GERM 3000 (3)   

3:30 - 4:45 MW
Mr. Wellmon

TBA

GERM  3559 (3)  Future Images of the Past

10:00-10:45 MWF

Ms. Zuerner  

This course seeks to ground students in understanding and grappling with the contentious pasts related to genocides of Europe during the 1900s - spanning from the Herero and Nama Genocide, the Shoah, to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Examining these atrocities through the lenses of literature, film, and memorial projects, diverse perspectives - not only from the generation experiencing the atrocities, but those of second and later generations, will be foregrounded. The events will be considered related to how they are remembered, perceived and worked through in the present and what that means for current and future understandings of these events, utilizing memorial sites as concrete examples of these representations as they are created, updated, etc.

GERM  (3)   

3:30-4:45 TR

Mr. Grossman 

German Jewish Literature and Culture, 1890-1950

In the German-speaking world – which beyond Germany has included Austria and various regions in Eastern Europe – Jews never numbered more than about 1% of the population. Yet, historian Steven Aschheim suggests that German-speaking Jews did not merely “contribute” to the surrounding environment but were “well-nigh co-constitutive” of modern German culture and society. In the twentieth-century, intellectuals like Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt, among many others, radically transformed the ways one thought about the mind and body, sexuality, technology and artistic forms, the physical world, literature, aesthetics, politics, and more. Focusing on a selection of German Jewish thinkers who engaged primarily with literature, the arts, humanities, and politics, we will ask if and how their intellectual concerns, broadly conceived, related to the place of Jews – and their own place as Jews – in the modern world. This matters not least because they lived in a world could at times be welcoming, at other times disdainful, even dismissive, and at still others vehemently, even violently, hostile toward the Jewish population, a hostility often directed especially at Jewish intellectuals who were at the forefront of the avant-garde (literary, philosophical, political, and otherwise).

Besides those noted above, readings may include texts by Else Lasker-Schüler, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Walter Rathenau, Theodor Herzl, Berta Pappenheim, Gustav Landauer, Egon Erwin Kisch, Gertrud Kolmar, among others.

GERM  (1)  

6:00-7:00 W 
TBA 

For students residing in the German group in Shea House. May be taken more than once for credit. Departmental approval needed if considered for major credit. Prerequisite: instructor permission."

GETR 1392 (3) Fairy Tales   

5:00-6:15 MW

Mr.  Schmid

In fairy tales, everything is possible: throw a frog against the wall, it may well turn out to be a prince in disguise; go visit your grandmother and you may realize that she has been eaten and replaced by a wolf; and if you have plans for the next hundred years, you better beware of being pricked by a spindle. Entering the world of fairy tales often feels like passing into an elaborate dream: it is a world teeming with sorcerers, dwarves, wondrous objects, and animals that speak. In this seminar, we focus on tales from fairy tale traditions in Germany and around the world. Why did the Grimm brothers bother to collect fairy tales? How does Disney depict the fairy tale in film? –  These are some of the questions that our seminar addresses.  Requirements include regular attendance, active participation, exams, and written assignments.

GETR 2710/ENWR 2510  (3) Faust: The Dilemmas of Desire  

3:30-4:45 MW

Mr.   Grossman

Goethe's Faust has been called an “atlas of European modernity” and “one of the most recent columns for that bridge of spirit spanning the swamping of world history.” The literary theorist Harold Bloom writes:  “As a sexual nightmare of erotic fantasy, [Faust] ... has no rival, and one understands why the shocked Coleridge declined to translate the poem. It is certainly a work about what, if anything, will suffice, and Goethe finds myriad ways of showing us that sexuality by itself will not.  Even more obsessively, Faust teaches that, without an active sexuality, absolutely nothing will suffice.”           

              Taking Goethe's Faust as its point of departure, this course will trace the Faust legend from its rise over 400 hundred years ago to the modern age.  Retrospectively, we will explore precursors of Goethe's Faust in the form of the English Faust Book and Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker, to which Goethe responded.  We will then read Goethe's Faust, parts I and parts II (either in its entirety or in excerpts), in part as a response to Rousseau’s Although now a major work in the European canon, Goethe sought in his Faust to radically transform central tenants of the legend and to challenge many conventions of European culture, politics, and society.  We will also study Byron's melancholy attempt in Manfred to respond to part I of Goethe’s Faust create a theater of the emotions that explores problems of power, sexuality, and guilt.  And we will venture into the twentieth century, viewing first F.W. Murnau's avant-garde Faust film (1926) as a response to contemporary European/German society and technology, and Istvan Szabo’s film Mephisto (1981), which wrestled with Nazism in the land of Goethe's Faust.

          Our aim will be to ask why writers repeatedly returned to the Faust legend and how, in re-working Faust, they sought to confront the political, social, and cultural problems of their own times. 

              This course is cross-listed with ENWR 2510.

