LANGUAGE COURSES
Please note that all sections of German 1 through German 4 will still meet five hours per week. However, at each level we are introducing sections that will meet three days per week, rather than five days per week.
German 1
1. (5) Elementary German I. Euba in charge. Fall/Spring. Five units; classes meet three or five times a week. All four foreign language skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening) are addressed to help students acquire communicative competence in the German language while being sensitized to the links between language and culture. German 1 is for students with no prior knowledge of German.
2. (5) Elementary German II. Euba in charge. Fall/Spring. Five units; classes meet three or five times a week. Prerequisite: G1 or equivalent. In German 2, students will continue to develop communicative competence in the German language and expand their sensitivity towards the relationship between language and culture. While all language skills will be addressed, additional emphasis will be on the various styles of written and spoken German. Prerequisite: G1 or equivalent.
1G/2G. (0) Reading German for Graduates (S/U). Fall/Spring. Taken on S/U basis. Prepares graduate students from other disciplines to take their German reading exam. One year of German should be taken before 1G; 1G or consent of instructor for 2G. Students who will take 2G should enroll in it at the beginning of the semester; 2G will begin approximately the eighth week of instruction. All students interested in the G courses should attend the first meeting of the semester.
3. (5) Intermediate German I. Topics in German Language and Cultural History. Euba in charge. Fall/Spring. Five units; classes meet three or five times a week. While continuing to expand students’ communicative competence in German, this content-driven course will provide insights into postwar German history and cultural trends. Primary focus will be on the development of literacy skills (critical reading and writing), vocabulary expansion, and a thorough review of structural concepts. You will be guided towards expressing yourself on more abstract topics, such as language and power in society, multiculturalism, rebellion and protest, and social justice and towards drawing connections between texts and contexts, using a variety of text genres (journalistic, historical, short story, poetry, drama, advertising, film).
4. (5) Intermediate German II. Topics in German Language and Culture. Euba in charge. Fall/Spring. Five units; classes meet three or five times a week. In this fourth-semester German language course you will work on strengthening your interpretative abilities as well as your written and oral forms of expression. While continuing the development of communicative competence and literacy skills, students will discuss a variety of texts and films and try to find innovative ways in which to engage with familiar presuppositions about who we are, about what determines our values and actions and about the function and power of language.
READING AND COMPOSITION (Readings and discussions in English.)
R5B. (4) Reading and Composition. Fulfills the second half of the University’s Reading & Composition Requirement (equivalent to English 1B, Comp. Lit. 1 B, etc.).
Section 1: Reading and Composition- Fockele
“Then and Now” – In this class, we will explore the relationship between the past and the modern view of it by examining both medieval literary texts and a variety of modern texts about the Middle Ages. We will seek to understand the differences between texts that are a product of the time and place in which they are set and texts that make use of an imagined past.
Section 2: Reading and Composition- Little
“Fee Fi Fo Fum: An Exploration of Monsters in the Germanic World” – Magical or mundane, frightening or friendly, monsters and other supernatural creatures have long inspired our imaginations. We will examine monsters from early sagas to modern novels, considering the relationship between monsters and people and the evolution of monsters across the canvas of history.
Section 3: Reading and Composition- Meyer
“Walking in the City” – All of the texts selected for this course involve narrators and characters who experience cities from a particular point of view. Some emphasis will be placed on German-language literature (to be read in English translation) at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. However, the figure of the city in contemporary texts and in works outside of the German tradition will also be considered. Taught in English.
Section 4: Reading and Composition- Johnson
“Modernity and The New Man” – This course explores works written and created from 1900 to 1930 that exhibit excitement and apprehension about burgeoning modernity. Some of these works are representative of modernist movements, such as The Blue Rider, The Bridge, Dada, Weimar Cinema and the G-Group. Together these works anticipate the development of the “New Man”, or the modern man who will come into his own in a world that has both benefited from modernity’s technological innovations and learned from society’s mistakes made during this time of rapid change.
Section 5: Reading and Composition- Gordon
“The central question of this course will be what it means to think and read “historically”. Most of our readings will address the nature of memory, history and writing, and the close relationship between them.”
Section 6: Reading and Composition- Etzler
In this course, we will analyze various depictions of supernatural occurrences within literary and cinematic works ranging from the late 18th to the 20th century. Students will discover how fictional stories, philosophical and critical works dealing with ghosts or spirits can reveal much about the community from which they originated in terms of politics, moral values, societal structure and cultural trends. Taught in English.
COURSES TAUGHT IN GERMAN
100. (3) Introduction to Reading Culture – Dewulf.
This course is intended to acquaint students with selected works from German cultural history and to familiarize them with various methods of interpretation and analysis. Required for all German majors. Fulfills the L&S requirement in Arts and Literature or International Studies. Taught in German. Students with native fluency in German are not eligible to enroll.
