GERMAN
Language and Reading Courses -- Graduate Courses 2008/2009 -- Undergraduate Courses 2008/2009
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Fall 2008
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.
Christiane Frey
Classic Yiddish Fiction: Sholem-Aleichem & Diasporic
GRMN 27708/37708, YDDH 27708, CMLT 29401/39401, ENGL 28908/ 48909
Course description to be added shortly.
Jan Schwarz
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Winter 2009
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.
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.
Christopher Wild
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Spring 2009
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.
Katharina Loew