Courses

101-102-103. Elementary German for Beginners. PQ: Knowledge of German not required. No auditors permitted. The aim of the course is to teach students how to communicate in German and to do so as accurately as possible. It enables them to express ideas in simple sentences, to comprehend ideas expressed through the vocabulary and the structures acquired, to understand simple German prose on nontechnical subjects, and to write short passages about a familiar topic without the help of a dictionary. At the same time, the course seeks to convey knowledge about German-speaking countries and aspects of their everyday culture, and to familiarize the students with major issues of contemporary life in those societies. Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

104-105. Elementary German. PQ: Placement test or consent of German language coordinator. No auditors permitted. Together with German 200, this sequence fulfills the Common Core foreign language requirement. This sequence is an accelerated version of the German 101-102-103 sequence, building on students' previous knowledge of German. The objectives are identical to those of German 101-102-103. Staff. Autumn, Winter.

200. Intermediate German (Variant A). PQ: German 105. No auditors permitted. Together with German 104 and 105, this course fulfills the Common Core foreign language requirement. The course objectives are identical to those of German 201. Classes conducted mostly in German. Staff. Spring.

201. Intermediate German (Variant B). PQ: German 103, 105, or equivalent. No auditors permitted. This course fulfills the Common Core foreign language requirement. Intensive review and practice in reading, writing, understanding, and speaking German. Short readings acquaint students with aspects of culture and the current situation in German-speaking countries. Some readings are chosen according to students' interests, with the sections geared to three tracks: humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Students should register for the track that corresponds to their interests. Classes conducted mostly in German. Staff. Autumn.

202-203. Advanced Intermediate German. PQ: German 201 or equivalent. No auditors permitted. This course aims at refinement in reading, writing, understanding, and speaking German. It serves as an introduction to literary analysis through readings of modern German writers and acquaints students with non-fictional writings of contemporary prose, including articles from major German newspapers and magazines. It includes discussion of the current situation in German-speaking countries. Readings are supplemented by audio and visual materials as appropriate. Classes conducted mostly in German. Staff. Winter, Spring.

210-211-212. PQ: German 203 or equivalent. No auditors permitted. This three-course sequence is designed to make the transition from intermediate German to upper level literature and culture courses. The courses are based on selected readings of increasing length, complexity, and intellectual challenge grouped around a theme chosen by the individual instructor. Classes conducted in German.

210. German Conversation. The course stresses the development of speaking skills through oral presentations and class discussions based on readings, as well as tapes, films, videos, television, and radio programs. Staff. Autumn.

211. Sprachübungen für Fortgeschrittene. The purpose of this course is to further refine a student's ability in all four language skills. Emphasis is placed on finer points of usage. Readings are augmented by materials from other media. Staff. Not offered 1996-97; will be offered 1997-98.

212. German Composition. Special emphasis is placed on writing correct German prose through frequent and varied assignments based on the class readings. Staff. Winter.

219. Women's Cinema in Germany: Feminism and Female Spectatorship (=CMS 227, GS Hum 209, Hum 227). This course is designed to offer students an introduction to both feminist film theory and feminist filmmaking in Germany. By bringing together questions of gender and representation with questions of spectatorship and the cinema (as an institution), the syllabus aims to challenge how we think about concepts such as women's cinema and feminism in general and more specifically in the Federal Republic. We consider a range of issues in postwar German history as well as various formal experiments with genre (e.g., documentary, melodrama, the essay film, and comedy) and consider the "feminism" of certain filmic approaches to topics such as World War II, the consumer culture of the fifties, the student movement, the women's movement, terrorism, and the situation of "foreigners." Films in German with English subtitles. T. Caprio. Autumn.

222/412. New German Cinema: History and Subjectivity (=CMS 226, Eng 284, GS Hum 211/311). The aim of this course is to present an important body of postwar German film in its historical and intellectual context. Films by Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Rainer Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, Wim Wenders, Helke Sander, and Helma Sanders-Brahms are considered in relationship to contemporaneous New Cinemas in Europe, North and South America, and to political and intellectual developments within West Germany. We look at how new paradigms of film and social theory influenced films' dramaturgy, visual style, and narrative form, and also precipitated debates about film as a social and political force. All readings available in English; all films subtitled. K. Trumpener. Not offered 1996-97; will be offered 1997-98.