101. (3) Advanced German Conversation, Composition and Style –Kooiker
Focusing on five central themes, this advanced-level language course will help students improve and expand on spoken and written language functions utilizing a variety of works from different genres in journalism, broadcasting, literature, fine arts, and cinema. The final goal is to enable students to participate in the academic discourse, written and spoken to linguistic and stylistic level appropriate for advanced students of German in upper division courses. Fulfills the L&S breadth requirement in Arts and Literature or International Studies. Taught in German. Students with native fluency in German are not eligible to enroll.
102A. (3) Cabaret Performance – Euba.
The analysis, discussion, adaptation and public performance of authentic texts from German Kabarett (i.e., comedic skits, political and social satire, parody, humorous poetry, etc.) will advance students’? language and interpersonal skills, while providing unique access to a significant dimension of German popular culture. Additional emphasis is put on aspects and practice of creative writing and German pronunciation and enunciation. Students must be available for evening rehearsals and performances on 4/22 and 4/28, 2013. Fulfills the L&S breadth requirement in Arts and Literature or International Studies. Taught in German. Taught in German. Students with native fluency are not eligible to enroll.
131 (3) Goethe. Tang.
In this undergrad seminar, we will study Goethe’s monumental drama “Faust”, his novels from “Werther” to “Wahlverwandtschaften“, as well as his experimentation with the lyrical form. Discussion in German or English, depending on the participants’ preference.
173 (3) The Phonetics and Phonology of Modern German. Shannon.
A course designed for undergraduates and graduates on the sound structure of modern German covering the fundamentals of pronunciation and the sound system, with comparison to English.
COURSES TAUGHT IN ENGLISH
C25. (4). Revolutionary Thinking: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. Feldman.
The aim of the course is to explore the central theoretical and philosophical premises of three of the most influential thinkers in the German-speaking world and to examine in detail several works in which problems of history, ideology, values, and methodology are considered. Lecture and readings in English.
160B. (4) Fascism and Propaganda- Von Hoene.
This course will focus on the theory and practice of propaganda during the 12 years of the Third Reich. It takes a close look at the ideology the Nazis tried to transmit, the techniques, organization, and effectiveness of their propaganda. Challenging the idea of the total power of propaganda, it looks for the limits of persuasion and possible other reasons for which Germans might have decided to follow Hitler. Sources will include the press, radio, film, photography, political posters, and a few literary works of the time.
179. (4) Special Topics (Cross-listed with Slavic 158) – Tennant & Frick.
“Galicia in History and Imagination”. The course looks at Galicia as the homeland of Ukrainians, Poles, Austrians, and Jews, tracing its development from the late 18th c., when it was a province on the map, through the post-communist period, when Galicia has become a site of memory for all the communities that were once neighbors there. Texts include historiography (Larry Wolff, Timothy Snyder), literature (Joseph Roth , Leopold von Sacher Masoch, Karl Emil Franzos, Stanisław Wyspiański, Bruno Schulz, Gregor von Rezzori, Paweł Huelle, Yuri Andrukhovych) and film (István Szabó’s Colonel Redl), chosen to represent the various ethnicities that have called themselves Galician since 1795.
Requirements: Regular attendance and active class participation, two midterms, and a final research paper that has not been submitted for another course.
Prerequisites: None. Instruction and readings are in English. No knowledge of the languages of Galicia is required. Students who can and wish to read texts in the original languages, however, are welcome to do so for their research projects.
GRADUATE COURSES
201E. (4) – Kudszus.
20th Century. Literary, philosophical, and cultural 20th century texts will inform and provoke our discussions. With key 20th century works engaging the occurrence and creative dissolution of various blockages, often in conjunction with the calamities and possibilities of linguistic formation, we will both study and respond to the texts at hand. In particular, the often invisible blockages and re-routings between a foreground language and obscurely present landscapes from other tongues will animate our thought. Reading 20th century texts with a focus on the vicissitudes of verbalization promises to engage both the reader’s desire for linguistic emergence and the received textual body that now comes alive in the dynamics of our freshly developing manuscripts. In continuously emerging forms, such manuscripts and their antecedents (fragments, thoughts, auditory and visual manifestations) will appear in our sessions throughout the semester. Among the various artistic manifestations we will note are Robert Walser’s microwriting, which will also be featured in the international Walser conference on madness, literature, and translation this spring in Berkeley and San Francisco.
205. (4) Studies in Medieval Literature –Niklaus Largier, co-taught with Beate Fricke (History of Art)
“The Sacred: Images, Texts, Theories”. The Sacred has become a key term in recent debates in a number of disciplines. However, what is at its core is often astonishingly undefined, open and ambivalent. Important theories of the Sacred have been articulated in the 20th century by Otto, Eliade, Caillois, Benjamin, Bataille, Auerbach, Feigel, Girard, Ricoeur, Smith, Agamben. In this course we will discuss a range of medieval and early modern images and texts in order to understand the notion of the sacred – in the past and today. Starting with medieval concepts of the sacred we will also explore modern theories of the sacred. Crossing the threshold between pre-modern and modern examples will help us to understand the premises for the visual culture involving sacred images, and more generally the sacred in medieval and modern texts. Topics that will be touched on in the course will include medieval visual culture, medieval spirituality, mysticism, visual exegesis, icons and their meanings, as well as the material, visual and theoretical aspects of sacred places, images and texts.
