Courses in the Department of Germanic Studies

LANGUAGE COURSES

20300. Kurzprosa aus dem 20. Jahrhundert.
Staff.
PQ: GRMN 20200 or placement. No auditors permitted. Must be taken for a letter grade.
Study of descriptive and narrative prose through short fiction and other texts and media from the 20th century. Focus on grammatical issues designed to push toward more cohesive and idiomatic use of language.

Third-Year Sequence

21101-21201-21301 do not have to be taken in sequence, but all three are required for the major.
These three courses serve as preparation for seminar-style classes. Students prepare texts for class discussion but will learn to present a Referat : a student led discussion of material, including the issues raised and the student’s position on those issues. These Referate will also be prepared in written form, and expanding a refining writing skills will be a major focus.

21101. Fokus: Zeitraum.
Staff.
PQ: GRMN 20300 or placement. No auditors permitted.
Advanced German through the study of one era, such as Weimar, Romantic, Post-War or Wende.

21201. Fokus: Gattung.
Staff.
PQ: GRMN 20300 or placement. No auditors permitted.
Advanced German through the study of one genre, such as the short story, novella, poetry or drama.

21301. Fokus: Schriftsteller.
Staff.
PQ: GRMN 20300 or placement. No auditors permitted.
Advanced German through the study of the work of an individual, such as Brecht, or a group, such as feminists or writers in exile.

SEMINARS

29200. Freud as Humanist.
Samuel Jaffe.
Cross-list GSHum, Comp Lit. PQ: Advanced Standing.
The aim of this course is to situate Freud within the tradition of humanism and, in so doing, to complicate the historical profile of "humanism" as well as of "Freud." The latter is read as an interpreter and critic with deep roots in 19th-c. humaniora, as a (re)constructionist in the sense of 19th-c. archaeology and historiography, and as an ambivalently humanistic moralizer, politicizer, and liberalizer of the 19th-, the 20th-, and now the fledgling 21st-c. psyche.

30600. Kafka, Scholem, Benjamin.
Eric Santner.
In this seminar we will read Kafka’s major works and then address the crucial place he occupied in the thinking of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. Readings will focus on the Scholem-Benjamin correspondence and relevant essays.

30700. Freud’s Traumdeutung.
Eric Santner.
In this seminar we will engage in an intense, close reading of Freud’s famous dream book, drawing upon later essays and secondary literature as needed.

30800. States of Exception.
Eric Santner.
This seminar will address Carl Schmitt’s highly influential conception of the state of exception and theory of sovereignty as well as the ways it has been taken up by other authors from Walter Benjamin to Giorgio Agamben.

31300. Gottfried Benn and T.S. Eliot.
Robert von Hallberg.
PQ: Reading knowledge of German.
The seminar will focus on two main themes: the representation of urban modernity in poetry and the development of reactionary politics among modernist writers. After some preliminary discussion of essays on modernity by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch, our reading will concentrate on the early poems of Eliot (Preludes and The Waste Land) and Benn (the Morgue sequence), to explicate the first theme, and on their prose, to explicate the second. Seminar members will give two oral presentations and write a long paper (20-25 pp.). Class discussions are conducted in English, but the ability to read German is required.

31400. Modern Theories of State.
Robert Pippin.
PQ: Consent of instructor.
This seminar concentrates on voluntarist or contractarian theories of the state in Rousseau and Kant, and the revisions and criticisms of that understanding by Fichte and Hegel.

32200. Literatur und Medien.
Chenxi Tang.
Advanced undergraduates and first- and second-year graduates.
This course serves a dual purpose: it introduces students to media theory and media history, and probes the potential of media-theoretical approaches for reading literary texts. Texts by Herder, Goethe, Rilke, Benjamin, Brecht, McLuhan, and Kittler.

33000. Modernist Prose.
Eric Santner.
PQ: Advanced knowledge of German. Advanced standing.
This course focuses on prose texts of the first third of the twentieth century dealing with the vulnerability of the “modern subject” and experiences of psychotic breakdown. Authors include Hofmannsthal, Walser, Kafka, Rilke, Musil, Schnitzler, and Freud.

