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How did bawdy tales of peasants using magic to climb the social ladder get transformed into moral lessons for children? The answer lies in Romanticism and its appropriation of the imagination as a force for social transformation. As Romantics edited older tales for juvenile consumption they wrote new ones for adults. This new fiction created the matrix for modern pop genres like fantasy, science-fiction, murder mysteries, and gothic horror. To understand this paradigm shift in modern culture, we will read, discuss, and write about a variety of texts the Romantics collected, composed, or inspired, including poetry and film, in addition to classic fairy tales and academic scholarship on the topic.

Berlin is a city that reinvents itself by rewriting itself. In this writing seminar, we'll study a variety of literary, visual, and sonic texts to create a mythical map of the city from its emergence as modern metropolis in the 1920s, reduction to rubble in World War II, refuge for the disaffected in the 1980s, and rebirth in the 21st century. As we make our way through the linguistic, visual, and aural landscape of its ever-changing topography, we'll create our own stories of a mythical Berlin in dialogue with texts written by the displaced persons who breached its walls and navigated its illicit economies. We'll also become more critical readers and viewers, as well as better writers.

Singing boys. Dancing horses. Waltzing debutantes. Those fortunate enough to live in a city where each day begins with a pastry and ends with a two-liter bottle of wine must live a charmed existence! Not according to Freud. After decades of treating the morbid Viennese, he concluded that human nature must be torn between two warring forces: a love instinct and a death drive. In this FWS we'll explore both sides of Vienna's enigmatic character, its life-affirming hedonism and its self-destructive nihilism, through the lens of narrative fiction on page and on screen. Along the way, we'll learn to read and view more critically by writing our way through the best literature and cinema of the multi-ethnic metropolis on the Danube.

Violence is a complex concept with a nuanced history. Beginning with Kant and progressing through the discourses of Engels, Benjamin, Arendt, and others, this seminar will employ close readings of philosophical texts to problematize violence’s conceptual history. Through in-class discussions you will learn how violence’s various conceptualizations have shaped the political, religious, and scientific landscapes of modern life. In addition to learning this discrete body of knowledge, you will use weekly writing activities and assigned essays to develop your own critical voice. By semester’s end you will have gained a critical eye towards the institutional dilemmas of contemporary life, and through those eyes you will be empowered with the voice to change it.

Why do sports fascinate and inspire us? How and to what extent can this sports fascination shape politics, identity, and collective experience? How have we expressed this fascination through writing and media, and are there lost or forgotten ways to do it? Rather than a superfluous pastime, sports acquired, over the last century, a central role of intensity and influence in our global society, and in this sense this seminar will explore the many ways in which sports rose to a prominent object of writing— lyrically, philosophically, journalistically, academically. Students will develop analytical and creative writing skills through a series of scaffolded, process-writing exercises to produce five academically viable essays in a variety of styles and genres.

From nuclear accidents to glacial melt, literature and the arts can capture anxieties about global catastrophes beyond comprehension and register seemingly invisible traces of radical changes to landscapes. In what ways do cultural forms grasp, question, and creatively transform world-negating events? How can creative texts use cultural memories to reinvigorate worlds with meaning after traumatic disasters? Using texts about impacted and disappearing places in central and eastern Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and Antarctica, we will investigate global catastrophes through intercultural lenses to explore the strategies and solidarities that arise in response. Scaffolded essay assignments with guided drafting and peer reviews will help students identify complex, interconnected impacts on local and global communities.

What does being “genuine to oneself” mean? Can one really know what is authentic, or is all self-presentation a form of pretense? This course delves into the tension between phoniness and awkwardness as it appears in narrative fiction. If one rejects phoniness, one may appear awkward or out of sync with social norms. Yet embracing pretense erodes authenticity. What is the “self” to which one is genuine? Writing in this class is inseparable from critical reading. Assignments include weekly short responses and five 5-page essays. From sentimentalism to satire, readings include presentations of “phoniness”, e.g. Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and Nabokov’s “Pnin”. We will explore how phoniness implicates aesthetic, moral, and economic values.

How can we reorganize society based on principles of shared resources, direct democracy, gender equality, and mutual aid? For centuries, radical thinkers have responded with the same answer: the commune. In this seminar, we will consider socialist, anarchist, and feminist proposals for how to live and work outside of the confines of the single-family home. The readings will cover a wide range of genres and historical periods: from first-hand accounts of the Paris Commune of 1871 to fictional communes in utopian literature and reports on intentional communities in the Ithaca area. In this seminar, students will gain experience writing in various genres. They will refine their writing skills through regular revisions and targeted exercises to develop their voice, use of sources, and close readings.