223. Seminar: Brecht und das epische Theater. PQ: Knowledge of German and consent of instructor. This course is intended especially but not exclusively for new, incoming students who have taken four years of German in high school or spent at least one year in a German-speaking country; the latter category includes native speakers of German. All prospective participants must have passed the Advanced Placement Examination with a grade of 4 or higher. The plays Baal and Trommeln in der Nacht, one or two Lehrstücke, and at least three of Brecht's later plays are discussed in their historical and literary context, lending particular attention to the relationship between the playwright's innovative dramaturgy and his political engagement. Some of Brecht's poems are also considered. Classes conducted in German. P. Jansen. Autumn.

225. Moderne Erzählungen. PQ: At least eight quarters of College German or the equivalent. Open to College students only. The aim of this course is to explore German and Austrian notions of modernism and modernity through a detailed reading of narratives written between 1890 and 1914. We pay particular attention to the way these texts depict social, symbolic, and psychological crises and think about the relationship between historical crisis and formal innovations. Texts are by Schnitzler, Kafka, Kraus, Musil, Rilke, Freud, Einstein, Döblin, Mann, Hesse, Hauptmann, and Simmel. Classes conducted in German. A. Gailus. Spring.

232/332. Postwar Cinema and History: "History Written in Lightning" (=CMS 225, ComLit 341, GS Hum 228/328). From its beginning, the cinema has been preoccupied with historical subjects to restage the past. This course focuses on a body of postwar films (including works by Rossellini, Straub and Huillet, Pasolini, Watkins, Jansco, Syberberg, Schroeter, Pontecorvo, Kluge, Resnais, Wajda, Szabo, Solanis and Gettino, Ray, Sanders-Brahms, Angeloupolos, and Rouan) that use materialist, documentarist, structuralist, annalistic, mythopoetic, and psychoanalytic models to think about historical events and experience. Readings are by Lévi-Strauss, Braudel, LeRoy Ladurie, Auerbach, Sartre, Fanon, Momigliano, Foucault, Ferro, Koselleck, as well as by everyday life, feminist, and subaltern historians. K. Trumpener. Spring.

240. Europe: 1930-1990 (=Hist 232/332). The focus of the course, which is primarily designed for upper-level undergraduates, is pan-European. It encompasses both Western and Eastern Europe. At its center are the origins and nature of postwar European stabilization and what happened to it in the 1980s and 1990s. We discuss the regime of mass production and consumption as well as the politics of national and transnational integration in the context of East-West confrontation. We also look at processes of regional and social marginalization and pay particular attention to questions of immigration and citizenship. M. Geyer. Spring.

243. Judaic Civilization III: The German-Jewish Experience (=Hum 202, JewStd 202). PQ: Reading knowledge of German helpful but not required. This course is designed as an exploration of cultural interactions between Jews and Christians within sixteenth- through twentieth-century Germany. Such interactions helped define the German-Jewish experience: its modes of thought, action, and cultural creativity and its assimilation to and difference from a sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile, ever-ambivalent societal environment. Readings include selections from authors, non-Jewish as well as Jewish, such as Reuchlin, Mendelssohn, Kant, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Börne, Heine, Hermann Cohen, Marx, Freud, Mann, Arendt, Buber, and Scholem. S. Jaffe. Spring.

244. Brecht and Beyond (=CMS 285, Eng 244, GS Hum 248). Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the twentieth century. In this course, we explore the range and variety of Brecht's own theater, from the anarchic plays of the 1920s to the agitprop Lehrstücke to the classical parable plays, as well as the works of his heirs in Germany (Heiner Müller, Franz Xaver Kroetz, and Peter Weiss), Britain (John Arden, Edward Bond, and Caryl Churchill), and sub-Saharan Africa (Soyinka, Ngugi, and various South African theater practitioners). We also consider the impact of Brechtian theory on film, from Brecht's own Kuhle Wampe to Jean-Luc Godard. L. Kruger. Winter.

275/375. Poetry of the Jews, Germans, and Other "Others" (=GS Hum 279/379, Hum 254, JewStd 275). PQ: Reading knowledge of German helpful but not required. The course consists of a series of close readings in several subgenres of verse, mostly (but not exclusively) from the modern period. Its aim is to explore how problematic identities such as those of Germans, of Jews, and of other "Others" creatively reinvent and reinscribe themselves within that most personal and intimate of canonical genres, lyric poetry. Poets read include Heine, Lazarus, Bialik, Lasker-Schüler, Celan, Reznikoff, Shapiro, McElroy, Amichai, Pagis, and Percy. Suggestions for poems are welcome. Texts in English and the original. S. Jaffe. Winter.

282. Henrik Ibsen: Problems of Democracy, Ethics, and Gender Relations. F. Engelstad.

283/383. Berlin Modernism (=GS Hum 282/382). PQ: Reading knowledge of German. This is a course on the art and literature of Berlin from 1900 to 1933. The focus is on connections among the arts and on social context. R. von Hallberg. Spring.

