Spring 2023 Undergraduate Courses

TR 12:30 – 1:45 pm

In German / 4 credits

Taught by Doreen Densky

This course surveys the major post-unification developments that have tested and continue to shape Germany. We will discuss the political structures, media landscape, cultural issues in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, contemporary social matters (including recent waves of refugees, immigration, integration, and right-wing extremism), as well as environmental issues around the country’s role as one of the leaders in the fields of renewable energy and sustainable development. A variety of established and new media (literature, music, film, journalistic writing, and web sources) respond to these issues and we will analyze how texts and images influence debates today. Taught in German. 

TR 3:30 – 4:45 pm

In German / 4 credits

Taught by Doreen Densky

This course has two major goals. First, it introduces students to a selection of representative authors and exemplary texts of German-language literature from the 18th to the 21st century. Second, it helps students develop close and critical reading skills while they learn to express their analysis of literary texts in German, both in speaking and in writing. Covering the three major literary genres—poetry, prose, drama—some of the following issues will be discussed: the depiction of otherness; the representation of time and history; the uncanny; the relationship between form and content; the economy of human relationships on the basis of hierarchy, love, and authority. Taught in German. 

MW 4:55 – 6:10 pm

In English / 4 credits

Taught by Avital Ronell

This course looks at problems of political conditioning and the agony of our times. The themes that draw our attention are not covered by traditional perspectives of political philosophy. We shall study the roots of tyranny, patriarchal strongholds, sexual repression, national identity, and the destruction of individual freedom in terms of literary and philosophical texts that describe and undermine all sorts of political myths and beliefs. The student will have a fuller sense of the stakes and pain of political maturity and what it takes to survive restrictive laws and what psychoanalysis calls the relentless pounding of the 'reality principle.' 

Readings include the works of Marx, Kleist, Kafka, Phillis Wheatley, Hannah Arendt, Kathy Acker, Sarah Kofman, Derrida.

R 4:55 – 7:25 pm

In English / 4 credits

Taught by Hent de Vries

Immanuel Kant's 1781 Kritik der reinen Vernunft coined the critical terms, next to developing influential transcendental arguments, that all serious subsequent claims of reason in modern philosophical discourse have had to contend with ever since its first publication. From the Neo-Kantian and phenomenological schools of thought, via Frankfurt School Neomarxism, up to the reception of contemporary analytic philosophy (as in so-called analytic German Idealism), Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy has remained the touchstone and central reference. This course will survey the remarkable legacy of Kant's critical vocabulary, the so-called canon of pure reason and the architectonic or art of constructing a philosophical system, as he saw it, and investigate the ways in which this modern classic has fundamentally reoriented the philosophical imagination and debate to the present day. 

MW 2:00 – 3:15 pm

In English / 4 credits

Taught by Christopher Wood and Lytle Shaw

The avant-garde is the leading edge of artistic change, and the preview of the artistic future.  An avant-garde is the picture, sketched by a gifted few, of where the many are headed.  While there has always been innovation in art, not until the nineteenth century was the progressive or experimental artist expected also to point the way forward to social and political change.  Some will deny that art has any single "direction," or that art should be valued on the basis of its forward-pointing quality.  And yet even today the metaphor of the avant-garde—the advance scouts of an army on the move—enjoys great prestige. 

This course aims to rethink the modern history and concept of the avant-garde through close study of three epochal moments in modern Western art:  Romanticism in Germany (circa 1800); Dada and Surrealism in Europe and the U.S. (circa 1920); and the "New York School" in poetry and art (circa 1960).  We will discover that whereas progressive art is supposedly always looking forward, avant-gardes have in fact often looked backwards and compared themselves to these and other "canonical" moments.  Is such meta-avant-garde consciousness compatible with true artistic freedom?  We will also consider the avant-garde as a site for the emergence of Theory—a discourse in dialogue with but ultimately distinct from literary criticism and philosophy.  How might our picture of Theory change if we situate it as a component of avant-garde practice?  Does the avant-garde model still retain its normative power in our own complex and multipolar society, where old distinctions between "high" and "low" art are ever more difficult to uphold?  If avant-gardes have never quite achieved their frequent ambition of breaking down the distinction between life and art, does this render them failures?  Or might there be other evaluative frameworks in which to understand their contributions?  Is it possible, for instance, to understand some of the social and artistic relationships developed within avant-garde groups as generative models that might be exported to other contexts?

Readings by Poggioli and Bürger (on avant-gardes in general); Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Schiller, Schlegel, Hegel, Novalis (German Romanticism); etc.; Ball, Huelsenbeck, Höch, Schwitters (Dada); O’Hara, Ashbery, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Cage, Smithson (New York School).

MW 9:30 - 10:45 am

In German / 4 credits

Taught by Andrea Krauss

This seminar offers an introduction to the work of Goethe (1749-1832) who is one of the most prominent figures in the history of German literature and thought and considered to be – as T.S. Eliot put it – "one of the wisest of men." Tracing this wisdom through selected poems, prose, plays and essays we will closely analyze the fascinating complexity of an oeuvre that reflects Goethe’s interdisciplinary interests in the aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific discourses and controversies of his time. Among other texts we will read: Prometheus, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust I, From my life: poetry and truth (excerpts), Metamorphosis of Plants (excerpts), Novella. Taught in German.

TR 9:30 - 10:45 am

In German / 4 credits

Taught by Elisabeth Strowick

The course analyzes texts by Franz Kafka from a twofold perspective. In as much as his work tirelessly addresses processes of administration, law, punishment, knowledge production and family structures, it can be considered an analysis of modern institutions and forms of power by means of literature. But these forms of power also inform Kafka’s poetic practice. His literary techniques relate to modern communication systems (postal system) and media technologies used in modern bureaucracy (typewriter, phonograph/sound writer, telephone). In close readings we will examine how the specific performative, rhetorical and material character of Kafka’s texts contribute to the power of writing or what Deleuze/Guattari call a ‘minor literature.’ The course will also explore Kafka’s impact on 20th century literary theory and philosophy (Benjamin, Deleuze/Guattari). Readings and discussions in German.