A basic understanding of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is a prerequisite for participating in critical debates in the humanities and social sciences. Our seminar will explore key terms in the revolutionary models of critical analysis these thinkers pioneered: historical materialism, post-metaphysical philosophy, and psychoanalysis. This will mean articulating points of contrast as well as convergence. Discussions and writing exercises will focus on texts that created the discursive framework for critiquing society and culture today. Our method will proceed from the premise that critical reading, thinking, and writing are inseparable moments in the same operation of critique. The question that guides that method will be: Do alternative ways of thinking exist in opposition to the ones we view as natural, inevitable, or universal?

Students develop basic abilities in listening, reading, writing, and speaking German in meaningful contexts through interaction in small group activities. Course materials including videos, short articles, and songs provide students with varied perspectives on German language, culture, and society. Taught in German.

Students build on their basic knowledge of German by engaging in intense and more sustained interaction in the language. Students learn more advanced language structures allowing them to express more complex ideas in German. Discussions, videos, and group activities address topics of relevance to the contemporary German-speaking world. Taught in German.

Students continue to develop their language skills by discussing a variety of cultural topics and themes in the German-speaking world. The focus of the course is on expanding vocabulary, reviewing major grammar topics, developing effective reading strategies, improving listening comprehension, and working on writing skills. Small group work increases each student’s opportunity to speak in German and allows for more individualized feedback and support. Taught in German.

Elementary Yiddish I is the first in a three-class sequence that will enable students to meet their Arts & Sciences language requirement in Yiddish. It provides an introduction to reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. Yiddish contains a wealth of embedded knowledge about Ahkenazi Jewish life, both historical and contemporary. In addition to language competence the course will build understanding of this legacy through songs, humor, holiday traditions, literature, and other cultural products.

Elementary Yiddish II is the second in a three-class sequence that will enable students to meet their Arts & Sciences language requirement in Yiddish. It provides a further introduction to, and deepening of, reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. In addition to language competence the course will build understanding of Ashkenazi Jewish culture through songs, humor, holiday traditions, literature, and other cultural products.

Students examine important aspects of present-day German culture while expanding and strengthening their reading, writing, and speaking skills in German. Materials for each topic are selected from a variety of sources (fiction, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet). Units address a variety of topics including studying at a German university, modern literature, Germany online, and Germany at the turn of the century. Oral and written work and individual and group presentations emphasize accurate and idiomatic expression in German. Successful completion of the course enables students to continue with more advanced courses in language, literature, and culture. Taught in German.

Intended for intermediate students, this is the third in a three-course sequence, designed to enable students to meet the College of Arts & Sciences language requirement. Students will increase their understanding of the language in cultural context and will further develop their capacity to produce both spoken and written Yiddish.

Babylon Berlin is the most expensive and elaborate television series in German history. The neo-noir police procedural set in a mythical Berlin of 1929 was already a global hit when it entered its current, fifth season of production. This fourth-semester course is designed to improve your linguistic proficiency and cultural competency by investigating the innovative media that gave birth to the myth of Berlin as metaphorical Babylon: pulp fiction, the New Objectivity in art, sound film, and the distinctly German genre of pop music that conquered the cabarets and dance halls: the Schlager. Taught in German.

This course aims at sharpening your awareness of personal and cultural subjectivity by examining texts in a variety of media against the backdrop of cultural, political, and historical contexts. We will focus on improving your oral and written expression of idiomatic German by giving attention to more sophisticated aspects of using enriched vocabulary in a variety of conversational contexts and written genres. Materials will include readings in contemporary prose, newscasts, research at the Johnson Art Museum, and interviews with native speakers on a topic of contemporary cultural relevance. Taught in German.

Learn German and understand German business culture at the same time. This is a German language course that examines the German economic structure and its major components: industry, trade unions, the banking system, and the government. Participants will learn about the business culture in Germany and how to be effective in a work environment, Germany's role within the European Union, the importance of trade and globalization, and current economic issues in Germany. The materials consist of authentic documents from the German business world, TV footage, and a Business German textbook. Taught in German.

This course explores the history of the Holocaust during which the Nazis murdered six million Jews. Topics covered in this class include the history of antisemitism in Europe and twentieth-century Germany, the origins and rule of the Nazis, the politics of World War II, the Final Solution and extermination camps, Jewish literary responses to the Holocaust, among other topics.

Big names, Big ideas, and Big events are associated with German culture and thought: Luther, Faust, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Mozart, Beethoven, Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Einstein, Kafka and Thomas Mann; Enlightenment; World Wars and Reunification; European Union, and Migration and Refugees: In this course, we shall cover the broad spectrum of both the long tradition of German culture and thought, and examine the wide range of political, literary, sociological, and artistic topics, themes, and questions that are of urgent contemporary concern for Germany, Europe, and beyond. Guest lecturers will introduce you to the wide and exciting field of German Studies. Topics include: the age of enlightenment; literatures of migration and minorities; avant-garde art; philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory; Weimar and War; Holocaust and its Aftermath; film and media; genres of literature: novel, novella, short story, lyric poetry, anecdote, autobiography; literature and politics; literature and the environment; digital humanities and literatures/fictions of cyber space. In addition, this course will introduce you to the techniques of critical analysis and writing. Authors include among many others: Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, Freud, Kafka, Kluge, Marx, Thomas Mann, Kracauer, Benjamin.