33100. Art and Film in Weimar Germany.
Reinhold Heller.
This course explores broadly the visual culture of Weimar Germany, with particular focus on the fine arts and more popular imagery, the intersections with Weimar cinema, and their interactions with the contemporary social and political milieus. To be considered are such art and film movements as Expressionism, Dada, and Neo-Objectivity; artists’ groups encompassing the Bauhaus, the November Group, and the Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists of Germany; artists ranging from George Grosz and Otto Dix to Kurt Schwitters and Wassily Kandinsky; and films, including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, M and Kuhle Wampe.

33200, 33300. Hegel’s Phenomenology I, II.
Robert Pippin.
Must be taken in sequence.
We read and discuss Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

33500. Models of Literary Signification.
David Wellbery.
PQ: Graduate.
In this seminar we will examine a number of theoretical models that have been proposed to explain literary signification. Among the texts to be discussed are: Auerbach’s Figura; Freud’s essays on Michelangelo and Leonardo; Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Unverständlichkeit; Heidegger’s Ursprung des Kunstwerks; Derrida’s The First Session; Cavell’s A Matter of Meaning It. The examination of the theoretical texts will be combined with practical work in the interpretation of literary texts.

33800. Staging Femininity: Gender and Spectacle in Opera and Film.
David Levin.
Explores the relationship between cultural production and gender identity. We read a broad range of texts from contemporary cultural, performance, and film theory (e.g. Judith Butler, Catherine Clement, Mary Ann Doane, Susan McClary, Laura Mulvey, Slavoj Zizek) and examine a number of symptomatic films and operas where gender norms become apparent through their exaggeration, violation, or suspension. All readings in English. Films (all with English sub-titles) by Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel, 1930), Busby Berkeley (The Gang’s All Here, 1943), King Vidor (Gilda, 1946), Werner Schroeter (Death of Maria Malibran, 1972), and Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva, 1982); operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Marriage of Figaro), Gaetano Donizetti (Lucia di Lammermoor), and Giacomo Puccini (Turandot).

34200. Romantic Literature and Science.
Chenxi Tang.
In the history of science, the early nineteenth century witnessed the decline of the descriptive study of nature and the rise of a host of modern natural scientific disciplines. At the same time, the human sciences came into being, and the first attempts were made to bridge the natural and the human sciences. This seminar will explore the relationship between scientific discourses and literary production around 1800. Readings by Haller, Lichtenberg, Hölderlin, Novalis, Humboldt, Arnim, Hoffmann, and Chamisso.

34100. Dramaturgy.
David Levin.
This experimental seminar/workshop course considers the history and development of dramaturgy, including its conceptual foundations and pragmatic aspirations as well as its generic peculiarities (e.g., what distinguishes a dramaturgy of theater, film, and opera). The course will focus on multiple renderings of the same material: that is, Macbeth as Elizabethan drama, 19th century opera, and various 20th century films. In addition to our more or less conventional academic analysis (of the history & various theories of dramaturgy), students will engage in dramaturgical practice(s) in writing and on stage. Among works to be considered: critical works by G.E. Lessing and Bertolt Brecht; and films, dramas, operas, (e.g., Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Verdi’s Macbeth, Polanski’s and Welles’ Macbeth, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood).

34300 Melodrama.
David Levin.
A consideration of the aesthetics, politics, and generic itinerary of German melodrama, including Trauerspiel (Lohenstein’s Sophonisbe), Sturm und Drang (Schiller’s Die Räuber), romantic opera (Weber’s Freischütz), and the New German Cinema (Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen). Theoretical works by Walter Benjamin, Peter Brooks, Thomas Elsaesser, Christine Gledhill, and Peter Szondi.

34500. Franz Rosenzweig’s Concept of Revelation.
Eric Santner, Paul Mendes-Flohr.
We consider the epistemological and theological significance of Rosenzweig’s concept of revelation. The readings focus on pertinent essays, letters, and above all on the second book of his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption.

34600. Radical Interpretation on Stage and Screen.
David Levin.
This course studies the history and aesthetics of radical interpretation of canonical works in theater, opera, and film. We examine aesthetic tracts (e.g., Appia, Artaud, Brecht, and Peter Brook) and theory (e.g., Barthes, Derrida, E. Diamond, and Foucault), as well as modern forays into radical interpretation (e.g., Derek Jarman/Marlowe’s Edward II, Hans Juergen Syberberg/Wagner’s Parsifal, Peter Sellers/Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Baz Luhrmann’s/William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Sally Potter’s Thriller).