212A. (4) Topics in Romanticism- Tang.
This seminar will approach German romanticism from a variety of perspectives that have developed during the past decades, addressing issues such as political romanticism, green romanticism, romantic science, the romantic constellation of words, images and music, as well as the romantic legacy in European high modernism. It will feature two special events: one small symposium on romantic poetics, and a faculty panel on green romanticism.
256. (4) Problems of Literary Theory- Feldman.
This course will consider various literary-theoretical approaches to the question of how textual interpretation is mediated by reception. Thus it will investigate to what degree formal and aesthetic textual analysis is conditioned by historical factors, and also how historical interpretation is conditioned by assumptions about literary form. We will read authors in the German tradition of reception theory (e.g. Iser, Jauss); literary formalism (e.g. Shklovsky); and deconstruction (e.g. de Man); as well as some classic authors of German literary and historical thought–e.g. Koselleck, Staiger, Blumenberg. Other readings may include Gadamer, Adorno, Lukacs, Brecht, Foucault, and Hayden White.
268. (4). Film Theory – Kaes.
FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND MEDIA. The seminar will focus on the critical writings on film and photography by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor W. Adorno from the 1920s to the 1960s. We shall engage in close readings of their major works on media theory and illustrate (as well as complicate) our readings with pertinent examples from film history. We contextualize their arguments by relating them to the contemporaneous theories of Georg Simmel, Bert Brecht, Sergei Eisenstein, et al. We shall also address the legacy of critical media theory in Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Kluge, and Friedrich Kittler. All texts are in English translation.
282. (4). Old Saxon- Rauch.
Introduction to heterogeneous language which is one of the most provocative of the major Germanic dialects in terms of language identification and language origin. Reading of the Latin prose and verse prefaces that serve as the keystone to the literary and ethnographic setting of the “Heliand” and “Genesis” manuscripts including the 2006 Leipzig find. No prerequisites.
294. (4). Contrastive Grammar. Rauch.
This course combines the study of two sets of contrastive languages. One part is devoted to advanced problems and methods in the contrastive grammar of Modern German and Modern English. The grammars of the immediate predecessors of these two languages, Early New High German and Early Modern English, provide the second set of contrastive data. No prerequisites.
PEDAGOGY
350. (3) Seminar in Foreign Language Pedagogy: Teaching College German (I)- Euba.
The focus of this course is on the theory and practice of foreign language pedagogy, providing you with knowledge and tools for your career as a teacher in the language classroom and beyond, ultimately promoting continual professional growth.
DUTCH
1. (5) Elementary Dutch- Hollander.
Dutch language course for beginners. Focus of the course is on acquiring basic communicative competence in the language, i.e., developing the ability to appropriately use the language (spoken as well as written) in authentic situations.
2. (5) Elementary Dutch- Mirjam Renting.
Prerequisite: Dutch 1 or consent of instructor. In this course you reinforce and expand your knowledge of grammar and vocabulary and increase fluency through oral and written exercises. Focus of this course is on developing communicative competence in the language, i.e. developing the ability to appropriately use the language (spoken as well as written) in authentic situations. Activities to develop oral communicative competence include dialogues and group discussions, and listening to songs, conversations and interviews. You are encouraged to build confidence and skill by actively participating in classroom activities and interacting with others. Authentic readings are drawn from a variety of genres (ads, newspaper articles, short stories) and are designed to increase vocabulary and to reinforce grammatical knowledge. Writing assignments include expressing an opinion, and writing personal letters and business letters. The course meets five hours per week. In addition to classroom instruction, one hour at the language lab is required.
100 (3) Dutch for Reading Knowledge- Hollander.
Research scholars are often faced with the difficulty of reading and understanding Dutch texts. They need to only have a reading knowledge of the language and need to be able to decipher, for instance, texts written in seventeenth-century Dutch. This course is tailored to the specific needs of these students. Taught in English.
107 (3) Structure of Modern Dutch- Shannon.
The Structure of Modern Dutch. A course designed for undergraduates and graduates on the structure of modern Dutch covering all aspects of Dutch, with comparison to English and German.
125. (3) Advanced Dutch- Hollander.
This course is designed to improve both the oral and written style of the student in Dutch, employing a variety of sources ranging from the newspaper to the essay to the creative forms (poetry, short story). The art of correspondence, both formal and informal, will be taught as well as the widely-varying spoken styles.
166. (4) Anne Frank and After- Dewulf.
Anne Frank and After. Course on the Holocaust in the Netherlands based on the study of literature and film. In English.
102. (5) Intermediate Yiddish for Students- Chaver.
Further intensive study of Yiddish for advanced students, building on the foundation established in Yiddish 101, or equivalent knowledge. Advanced grammar and introduction to the reading of original texts.