From hieroglyphs to HTML, ancient poetry to audiotape, and Plato's cave to virtual reality, Thinking Media offers a multidisciplinary introduction to the most influential media formats of the last three millennia. Featuring an array of guests from across Cornell, including faculty from Communication, Comparative Literature, German Studies, Information Science, Literatures in English, Music, and Performing & Media Arts, the course will present diverse perspectives on how to think with, against, and about media in relation to the public sphere and private life, archaeology and science fiction, ethics and aesthetics, identity and difference, labor and play, knowledge and power, expression and surveillance, and the generation and analysis of data. (HC)

This 1-credit optional course aims to expand the students' vocabulary, and advance their speaking and reading skills as well as enhance their knowledge and deepen their cultural understanding by supplementing non-language courses throughout the University.

What forms can and should the future take? How do futures emerge in thought and action, and what is the role of reflection on past events for imagining future horizons? How can art and fiction disrupt habits of thought to bring alternative futures into view? This course will investigate seemingly disparate tools for imagining possible worlds: technology, poetic language, and cultural difference. By looking closely and critically at futurity (or its absence) in science fiction, magical realism, visual art, and new media, students will explore how historical ruptures and social violence test imaginations, and the creative forms that push back. Taught in German. Viewings and readings may include Akomfrah, Arendt, Benjamin, Berlant, Bloch, Edelman, Gaiman, Haraway, Kafka, Kaléko, Kant, Klee, Lubinetzki, Nietzsche, Sebald, and others. Taught in German.

Why do literary texts insist on bending (and even breaking) the rules that govern everyday language? Could we improve our mastery of colloquial German by accepting literature's challenge and investigating how it manipulates language in unconventional ways? We'll take an inductive approach to answering these questions by engaging in close and sustained textual analysis of poetry, prose, and plays that fascinate as well as frustrate. The course is designed to help you transition to advanced study in German, so we will also learn the terminology of poetics, rhetoric, and genre as we practice creating the oral and written texts (Referate und Seminararbeiten) that form the core of any seminar in Germanistik. Taught in German.

"Print Culture from the Medieval to the Modern" employs texts and images in the Kroch Rare Books Library and Johnson Museum of Art as a prism to consider how advances in printing technology transformed life in Germany by making verbal and visual literacy possible for most members of society. Topics include Martin Luther and the Creation of a National Language, Albrecht Dürer and the Creation of Print Art, and Käthe Kollwitz and the Politics of Print Art. All discussion, reading, and writing in German. Taught in German.

This course is aimed to increase your linguistic competencies in German, your cultural awareness, as well as critical thinking skills. We will discuss different perspectives of the German Reunification and its implications then and today. The highlight of the course will be an intercultural encounter with students from the Bielefeld Universitat in Germany. Taught in German.

From Neuschwanstein’s fairy tale palace and faux ruins at Sanssouci to Bauhaus functionality, German architectural ideas shape how people live, work, and socialize in German-speaking areas and beyond. This course will explore the planning and construction of German environments at historical junctures from 1750 through today to investigate how architecture and urban design inform values and shape societies. How do built environments reflect social commitments, and what do architectural styles signal about how we want or ought to live together? What makes a space a place? How do migration and climate change stress design, and how can architecture respond? By examining German design principles, movements, and debates, we will investigate the construction of community and place in German-speaking areas as relevant more widely. Taught in German.

A humanoid robot, an attic portal to another world, a haunted small town, an instance of time travel gone wrong—we will encounter all of these (and more) in this course on science and speculative fiction. Instructed in German, this course centers texts in German and/or about Germanophone spaces. Students will read novels, short stories, and poems; look at zines, comics, and webcomics; play through video games; and watch films. Class discussions will address topics like colonialism, climate change, escapism, dystopia/utopia, and formations of gender, sexuality, race, and nation. We will explore how narratives make use of worldbuilding, immersion, plot devices, and formal elements to unfurl these futuristic and fantastic places. Taught in German.

Focus on Kafka’s literary, theatrical, political, historical, religious, personal and intellectual environment and its impact on his literary productions. Topics of discussion include: the individual versus hierarchical systems (state, law, bureaucracy); the individual and the arts (music, theater, literature); writing between life and death; finding a home in language; the animal in the human; the body between pain and pleasure; writing between wars. Seminar will also explore Kafka’s enormous impact on modern film, drama and literature. Readings include his short stories and one novel. Taught in German.