34800. Postwar German Cinema.
David Levin.
Cross-list CMS. PQ: Advanced standing.
Introduction to Postwar German Cinema and some of the issues in its history and theory. We consider a broad variety of films (e.g., by W. Staudte, H. Sanders-Brahms, R.W. Fassbinder, W. Herzog, A. Kluge, J-M Straub & D. Huillet, W. Wenders, and M. Treut) and a wide variety of critical commentary (e.g., by T. W. Adorno, T. Corrigan, T. Elsaesser, M. Hansen, A. Kaes, A. Kuzniar, E. Rentschler, E. Santner, K. Silverman). In addition to readings devoted to specific films, we will make a bi-monthly habit of reading various responses to the question: what is the New German Cinema? Proficiency in German or German history is not required (all films have subtitles); a serious commitment to thinking about the logic, rhetoric, history, and textuality of film is essential.

35000. From Wagner to Brecht.
David Levin.
Cross-list Music, GSHum.
Both Wagner and Brecht saw themselves as fundamentally oppositional (e.g., aesthetically, culturally, politically). This course explores the terms of their real and imagined oppositionalities. And insofar as the Gesamtkunstwerk (or total work of art) formed a recurring concern for both—an impossible, progressive ideal for Wagner; an all-too-real, regressive roadblock for Brecht—we will seek to trace its origins, examine its forms, and consider its implications. Throughout the course, we will be attending to both theory and practice—reading programmatic statements by Brecht and Wagner (e.g., on the functions, places, or institutions of art) and considering artworks created in the name of those statements.

35200. Literary Kierkegaard.
Chenxi Tang.
Graduate and undergraduate.
In this seminar we will read Søren Kierkegaard’s novellas , literary criticism and aesthetic theory. Issues to be discussed include irony, repetition, observation, history and authorship.

35400. The (anti-) Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century.
Robert Buch.
Törleß, Jakob von Gunten, Karl Roßmann, Malte Laurids Brigge and, a few decades later, Oskar Matzerath are the late descendants of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman. But unlike their predecessors, none of them ever reaches maturity. Adulthood itself has become an undesirable goal; the ideals of self-cultivation, of Bildung, seem to be obsolete; socialization doesn’t take place. Indeed societal institutions, rather than making autonomy possible, deform the subject. The course will look at how the texts tell the stories of such deformations and what counter-strategies their protagonists muster to cope with them.

35500. Political Theology: Carl Schmitt Among Friends and Foes.
Robert Buch.
Carl Schmitt, a jurist and political theorist, was one of the most controversial German intellectuals of the twentieth century. A brilliant writer and polemicist, he actively contributed to the Nazis’ rise to power and probably would have continued to support them if he hadn’t fallen into disgrace. In the twenties and thirties, Schmitt’s trenchant interventions and invectives won him very prominent admirers both on the right and the left, among them Ernst Jünger, Leo Strauß, and Walter Benjamin. The course will situate Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology in this intellectual context. We will analyze Schmitt’s rhetorical and argumentative strategies and trace the genealogy of his ideas to some of their unacknowledged sources in Marx, Lenin, Max Weber, and Lukács.

36100. Kitsch.
Malynne Sternstein.
This course explores the concept of kitsch (and its attendants: camp, trash, and the Russian “poshlost”) as it has been formulated in literature and literary essays and theorized in modern critical thinking. The course is discussion intensive with readings from Theodor Adorno, Clement Greenberg, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Walter Benjamin, Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera, Matei Calinescu, and Tomas Kulka. No prior experience of kitsch is necessary.

36900. Weimar Subjects. (PQ Texts and discussions in German)
Robert Buch.
The construction of different types of modern subjects was a conspicuous trend in the intellectual and artistic debates of the interwar period. As the war seemed to have put an end to the idealist notion of subjecthood, this concern with different cultural and professional types is both striking and puzzling. While some of these figures reflect the new realities of the entre-deux-guerres era, others are projections of its anxieties and aspirations, utopian and apocalyptic visions of both the future and the present. Among the “types” the course will examine are Max Weber’s charismatic leader, Siegfried Kracauer’s employees, Ernst Jünger’s worker, Walter Benjamin’s flaneur and Irmgard Keun’s girl.