291/391. Nietzsche's Rhetoric (=GS Hum 285/385). This course is designed to serve as an introduction both to Nietzsche's thought and to the modernization and postmodernization of ancient arts of rhetoric in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The main text is The Rhetoric of the Greeks and Romans, a lecture course Nietzsche offered during the winter semester of 1872-73 in his capacity as professor of classical philology at the University of Basle. Central issues include the text's relation to rhetorical tradition, to Nietzsche's philology, to his early stand for a rehumanization of philology, to his philosophy, to his antireligious religiosity, and to his (re)constructive as well as deconstructive culturology. Texts in English and the original. S. Jaffe. Spring.

298. Thesis Tutorial. PQ: Fourth-year standing. Staff. Spring.

299. Individual Reading Course in German. PQ: Consent of department. Students must consult with an instructor by the eighth week of the preceding quarter to determine the subject of the course and the work to be done. Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form. Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

352. Sturm und Drang. PQ: Knowledge of German. The period is examined in its literary, cultural, social, and political context. Some of its manifestos and theoretical writings are discussed, but the main emphasis is on the characteristics of the movement as they emerge from a close analysis of the typical Sturm und Drang works, especially plays and poems. Dealing only marginally with the pertinent works of Goethe and Schiller, we examine the writings of Klinger, Lenz, Leisewitz, Gerstenberg, Friedrich Müller, and H. L. Wagner. Critical attention is focused on the relationship between content and structure of Sturm und Drang literature, this being an essential aspect of the period's aesthetics. P. Jansen. Spring.

357. August von Kotzebue und die Anfänge der Kulturindustrie. PQ: Knowledge of German and consent of instructor. August von Kotzebue (1761-1819) was by far the most commercially successful playwright of his age--and the most controversial. Very few of his countless dramatic texts have survived the disdain of critics. But his eagerness to cater to the taste and concerns of his contemporaries makes his entire oeuvre a treasure trove of information on the issues of his day, and his unfailing instinct for manipulating the reactions of audiences foreshadows modern media techniques. A number of Kotzebue's "forgotten" plays are discussed and analyzed with particular attention to both their historical topicality and the "timelessness" of their manipulatory method. Readings and lectures in German, discussions in German and English. P. Jansen. Spring.

392. Freud: Interpretation, (Re)construction, and Culture. PQ: Reading knowledge of German helpful but not required. Consent of instructor. This course undertakes to introduce Freud from the perspective of his relation to the tradition of classical studies in the twentieth century: as interpreter and critic, historian and psychologist, philosopher and pedagogue of the "the unconscious." Texts include The Interpretation of Dreams (1900); Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920); The Ego and the Id (1923); Civilization and its Discontents (1930); and Constructions in Analysis (1937). S. Jaffe. Autumn.

101-102-103. First-Year Norwegian. This course sequence fulfills the Common Core foreign language requirement. The aim of this course sequence is to provide students with a practical foundation in reading, writing, and speaking bokmaal, the dominant written and spoken language in Norway, and to introduce them to present-day Norwegian and Scandinavian culture and society. Language labs are at least one hour a week in addition to scheduled class time. Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

201-202-203. Second-Year Norwegian. PQ: Norweg 103 or consent of instructor. This three-quarter sequence further develops the students' ability to read, write, and converse authentically in Norwegian bokmaal. Classes are conducted in Norwegian and stress frequent student participation in conversation and role-playing. Reading and discussion topics are taken from a wide variety of cultural sources, including Norwegian newspaper articles, radio programs, films, and introductory literary texts (short stories, poems, plays, and one novel). The course sequence also includes some use of nynorsk language and texts. Not offered 1996-97; may be offered 1997-98.

101-102-103. First-Year Swedish. This course sequence fulfills the Common Core foreign language requirement. Reading and writing skills and a thorough foundation in Swedish grammar are basic aims in this introductory course sequence. Immediate emphasis is also given to oral communication. Short dialogues related to specific situations and based on the exchange of useful phrases facilitate the initial grasp of spoken Swedish. In addition, students are introduced to present-day Swedish culture and society. Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

201-202-203. Second-Year Swedish. PQ: Swed 103 or consent of instructor. This course consists of a review and refinement of skills in Swedish grammar, composition, and conversation. Selected readings of shorter works by modern authors, newspapers, and other sources provide background for discussions on a variety of topics, including history, traditions, current events, and film. Not offered 1996-97; may be offered 1997-98.

Go to top of document