This course provides an introduction to the theory of trauma, along with literary, artistic and clinical works that engage with traumatic experience. We will explore the enigmatic notion of an experience of catastrophe that is both deferred and repeated, that escapes immediate comprehension but insists on testimonial recognition. How does trauma require us to rethink our notions of history, memory, subjectivity, and language? Who speaks from the site of trauma, and how can we learn to listen its new forms of address? We begin with Freud's foundational studies and their reception across the 20th and 21st centuries, then examine a range of global responses reformulating individual and collective trauma in its social, historical and political contexts. Materials include theoretical, artistic, testimonial expression in various media.

“Talking trash” usually seeks to devalue its target through pejorative language or slander. Yet it’s also a way to separate self and other, or establish order by distinguishing use and waste. When is trash a helpful byproduct? What can we learn about a society from the things it rejects or discards? How might trash become a site for philosophy and art, and if it can be viewed as beautiful, should it be? This seminar explores poetic and popular “trash talk” that employs metaphors about garbage, its landscapes (landfills, wastelands), and its cognates (excess, abject, refuse, waste) to investigate what values and alternatives arise from the parts of society deemed unvaluable and the parts of life determined unviable. Taught in English.

Today, the legacy of the Middle Ages can be found everywhere, from the game of chess to Game of Thrones, the parliament to the university, the Crusades to the Vikings, the nostalgia for tradition to the very concept of modernity. This course explores the function of the medieval past through the lens of modern visual culture, as part of an emerging field known as “Medievalism.” Along with readings of classic theories of Medievalism (Huizinga, Balázs, Panofsky, Bazin, McLuhan, Eco), screenings will put auteur films (Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, Bergman’s Seventh Seal, Kurosawa’s Ran) in dialogue with popular culture (from Monthy Python to A Knight’s Tale) in order to raise the question of a Global Middle Ages. Taught in English.

An introduction (without prerequisites) to fundamental problems of current political theory, filmmaking, and film analysis, along with their interrelationship. Particular emphasis on comparing and contrasting European and alternative cinema with Hollywood in terms of post-Marxist, psychoanalytic, postmodernist, and postcolonial types of interpretation. Filmmakers/theorists might include: David Cronenberg, Michael Curtiz, Kathryn Bigelow, Gilles Deleuze, Rainer Fassbinder, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Marleen Gorris, Werner Herzog, Alfred Hitchcock, Allen & Albert Hughes, Stanley Kubrick, Fredric Jameson, Chris Marker, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Gillo Pontecorvo, Robert Ray, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Oliver Stone, George Romero, Steven Shaviro, Kidlat Tahimik, Maurizio Viano, Slavoj Zizek. Although this is a lecture course, there will be ample time for class discussions. Weekly film screening, TBA. Taught in English.

What is a comic? How might comics attend to complex historical, social, and political topics? How do comics facilitate a coming to terms with the past or function as an activist medium—spurring on political and cultural shifts? Given this great variety of comics from Germanophone locales this course engages with comics as a key literary form and one that provides a deep engagement with histories, cultures, activisms, and representations thereof. Our readings will include queer/trans comics and zines, early text/image works preceding the comic form, and webcomics on decolonization projects and fantastical places. We will also read comics scholarship and historical texts that will provide a solid foundation from which to approach these literary works. As a way of immersing ourselves into the world of comics, each student will create their own comic over the course of our class—building upon the formal components we locate in class texts. (Drawing skills are not required! Come as you are.) As comics have their own medium-specific vocabulary for visual and textual analysis, we will also spend time building the skills and vocabulary necessary for analyzing the comics we read. Taught in English.

Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors. Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives. As unbound energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life. Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology. Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.

Survey of nineteenth century philosophy.

An intensive study of the metaphysical and epistemological doctrines of the Critique of Pure Reason. Some editions of the course may also consider Kant's ethical views as laid out in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and related works.

This course examines the stories, literary examples, and metaphors at work in elaborating capitalist society and its “hero,” the modern economic subject: the so-called “homo oeconomicus.” We will examine the classic liberal tradition (e.g., Locke, Smith, Mill) alongside its later critiques (e.g., Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Brecht) as well as more recent feminist, Black, and indigenous interventions (e.g., Federici, Davis, “land-grab university” research). Throughout we will create a dialogue between texts, both across centuries (e.g., Locke on Property with Indigenous Dispossession; Balzac’s Pere Goriot with Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century) as well as across genres (e.g., Nomadland with Geissler’s Seasonal Associate). At stake are the narrative and figurative moments in theoretical texts as well as crucial literary sources (novels, novellas, and plays) as they collectively develop the modern economic paradigms of industry, exchange, credit-debt, and interest – as well as the people they often leave out: women, people of color, the working class. The seminar will include working with an archive, collection, or museum at Cornell. Taught in English.