37000. Problems in Goethe Studies.
David Wellbery.
Cross-list Comp Lit. PQ: Advanced standing.
The seminar examines various works by Goethe (Faust, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Pandora, selected scientific writings, etc.) in terms of contemporary controversies in Goethe scholarship and literary theory. Major critical positions in Goethe scholarship (Benjamin, Schmitz, Emrich, Adorno, Schlaffer, etc.) will be closely studied.

37100. Transformations of the Literary System: 1900.
David Wellbery.
This course will examine literary texts written and published on the threshold of modernity against the background of discussions in philosophy (Lebensphilosophie, Sprachkritik), science (esp. psychphysics and psychoanalysis). Another contextual factor to be considered will be the emergence of new media (film, typewriter). Writers to be examined include: Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal, George, Mann, Musil, Bahr, Schnitzler, Kraus. The major aim of the seminar is to grasp the systematic transformation that literary signification undergoes before and after 1900.

37200. The Theory of Media.
David Wellbery.
Medientheorie and Mediengeschichte have become central themes in all of the cultural disciplines. This seminar will study some of the major contributions to this field with a special view to aesthetic (including literary) issues. Our approach will be historical, beginning with the first delineation of a media-based aesthetics in Lessing and continuing through major texts of the nineteenth (Hegel, Nietzsche) and twentieth centuries (Benjamin, Kittler).

38300. Goethe and the Theory of the Lyric.
David Wellbery.
This seminar has a twofold goal: (a) to get a view on the entirety of Goethe’s lyric production and therewith on his entire career as a poet, and (b) to test various approaches to the theory of lyric poetry. These two aims come together in the project of developing a theoretically informed account of Goethe’s lyric writing. Aspects to be discussed include: the medial constitution of the lyric; figurality; lyric subgenres; the anthropology of lyric speech; the historicity of the lyric. Readings include selections from Goethe’s poetry, including the major collections, as well as readings by various theoreticians (e.g., Jakobson, Adorno, Burke, Blumenberg, Warning, Gans, Kittler.)

38500. Robert Walser.
Eric Santner.
PQ: Reading knowledge of German required.
This seminar is dedicated to close readings of Walser’s novels and short prose. Through a variety of theoretical approaches, we explore the utterly singular nature of Walser’s narrative voice and what might be called his philosophy of impotence.

38600. Narrative Systems.
David Wellbery.
The leading question of the seminar is: what is the function of narrative for psychic and social systems? Anthropological, cognitive, and communicative aspects provide the major focus of discussions. The seminar draws on a corpus of literary and non-literary texts, with reference to which various theoretical contributions are exemplified and criticized. Readings from several disciplines: literary theory, semiotics, philosophical anthropology, and cognitive psychology.

38700. Narratives of Foundation.
David Wellbery, Albrecht Koschorke.
PQ: Graduate.
This seminar will examine the cultural and political significance of narrative forms by analyzing a number of texts dealing with origins, beginnings, foundations, constitutions, etc. Texts to be examined range from Roman times to the present and are drawn from a number of different discourses (both literary and non-literary). The overall goal of the seminar is to determine the ways in which, under various historical circumstances, systems and institutions account for their own emergence. Contemporary work in political and legal theory, narratology, and systems theory that deals with this problem will be discussed in connection with the primary texts.

39300. H.D., Freud, and the Poetry of Women.
Samuel Jaffe.
Cross-list Fundamentals, GSHum. PQ: Advanced standing.
The aim of this course is to confront the “masculinist” thrust of much of Freud’s theoretical-critical account of psychosexual differentiation with the “feminist” receptivity and (re)constructivism no less at work in his interpretive sensibility and hermeneutical practice. H. D.’s (Hilda Doolittle’s) account of her analysis with Freud is taken as a paradigmatically central text with regard to these issues.

39600. Kafka in Prague.
Malynne Sternstein.
The goal of this course is a thorough treatment of Kafka’s literary work in its Central European, more specifically Czech, context. In critical scholarship, Kafka and his work are often alienated from his Prague milieu. The course revisits the Prague of Kafka’s time, with particular reference to Josefov (the Jewish ghetto), das Prager Deutsch, and Czech/German/Jewish relations of the prewar and interwar years. We discuss most of Kafka’s major prose works within this context and beyond (including The Castle, The Trial, and the stories published during his lifetime), as well as selected critical approaches to his work.

