Fall 2019 Undergraduate Courses

Conducted in German

Taught by Andrea Dortmann

This course introduces students to the history, theory, and practice of translation through German and English texts taken from a variety of cultural backgrounds. While engaging in the craft of translation first hand, students will encounter diverse contrastive grammatical, syntactical, and stylistic problems, thus gaining a deeper understanding of the German language. The course also stresses the acquisition of vocabulary and complex idiomatic structures necessary for effective reading comprehension as well as written expression. A background reader in English will familiarize students with historical and theoretical implications of translation.

Photocopies of primary texts in German (and English) to be translated will be distributed by the instructor. Materials may include newspaper and magazine articles; recipes; TV- and print advertisements; scientific and philosophical articles; pop material such as hip hop and rap songs, cartoons; Literary texts: prose, theater, poetry, libretti, among others. In addition to those weekly translation assignments, which will be critically assessed in class, we will translate one or more longer prose texts (TBD) from German to English as a class. This work will accompany our course throughout the semester.

Course originates in History as HIST-UA 262

Conducted in English

Taught by Daniel Jütte

This course explores the history of Northern Europe between 1400 and 1700. These three centuries were marked by massive transformations on a religious, political, and intellectual-artistic level. At the same time—and as a result of these transformations—the period saw wars and bloodshed on an unprecedented scale. The geographic focus of this course lies on the Holy Roman Empire (i.e. the German lands and the Low Countries), France, and England. Emphasizing the encounter with primary sources, the course explores three major thematic areas (culture – religion – politics): The “Northern Renaissance”, the Reformation, and the Wars of Religions. 

Conducted in English

Taught by Friedrich Ulfers

The objective of the seminar is to show how Nietzsche revolutionized Western philosophy and how this transformation influenced significantly what is known as “Continental Philosophy,” which includes such figures as Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze. Particular attention will be paid to the meaning of Nietzsche’s pronouncement that “God is dead”; his declaration that the world is “Will to Power” and an “aesthetic phenomenon”; and his idea of “Eternal Recurrence.” Also discussed will be the role language plays in Nietzsche’s view on epistemology and ontology, his revaluation of morality, and his influence on the arts.

Course originates in Art History as ARTH-UA350

Conducted in English

Taught by Christopher Wood

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was in his lifetime the most famous artist in Europe.  His watercolors of animals, plants, and landscapes, his penetrating portraits and self-portraits, his innovations in the fields of art theory and mechanical image replication, and his wide-ranging studies of Christian and pagan symbolism shaped a German “Renaissance” or rebirth of the arts.  This course will focus on this complex personality as well as his artistic contemporaries, including Schongauer, Cranach, Altdorfer, Grünewald, and Holbein, within the overall context of Renaissance Europe.  No prerequisites. 

Conducted in German

Taught by Christopher Wood

To “romanticize” the world, according to the poet Novalis, is “to give the common a higher meaning, to make the familiar strange, to make the known the unknown, to make the finite seem infinite.”  For a charmed generation of poets, artists, and thinkers, young enough to share in the enthusiasms of the French Revolution, the world in 1800 seemed ready for remaking.  They invented a new poetry and a new art, new languages of self-expression, alternately vivid and mysterious.  Natural and sincere, introspective and visionary, pious but also scientific, nostalgic or politically engaged, the Romantics sought both intensified subjective experience and a loss of self in communion with the Whole.  The course will engage with the poets and painters Goethe, Hölderlin, Novalis, Kleist, Hoffmann, Grimm, Friedrich, and Runge. Conducted in German.

Conducted in German

Taught by Elisabeth Strowick

With the fall of the Berlin Wall thirty years ago, one of the most powerful symbols of the Cold War came down. For decades, the division between East and West Germany had been a decisive factor in German literature and film from both states in several respects. Political censorship in the GDR and West German publishing policies determined the conditions for art production. They created specific audiences and shaped the role of the public intellectual. The Berlin Wall could also be said to have contributed to certain trends like the aesthetics of coldness and the poetics of observation. The course examines the relationship between aesthetics and politics in German-German literature and film from 1961 to the present.