More than thirty years after the end of the Soviet Union, we have the distance needed to view the twentieth-century state socialist project from a historical perspective-even as Cold War tropes are revived amid another major confrontation with Russia. In this course, we will analyze memoirs, oral histories, historical fiction, films, and TV shows that look back at this period. How do the makers of these works use genre as a political as well as artistic tool? What are the political implications of comedy, cosplay, or melodrama when applied to communism? How does the portrayal of this period change as state socialism recedes into the distance? Texts from Russia, Ukraine, Germany, the Balkans, the UK, and the United States.

Shortly after the 2016 election, The New Yorker published an article entitled “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump was Coming.” This course examines what the Frankfurt School knew by introducing students to Critical Theory, juxtaposing its roots in the 19th century (i.e., Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud) with its most prominent manifestation in the 20th century, the Frankfurt School (e.g., Kracauer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse) alongside disparate voices (Arendt) and radical continuations (Davis, Zuboff, Weeks) as they engage with politics, society, culture, and literature (e.g. Brecht and Kafka). Established in 1920s and continued in exile in the US during WWII, the interdisciplinary circle of scholars comprising the Frankfurt School played a pivotal role in the intellectual developments of post-war American and European social, political, and aesthetic theory: from analyses of authoritarianism and democracy to critiques of capitalism, the entertainment industry, commodity fetishism, and mass society. This introduction to Critical Theory explores both the prescience of these diverse thinkers for today’s world (“what they knew”) as well as what they perhaps could not anticipate in the 21st century (e.g., developments in technology, economy, political orders), and thus how to critically address these changes today. Taught in English.

Disciplines as different as anthropology, literary studies, philosophy, and sociology have developed a strong interest in the theory and practice of friendship in recent years; friendships are seen on TV, Facebook is based on the concept of “friends” connecting. Whereas definitions of friendship traditionally emphasized proximity, similarity, and mutuality, new readings and representations find distance, difference, and asymmetry at the core of this relation. The seminar will explore friendship as a radically different form of relationship and community. Taught in English.

This course will explore Holocaust survivor testimonies, from the multilayered history of their recording across the globe and their increasing institutionalization after the 1980s to their current uses and future promises, including digital methods. How can we approach, use, and make sense of what amounts to 20 years of uninterrupted listening? This seminar will offer a hands-on, interdisciplinary approach to these largely untapped archives around the world, probing them through the lens of history, film and media studies, trauma studies, cultural studies, and memory studies. Throughout the semester, students will each pick one video testimony to work on individually. Collectively, the course will develop tools to make these video testimonies not only a lasting memorial, but a proper object of study at the global level. Taken together, we will offer a tentative answer to an urgent question: what is the future of Holocaust and atrocity testimony, now that the last generation of survivors is passing away?

Topics vary by instructor. Taught in German.

The most intense public encounter between Existentialism and Marxism occurred in immediate post-WWII Europe, its structure remaining alive internationally. Existentialist questions have been traced from pre-Socratic thinkers through Dante, Shakespeare, and Cervantes onward; just as roots of modern materialism extend to Epicurus and Lucretius, or Leopardi. This course will focus on differing theories and concomitant practices concerned with “alienation,” “anxiety,” “crisis,” “death of God,” “nihilism,” “rebellion or revolution.” Crucial are possible relations between fiction and non-fiction; also among philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and political theory. Other authors may include: Althusser, de Beauvoir, Beckett, Büchner, Camus, Che, Dostoevsky, Fanon, Genet, Gide, Gramsci, O. Gross, Hamsun, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, C.L.R. James, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Lagerkvist, Lacan, Lenin, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Mishima, G. Novack, Nietzsche, Ortega, Pirandello, W. Reich, Sartre, Shestov, Tillich, Unamuno. There is also cinema. Taught in English.

This workshop-style course will address the question of how to draw on academic research and expertise to write for a non-specialist audience. We will discuss the benefits of public-facing writing; how to select a publication to pitch; how to pitch an article; and how to draft and revise an article once a pitch has been accepted. These skills will be developed through practice. Students will develop real pitch ideas to use as a basis for articles that will be drafted and revised over the course of the semester. We will discuss questions such as selecting appropriate venues, adapting to a new writing style, sourcing, citation practices, and communicating with editors.

An introduction to the arboreal humanities, this course examines the status of trees and forests at the intersection of ecological, aesthetic, artistic, and literary concerns. In addition to scientific texts and scholarly treatises, we will read popular accounts and literary works that examine the being of trees and forests in relation to and as conditions of possibility of human culture. Taught in English.