42100. Richard Wagner and Critical Theory.
David Levin.
PQ: Advanced standing and consent of instructor.
This course examines the intersection of Wagner and contemporary critical theory. We read a broad range of Wagner’s writings and a broad range of writings on Wagner; we explore a number of the stage works on paper and in production. In addition to Wagner’s own writings, we read critical works by: Carolyn Abbate, Theodor Adorno, Elisabeth Bronfen , Catherine Clement, Carl Dahlhaus, Friedrich Kittler, Barry Millington, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Michel Poizat, Michael Steinberg, Hans-Rudolf Vaget, Samuel Weber, Marc Weiner, and Slavoj Zizek.

44600. Pop Art and Popular Culture.
Reinhold Heller.
In 1961, Claes Oldenburg observed, “I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life, that twists and extends impossibly and accumulates and drips and is sweet and stupid as life itself.” The melding of life and art is a constant topos among artists associated with Pop Art during the later 1950s and 1960s. This seminar sets as its task the exploration, inter alia, of Coca-Cola bottles, Volkswagens, and Marilyn Monroe through their iconic imagery in England, the United States, France and Germany. “Here,” Alan Kaprow pronounced, “the identity of ‘art’ becomes uncertain and the artist can no longer take refuge in its superiority to life, as he [sic] once could.”

45000. Musil: The Man Without Qualities.
Mark Lilla.
Robert Musil’s unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, one of the masterpieces of 20th-century German literature, paints a haunting, bleak portrait of modern life. This course offers a close reading of the work, with an eye to understanding the political, amorous, and scientific aspects of the modern condition, as Musil sees it. The course is conceived as a pendant to the course on Mann’s The Magic Mountain, but does not presuppose familiarity with that work.

47700. Performance Theory.
David Levin.
This graduate seminar seeks to explore the burgeoning field of performance theory, examining some of its foundational statements (e.g., J.L. Austin, J. Derrida, R. Schechner) and some more recent practical applications and theoretical elaborations (e.g., E. Diamond, R. Morris, P. Phelan, J. Roach). We shuttle between two questions: what does recent work in cultural (e.g., semiotic, psychoanalytic, gender) theory bring to the study of theater? What insights might an exploration of the particular theoretical problems involved in the study of theater bring to cultural analysis more generally? Readings are supplemented by screenings and, if possible and desirable, forays to Chicago theaters.

47800, 47900. German Romanticism: Literature, Philosophy I, II.
Robert Richards.
Lecture-discussion seminars that investigate the formation of the idea of the Romantic
in literature, philosophy, and science during the age of Goethe. The works of the following are discussed: Kant, Fichte, Schiller, Goethe, and von Humboldt brothers.

48600. Hegel’s Aesthetics.
Robert Pippin.
PQ: Advanced standing.
We discuss selected portions of Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art, giving special attention to his theory of beauty; his account of the historical character and development of art; his account of poetry, especially dramatic poetry; and his theory about the “end of art” in the modern period.

49000. Historiography of Art History, c.1750-1930.
Reinhold Heller.
PQ: Reading knowledge of French and German.
This course investigates the historical development of the methodologies and discipline of art history, beginning with Johann Winckelmann and continuing to the 1930s. Selected topics to be considered include the art historical practice of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the impact of G.F.W. Hegel, the professionalization of art history, and the late 19th century accent on systems of visual history and analysis. The course concludes with the alternative approaches of the early 20th century provided by scholars such as Max Dvorak, Henri Focillon, Erwin Panofsky, and Meyer Schapiro.

49100. Acquisition and Teaching of Foreign Languages.
Catherine Baumann.
An introduction to foreign language acquisition and to the theoretical models underlying current methods, approaches and classroom practices. Participants observe and then put into practice the theories and techniques in practice teaching experiences, where they also develop skills in lesson planning and the construction and implementation of activities.

51300. Adorno.
Robert Pippin.
The aim of this seminar will be to achieve a comprehensive perspective on the most important elements of Adorno’s version of critical theory. Special attention will be paid to the relation between Adorno’s position and Kantian and Hegelian alternatives, to Adorno’s theory of modernity, and to Adorno’s ethical theory. Readings will include Dialectic of Enlightenment; Negative Dialectics; Hegel: Three Studies; Minima Moralia; Problems of Moral Philosophy, and selected essays on art, modernism, and aesthetics.

This list was last revised on 9/15/2003.