For all meeting days and times please see the Online Schedule of Classes(link is external)
German 204: Compact Seminar (G. E. LESSING –DRAMATURGY OF CRITICAL REASON)
2 Units
Instructor: Hinrich Seeba
Principles of Enlightenment such as the secular emancipation of the individual, were perceived philosophically by Johann Martin Chladenius, Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant, and explored dramaturgically by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781). As a drama critic and dramaturg, Lessing worked for the first standing theater in Germany, in Hamburg, and was instrumental in developing the concept and the practice of literary criticism. He defined drama by its temporal structure as opposed to spatial painting, thus freeing literature from the Horatian rule ut pictura poesis, he introduced dramatic perspectivism and created in the figure of Nathan a famous icon of Jewish emancipation. As the head of the Berlin Enlightenment, he argued for the freedom of thought and for social tolerance and thus became one of the cultural figure heads of political liberalism, both admired and, especially in the Third Reich, shunned. We will discuss excerpts from Lessing’s critical writings such as Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766), Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767), Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet (1769), Über das Wörtlein Tatsache (1779) as well as the dramas Minna von Barnhelm (1763), Emilia Galotti (1772) and Nathan der Weise (1779).
NOTE: Please note that this course meets for only 5 Fridays starting 01/24/2025 and ending 02/21/2025!
Taught in German.
German 214 sec.002/ Film 240 sec.003: 20th Century Literature (Critical Theory and Photography)
4 Units
Instructor: Tony Kaes
The project of this seminar is to examine the theory and history of photography through the lens of the Frankfurt School. We will begin by discussing the seminal texts of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer in the context of emerging media technologies from the 1840s to the 1930s, including the relationship between still and moving images at the birth of film. We will pay special attention to the modernist photography of the Bauhaus and New Objectivity. In the second half of the seminar, we will analyze the vital impulses of Weimar visual culture for abstract and conceptual photography from the 1960s to the present. Critical theory (in its broadest sense) will also help us understand the changing status and function of the photographic image in the digital age.
Taught in English.
German 215: What, if anything, is the Human
4 Units
Instructor: Hannes Bajohr
Since the mid-twentieth century, the notion “the human” has become highly contested: Do we have an essential nature, or are all such definitions historically contingent and exclusionary, shaped by power relations, colonial histories, and the legacies of Western humanism? Can we still speak meaningfully of “humanity” in an age of ecological crisis and artificial intelligence, or is the very category of the human dissolving in the face of these challenges? This class approaches these questions through several frameworks: German philosophical anthropology, French antihumanism, and contemporary posthumanism. We will ask: What is “man” after European colonialism, after the “Anthropocene” that bears his name, and after the prospect of a technology that is more-than-human? Drawing from thinkers such as Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen, Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, Sylvia Wynter and Donna Haraway, we will explore how notions of the human have been framed, contested, and redefined across the 20th and 21st centuries.
Taught in English.
German 256/Comp. Lit. 258: Problems of Literary Theory (Essays and Essayism)
4 Units
Instructor: Niklaus Largier
“The essay does not play by the rules of organized science and theory,” writes Theodor W. Adorno in his great study, “The Essay as Form.” For Adorno, the essay “suspends the traditional concept of method,” preferring instead to operate obliquely, through association, “conjointly and in freedom.” It avoids the idealist obsession with primordial phenomena or grounds for experience, working instead in the realm of mediations and artefacts, exploring the cultural garbage inherited from the past.
In this seminar we will take seriously Adorno’s focus on the essay as a tool of investigation rooted in history and cultural tradition. We will track the emergence of the essay as a tool for investigation, from Montaigne’s invention of the form in the sixteenth century up through the current explosion in new types of essayistic writing. We will focus not only on a set of poetic and philosophical problems raised by the essay (the role of digression, for example, or the vagabond representation of selfhood), but also on the historical evolution of the form, and its relationship to other types of art that seek to appropriate its disruptive energy (the novel, the “film essay”). We will study a number of major essay writers (Montaigne, Bacon, Emerson, Nietzsche, Woolf, Valéry, James Baldwin, Joan Didion et al), as well as a set of fiction writers who draw upon the resources of the essay (Laurence Sterne, Robert Musil, Jorge Luis Borges et al). In the largest context, we will be interested in what a study of the essay might teach us about our own writing
Taught in English.
German 375A: Teaching College German I
4 Units
Instructor: Niko Euba
Focusing on the theory and practice of foreign language pedagogy, this course is designed to provide graduate students in German with knowledge and tools for their careers as teachers in the language classroom and beyond. While emphasizing critical reflection on pedagogical practices–-one’s own and that of others–-students will also be introduced to the field of Second Language Acquisition research and its relationship to pedagogy. This, along with the development of practices that promote continuing professional growth, should provide a basis for the ability to stay theoretically informed and to participate in the professional discourse of a rapidly developing field. Included in this course is a significant practical component addressing the day-to-day challenges of planning for and teaching the simultaneously offered elementary German language courses.