In the last decades, Holocaust Studies witnessed an extraordinary expansion, covering different fields of scholarship, from history to literature, from philosophy to aesthetics. This course will retrace the major steps of Holocaust history writing. It will analyze the classical debates between intentionalism and functionalism, the discrepancies between the analytical approaches focused on the perpetrators and those focused on the victims, the inscription of the Holocaust into the broader context of war violence, and its comparison with the genocidal violence of colonialism. Finally, it will investigate some methodological problems concerning the place of testimony in history writing and the permanent connections, both fruitful and problematic, between history and memory. This means taking into account the entanglement of the most productive areas of Holocaust scholarship (Germany, France and the United States) as well as the relationship between the historiography of the Holocaust and other disciplines (memory studies, postcolonial studies, etc.).

Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? At a time when reality appears dystopian, many are quick to dismiss utopian visions as naive or irresponsible. In this seminar, we take on the critical and imaginative task of considering what utopias can tell us about our pasts, presents, and possible futures. We encounter two centuries of utopias in which communes have displaced the family, mutual aid has taken the place of capitalist individualism, and sexuality is no longer linked to property rights. While these speculative times and places seek to overcome capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and the climate crisis, they remain haunted by these figures. Our treatment of utopias in theory and literature therefore includes a range of ambivalent affects and genres, from critical and ambiguous utopias to philosophical treatises and manifestos.

This course studies major works from the great 20th century literary theorist Paul de Man, one of the founders of deconstruction. We will read carefully works from across his career, including broader theoretical statements and texts more closely focused on literary and philosophical texts. The Rhetoric of Temporality, Semiology and Rhetoric, The Resistance to Theory, Autobiography as De-Facement, Shelley Disfigured, Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist, Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant, and works on Rousseau, Hegel, and others. We will include poetry and relevant sections of philosophical and theoretical material as appropriate.

This extraordinary figure died in 1941, and his death is emblematic of the intellectual depredations of Nazism. Yet since World War II, his influence, his reputation, and his fascination for scholars in a wide range of cultural and political disciplines has steadily grown. He is seen as a bridging figure between German and Jewish studies, between materialist critique of culture and the submerged yet powerful voice of theology, between literary history and philosophy. We will review Benjamin's life and some of the key disputes over his heritage; read some of the best-known of his essays; and devote significant time to his enigmatic and enormously rich masterwork, the Arcades Project, concluding with consideration of the relevance of Benjamin's insights for cultural and political dilemmas today.

The premodern world played a crucial role in the formation of postmodern theory. ‘Biblical exegesis’, ‘negative theology’, ‘inner experience’, and other premodern concepts and practices were taken up by postmodern authors including Ingeborg Bachmann, Georges Bataille, Italo Calvino, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, and Robert Musil. Each week we will read one modern author in dialogue with one premodern author, such as Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Hildegard of Bingen, and Mechthild of Magdeburg, among many others. The aim of our comparisons will be to interrogate the legacy of what Bruce Holsinger calls the “premodern condition.”

Undergraduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

Undergraduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

The Reading Course is administered by the director of the honors thesis. It carries 4 hours credit, and may be counted towards the work required for the German Major. The reading concentrates on a pre-determined topic or area. Students meet with their honors advisor about every two weeks throughout the term. Substantial reading assignments are given, and occasional short essays are written.

The thesis is to be written on a subject related to the work done in GERST 4530. A suggested length for the thesis is 50-60 pages.

Designed to familiarize students with current thought and approaches in the field of applied linguistics and language pedagogy. Introduces different models of foreign language approaches and discusses various practices for the foreign language classroom. Special consideration is given to topics such as language acquisition progression, planning syllabi, creating tasks and projects, designing classroom tests, and evaluating students' performance. Participants conduct an action research project. Taught in German.

Reading, translation, and English-language discussion of important texts in the German philosophical tradition. Readings for a given term are chosen in consultation with students.

This workshop-style course will address the question of how to draw on academic research and expertise to write for a non-specialist audience. We will discuss the benefits of public-facing writing; how to select a publication to pitch; how to pitch an article; and how to draft and revise an article once a pitch has been accepted. These skills will be developed through practice. Students will develop real pitch ideas to use as a basis for articles that will be drafted and revised over the course of the semester. We will discuss questions such as selecting appropriate venues, adapting to a new writing style, sourcing, citation practices, and communicating with editors.

This course emphasizes the acquisition of reading skills in German, using a variety of prepared and authentic texts. The follow-up course, GERST 6320, Reading Academic German II, is offered in the spring. Taught in English.

Emphasis on development of the specialized vocabulary of student's field of study. Taught in English.

In this seminar, we will draw connections between radical theories and movements from the nineteenth century to the present. Rather than identifying isolated trajectories of “Marxism” “anarchism” and “feminism,” or distinct national traditions, we will focus on key concepts within internationalist thought: from the commune, the state, and the family to empire, colonization, revolution, and the strike. Focusing on the period before and after the 1917 Russian Revolution, we will witness Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin debate the role of the state, Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg consider the benefits and limitations of reform, Vladimir Lenin and W.E.B. Du Bois address the function of the strike, and Silvia Federici, Cedric Robinson, and Andreas Malm interrogate the racialized, gendered, and extractive foundations of capital. Taught in English.