GETR 3559 (3) The Crime of Writing   

5:00-6:15 TR

Mr. Bennett  

This course will concentrate not only on the possibility of considering writing a crime, but also on fictional writing about crime, in the detective novel.  On the theme of writing as an offence against society, the readings will include Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and two stories of Kafka, plus a couple of pieces from modern literature in the U.S. and France.  The authors of detective fiction who will be read include Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Dashiell Hammet, Margery Allingham, and Rex Stout.  Requirements include participation in class discussion, a short (5-6 page) midterm paper on an assigned topic, and a longer final paper on a topic of the student’s choosing.

GETR  3470 (3) Writing and Screening the Holocaust  

3:30 - 6:00 MW

Mr. Grossman

The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard likened the effect of the Holocaust to that of an earthquake that “destroys not only lives, buildings, and objects but also the instruments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly.” In the death camp Treblinka, as many as two to three thousand people per day were gassed to death for months on end; at Auschwitz, nearly 1.1 million were killed; and as many as 2 million Jews were rounded up and murdered in mass shootings and associated massacres in Poland, Ukraine, and other locations, mostly in Eastern Europe. How, to follow upon Lyotard, have survivors and others concerned with the events contributing to the Holocaust and with its impact sought to write about it? Or to represent it visually, e.g., in film? What role does memory, whether individual or collective, play in their attempts? Can their works give expression to the trauma experienced by the victims and survivors? And if so, how? This course explores different approaches taken by writers and filmmakers and others who have grappled with these questions. 

Readings drawn from Primo Levi, Art Spiegelman, Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Delbo,Theodor Adorno, Ruth Kluger, Tadeusz Borowski, among others; screenings of the films Casablanca (1942), dir. Michael Curtiz, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956); parts of Claude Lanzman’s Shoah (1985), Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), and possibly others.

The course assumes no prior knowledge of the subject matter.

GETR  3780/ENGL 3690 (3) Memory Speaks 

2:00-3:15 TR

Ms. Martens 

Memory is a crucial human faculty.  Our ability to remember our own past is one of the things that make us human.  Memory has long been thought to ground identity: without memory, one has no sense of self.  Memory has been seen as fundamental to psychic health, and even as a remedy in times of trouble, as well as essential to our ability to imagine the future.  Remembering has its delights.  Certainly the idea of losing one’s memory, through shock or illness for example, is terrifying to contemplate.  Yet having too many memories of the wrong kind is believed to endanger our equilibrium.   Maddeningly, given its power to make us healthy or sick, memory often lies beyond our conscious control.  It operates according to its own laws, giving us what we want only sometimes.  Undeniably useful, it has also been seen as deceptive.  It is demonstrably suggestible.  It is not surprising, therefore, that memory is a subject of vital importance in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences alike.

This course will focus on individual memory and in particular on autobiographical memory (our memories of our own lives).  We will read autobiographies and works of fiction, written from the early twentieth century to the present, by Patrick Modiano, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Marguerite Duras.  We will also study two films on the theme of memory:  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inside Out.  Concurrently, we will read psychological, psychoanalytic, and neuroscientific work on memory.   Some attention will be paid to the issues of false memory, external memory, and mediated memory, as well. 

Two short papers, presentations, exam.

GETR  3393 (3)  Serial Media

3:30-4:45 MW

Mr. Schmid  

Have you ever binge-watched a show on Netflix? Have you ever not been able to put down a book? You had to know what was going to happen in the next episode or the next chapter. In this class we will not only reflect on and analyze this experience, we will also investigate its history: the history of serial media. 

Over the past 20 years we have witnessed in a revolution in serial media: The medial possibilities made available through online streaming have inspired a trend away from the theater in favor of the laptop, and the primacy of feature length film has been upset by the advent of the so-called second golden age of television. Together we will explore the history of serial forms, particularly through its German tradition beginning with the 19th century serial journal projects of the Romantics and culminating with the contemporary German Netflix show “Dark,” a show that, like the American hit “Stranger Things,” involves parallel dimensions and supernatural elements. Finally, with the help of the work of German intellectuals such as Paul Kammerer and Carl Gustav Jung, we will explore the connection between seriality and coincidence

GETR 3475 (3) Body Horror: From Kafka to Croneberg and Beyond 

3:03 - 4:45 TR

Mr. Dobryden  

This course explores the terrifying and thrilling experience of being (in) a body through the film genre of “body horror.” Beginning with early influences (Kafka, German expressionism), we will examine ‘80s classics (The Thing, The Fly) and more recent examples (Titane, The Substance). Readings in psychoanalysis, disability studies, and gender studies will help us grapple with the question of what makes bodies so fascinatingly scary.

GETR 3480 (3) German New Wave Cinema: Reinvention, Remembrance, Rebellion

12:30 - 1:45 TR

Mr. Dobryden 

This course explores how West German art cinema of the 1960s-80s reinvented filmmaking, remembered the Nazi past, and rebelled against cultural and political institutions. In dialogue with films by Werner Herzog, Helke Sander, R. W. Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, and others, we will examine the aesthetic and political possibilities of cinema, in the context of an affluent consumer society with a violent past that many preferred to forget.