Fall 2023 Graduate Courses

R 2:00 – 4:45 pm

In English / 4 credits 

Taught by Barbara Hahn, Eberhard Berent Goethe Professor at NYU

Beginning with letters written by Rahel Levin to David Veit and ending with Hannah Arendt’s biography of Rahel, we will explore debates on Jewish Modernity in Germany. Poems, stories, and essays by Heinrich Heine, Martin Buber, Margarete Susman, Franz Kafka, and Franz Rosenzweig, will introduce us to a closely-knit web of debates on Jewish identities in a world that kept changing dramatically: from skeptical reflections on Jewish emancipation in the course of the French Revolution up to the Nazi rise to power in Germany.

T 2:00 - 4:45 pm

In English / 4 credits

Taught by Hent de Vries

Starting with a detailed rehearsal of its “Introduction” and of major themes of “Division One” (which was the subject of a graduate seminar in Fall 2022), the present seminar will offer an integral reading of the more controversial “Division Two” of Martin Heidegger’s 1927 magnum opus Sein und Zeit (Being and Time): a failed part of the project in the eyes of some, its pièce de résistance and lasting contribution, according to most. We will read this division against the background of its historical and philosophical origins and contexts as well as in view of its immediate reception at the time. We will, on each occasion, circle back to the corresponding paragraphs in the first division in other to familiarize ourselves with the topics and arguments of the whole book, but also in order to see how and why Heidegger, quite literally, repeats them while shifting terrain and adding more depth and complexity. In addition to a close reading of the text, aided by its translation and commentaries, the seminar further aims to bring not only phenomenological, hermeneutic, and deconstructive but also analytic, epistemological, and pragmatist methods, arguments and perspectives to bear upon the more recent interpretation and undiminished significance of this modern classic. 

M 2:00 – 4:45 pm

In German / 4 credits 

Taught by Andrea Krauss

Introducing his selection from Jean Paul's work, Stefan George characterizes Jean Paul's (and Goethe's) writing as follows: "Entgegen dem formend-antiken und begrifflichen der goetheschen erfüllung bietet er [J. P.] unsrem schrifttum das farbige und klangliche das wir ohne ihn in der vollendung entbehren müssten." George's subtle chiasm has not yet accomplished a revision of literary canonization. As is generally known, it is the relation between Goethe and Schiller that forms the representative couple for the period around 1800. Jean Paul, a somehow 'disconnected' contemporary of Classicism and Romanticism who never belonged to either one of these artistic directions, stands alone in literary history. In this seminar we will analyze Jean Paul's literary phenomenology of what he calls the complex relation between finitude and the infinite, between the experience of a limited object-world such as the human body and death on the one hand, and the notion of infinite reason and desire for transcendence on the other. We will explore, among other aspects, the conceptual and aesthetic elaboration of humor as "the inverted sublime" and investigate to what extent this (comic) inversion of transcendence into finitude might be described (against Kant) as a (not only) epistemological mode of skepticism and thus as a specific practice of modernity. Readings and discussion in German.

F 2:00 – 4:45 pm

In English / 2 credits 

Taught by Elisabeth Bronfen, Global Distinguished Professor

Meets 1^st 7 weeks Sept 7-Oct 13 (2 classes meet in last week)

During the silent film era a fertile artistic exchange developed between the UFA studios in Berlin and those in Hollywood. One might think of the success the German director F.W. Murnau had with his melodrama Sunrise, or the success the American actress Louise Brooks had with her role as femme fatale in G. W. Pabst’s Lulu. The transatlantic dialog between German expressionism and an American sensibility for popular culture continued when, in the face of fascism, many people working in the German film industry were forced to emigrate, only to leave their distinct mark on Hollywood genre cinema. This seminar will explore how this conversation continued during the 1930’s through comparative readings of sophisticated comedies (It happened One Night, Glückskinder) and melodramas (Verwehte Spuren, Rebecca). We will also look at the transatlantic work of Billy Wilder, who wrote the screen play for Menschen am Sontag, directed the quintessential Film Noir with Double Indemnity, and then returned to the ruins of Berlin in A Foreign Affair. Finally, we will explore the difference between American and German cinema’s engagement with the traumatic aftereffects of WWII, looking at two seminal postwar films, The Best Years of Our Lives and Zwischen Gestern und Morgen. 

F 2:00 - 4:45 pm

In English / 2 credits

Taught by Catherine Malabou, Otto Mainzer and Ilse Wunsch Mainzer Global Distinguished Professor

Meets last 7 weeks Oct 20-Dec 8

This course revolves around three major reflections on anxiety. Philosophical, with Heidegger and the existential notion of being-for-death. Psychoanalysis, with Freud and the question of the origin of anxiety. Neuroscientific, with the study of stress and its possible epigenetic transmission.

By crossing these studies, we will ask ourselves if anxiety is a threat to the plasticity of the subject, to their capacities for transformation and evolution, or if it does not act on the contrary as a power of metamorphosis and self-creation. We will start with the fundamental distinction between anxiety and fear, the first, unlike the second, having no object. What is this nothing of anxiety? This non-being that triggers anxiety? These questions have proven fundamental in the late Xxth century’s continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. They are currently lying at the heart of the most recent research in neuroscience and epigenetics. After exploring these different domains, we will approach political critiques of the concept of anxiety, like those developed by afro-pessimist thinkers, arguing that this concept is a pre-fabricated response to the absolute lack of plasticity of the non-being.

W 2:00 – 4:45 pm

In English / 4 credits

Taught by Avital Ronell

We shall examine a wide range of texts that confront a history of self in a compromised world where the very premises of selfhood must be constantly discarded and reinvented, part of a shattering linked to difficult growth spurts, politically stunted. Readings span from Rousseau and Goethe to James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Kafka, Chantal Akerman, Werner Herzog and Sandy Stone, whose pathbreaking Post-Transsexual Manifesto provides some of the theoretical groundwork for establishing a hermeneutics of Bildung and transition, a recast of autobiographical theories and crucial psychoanalytic checkpoints.

The failure of self-appropriation is a theme driven by Nietzsche in a number of morphs dependent on the often repressed inclusion of “the woman in Nietzsche.” Students will be encouraged to work on their own projects that use this course as a jumping-off point for theoretical engagements with the frustrated development of self and history in an era of incessant traumatization.