This course studies major works from the great 20th century literary theorist Paul de Man, one of the founders of deconstruction. We will read carefully works from across his career, including broader theoretical statements and texts more closely focused on literary and philosophical texts. The Rhetoric of Temporality, Semiology and Rhetoric, The Resistance to Theory, Autobiography as De-Facement, Shelley Disfigured, Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist, Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant, and works on Rousseau, Hegel, and others. We will include poetry and relevant sections of philosophical and theoretical material as appropriate.

What is the function of utopia in contemporary queer theory and practice? Initiated by José Esteban Muñoz, queer utopianism was originally a response to the so-called “anti-social turn” in queer studies that eschewed the responsibility of imagining a collective future. More than fifteen years later, we see a resurgence of utopianism in the framing of prison, family, and gender abolition as utopian projects that generate alternatives. This seminar expands the scope of queer utopia to include feminist, queer, and trans fiction and theory, from novels by Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, and Jordy Rosenberg to the theory of Herbert Marcuse, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa. We will consider the many ways in which gender and sexuality have been reimagined within utopian literature, theory, and political practice, as well as the limits of these interventions.

This seminar explores the writing of revolutionary moments, when the course of history is interrupted and announces a new path, one that can be realized, betrayed, or compromised. What are the strategies for capturing, condensing, and making legible events that have an often unrecognized pre-history, an explosive moment, and various aftermaths? How do literary and theoretical strategies differ? After a quick look at the Peasants War and its theorizations by Bloch, Engels, and the Wu Ming collective, the course focuses on the long nineteenth century in Europe (including its colonies) and its series of revolutionary convulsions: the French Revolution (Buechner, Weiss, Kant, Hegel, Burke, Tocqueville), the Haitian Revolution (Kleist, CLR James, Hegel, Buck-Morss); the weavers uprising of 1844 (Hauptmann, Heine, Kollwitz); the 1848 revolutions (Marx, Flaubert, Tocqueville), and the Paris Commune of 1871 (Kristin Ross).

This required seminar for the new graduate minor in media studies considers media from a wide number of perspectives, ranging from the methods of cinema and television studies to those of music, information science, communication, science and technology studies, and beyond. Historical and theoretical approaches to media are intertwined with meta-critical reflections on media studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Close attention will be paid to media's role in shaping and being shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other politically constructed categories of identity and sociality.

This extraordinary figure died in 1941, and his death is emblematic of the intellectual depredations of Nazism. Yet since World War II, his influence, his reputation, and his fascination for scholars in a wide range of cultural and political disciplines has steadily grown. He is seen as a bridging figure between German and Jewish studies, between materialist critique of culture and the submerged yet powerful voice of theology, between literary history and philosophy. We will review Benjamin's life and some of the key disputes over his heritage; read some of the best-known of his essays; and devote significant time to his enigmatic and enormously rich masterwork, the Arcades Project, concluding with consideration of the relevance of Benjamin's insights for cultural and political dilemmas today.

This seminar examines German media theories from the Frankfurt School to the Kittler Network and beyond. We will discuss influential concepts associated with this work (e.g., the culture industry, the public sphere, discourse networks), along with related concepts in media and cultural studies (e.g., space and time, analog and digital, old and new media). Theoretical readings address questions about media aesthetics, intermediality, and media change; automation, mechanization, and standardization; and communication, command, and control. Engaging with scholarly debates about interdisciplinarity and theory transfer, we will also revisit and revise reductive stereotypes about media critique, technological determinism, and the Germanness of German media theories.

The premodern world played a crucial role in the formation of postmodern theory. ‘Biblical exegesis’, ‘negative theology’, ‘inner experience’, and other premodern concepts and practices were taken up by postmodern authors including Ingeborg Bachmann, Georges Bataille, Italo Calvino, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, and Robert Musil. Each week we will read one modern author in dialogue with one premodern author, such as Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Hildegard of Bingen, and Mechthild of Magdeburg, among many others. The aim of our comparisons will be to interrogate the legacy of what Bruce Holsinger calls the “premodern condition.”

What is illness? What is health? The human body seems to vacillate between these dichotomous versions of its existence. This seminar traces the cultural/historical developments/traditions that define illness, disease, well-being, treatment, cure and approaches to death. We will approach the topic at the intersections of medicine, philosophy, psychology and literature. Authors will include: Herodot, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Galen, von Bingen, Burton, Paracelsus, Kant, Novalis, Herder, Hegel, Stifter, Dostojevskij, Tolstoj, Nietzsche, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Freud, Foucault, Susan Sontag et al.

