and others. The course will be given in German.
Susanne Luedemann, TTh 10:30AM-11:50AM.
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Winter 2010
Adalbert Stifter, Tales
GRMN 24510
Stifter's work has often been characterized by a conservative pursuit of balance and reconciliation. His tales were widely read in the 19th century and are still acclaimed for their sensitive descriptions of nature and a simple and beautiful harmony between man and nature. However, the idyll is deceptive: When Thomas Mann noted that "behind the quiet, inward exactitude of Stifter’s descriptions of Nature in particular, there is at work a predilection for the excessive, the elemental and the catastrophic, the pathological", he referred to what can be called the ‘hidden modernity’ of Stifter’s work. In this course we will read selected Stifter tales with regard to their contribution to the emergence of esthetic modernity.
The course will be given in German.
Susanne Luedemann
Nietzsche and Literary Modernism.
GRMN 24610.
The first half of this course is devoted to studying some of Nietzsche’s major works as cultural critic and diagnostician of the modern condition, focusing on The Birth of Tragedy, The Genealogy of Morals, and other writings. In the second half of the quarter, we examine the impact of Nietzsche, both in terms of his ideas and of his style, on some key works of Literary Modernism, including Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Ernst Jünger, and others.
Robert Buch
Jewish American Literature, Post-1945.
GRMN 27800/37800, CMLT 29800/39800, ENGL 25004/45002, YDDH 27800/37800
The goal of this course is to expand the conception of the field of Jewish American literature from English-only to English-plus. We examine how Yiddish literary models and styles influenced the resurgence of Jewish American literature since 1945, and we 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, Art Spiegelman, and Michael Chabon.
Jan Schwarz
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Spring 2010
Course descriptions to be added shortly.