Some of the most powerful approaches to visual practices have come from outside or from the peripheries of the institution of art history and criticism. This seminar will analyze the interactions between academically sanctioned disciplines (such as iconography and connoisseurship) and innovations coming from philosophy, psychoanalysis, historiography, sociology, literary theory, mass media criticism, feminism, and Marxism. We will try especially to develop: (1) a general theory of "visual ideology" (the gender, social, racial, and class determinations on the production, consumption, and appropriation of visual artifacts under modern and postmodern conditions); and (2) contemporary theoretical practices that articulate these determinations. Examples will be drawn from the history of oil painting, architecture, city planning, photography, film, and other mass media.

This graduate seminar provides a basic introduction to the thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and to the latter’s interpretation and appropriation of the former. A major concern is the articulation of philosophy and politics, particularly in the case of Heidegger. We are also interested in the types of argumentation and styles of writing of both thinkers, including in light of the hypothesis that they were working in the ancient tradition of prudent exotericism, viz. that they never wrote exactly what they thought and that they intended their influence to come slightly beneath the level of conscious apprehension. We also consider their impact on the long list of intellectuals across the ‘Left-Center-Right’ spectrum, including (depending on seminar-participant interest): Adorno, Agamben, Bataille, Badiou, Bourdieu, Butler, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Gadamer, Irigaray, Klossowski, Löwith, Marcuse, Rorty, Leo Strauss, Vattimo, Zupancic. The readings are provided in German (and French or Italian in some cases) and in English translations, when these exist. Discussion and papers in English. Students from all disciplines are welcome.

What is (not) a medium? How have various cultural techniques and media technologies historically informed philosophers and philosophical traditions? To what extent might the very existence of media in the world shape our possibilities of thinking? This seminar introduces the key concepts and scholarly debates around the emergent field of “media philosophy.” We will read and discuss continental philosophers whose thinking about media presents new insights into their work, while also doing rigorous conceptual work on the meanings of “media,” “aesthetics,” “messages,” “intelligence,” “nature,” “technology,” “environments,” “surroundings,” “epistemology,” “ontology,” and “philosophy.” Taught in English.

“Prophetic Realisms” explores the notion that certain literary texts – those that are deeply embedded in the socio-economic totality of the world they build – not only provide insight into the present world, but also anticipate the shape of things to come: the tendencies and trajectories of coming historical formations. The latent is already manifest so that, strangely, one of the proving grounds of literature is history. This idea is very pronounced in Georg Lukacs’ 1930s writing on Realism, but also shared by his antagonists in the ‘Expressionist Debates,’ such as Ernst Bloch: the one point they agree on is literature’s ability to ‘anticipate’ historical developments. This idea is expressed, in a different way, by Erich Auerbach’s 1937 essay “On the Serious Imitation of the Everyday” and 1938 essay “figura”. In this course we will look at these 1930s writings, constellating them with the 1830s texts that harken back to as anticipating the direction of capitalism (Balzac, but also Stendahl), alongside the early 1900s novels anticipating the rise of fascism (Heinrich Mann, but also Fallada), and finally juxtaposing them with science fiction since the 1960s, including theoretical reflections on them with respect to ‘prediction’, such as Philip K Dick, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood. We are interested in moments when historical time seems to become ‘concentrated,’ hence the axes of 1830/1930/2030.

This course offers a systematic in-depth study of Hegel’s Aesthetics, one of the towering monuments in the development of the discipline. In addition to Hegel’s voluminous lectures, we will also consider more recent reactions to and critiques of it. Taught in English.

Graduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

The course consists of a bi-weekly workshop series focusing on a range of interdisciplinary topics and sponsored by the Institute for German Cultural Studies (IGCS). Speakers include prominent scholars in the field of German Studies (understood in a wide, interdisciplinary sense) and advanced graduate students, who discuss their work-in-progress based on pre-circulated papers. Besides attending the workshops, course participants meet with the instructor for two additional sessions devoted to pursuing the ties between the topics and disciplinary fields showcased by the speakers and the students' own work. The course is thus intended both as a survey of disciplinary approaches in German and Humanities Studies and as a framework that allows graduate students to hone professional skills (presenter and panel respondent, newsletter contributor, etc).

Graduate student and faculty advisor to determine course of study and credit hours.

The course consists of a bi-weekly workshop series focusing on a range of interdisciplinary topics and sponsored by the Institute for German Cultural Studies (IGCS). Speakers include prominent scholars in the field of German Studies (understood in a wide, interdisciplinary sense) and advanced graduate students, who discuss their work-in-progress based on pre-circulated papers. Besides attending the workshops, course participants meet with the instructor for two additional sessions devoted to pursuing the ties between the topics and disciplinary fields showcased by the speakers and the students' own work. The course is thus intended both as a survey of disciplinary approaches in German and Humanities Studies and as a framework that allows graduate students to hone professional skills (presenter and panel respondent, newsletter contributor, etc).