The German Department is planning a socially distanced graduate curriculum for Spring 2021 with strategic use of our classroom allocations to provide a robust curriculum, onsite where possible. We will aim for "in-person" instruction, but any student can access classes remotely. Depending on the number of students who do so, the teaching format might have to be changed to "blended" or "remote" for reasons of pedagogical effectiveness. (Specifics for each graduate course can be found in the note section on Albert.) In-person components are offered to students in New York City, even if seminar sessions are held online. Although our usual academic programming (public lectures, events etc.) will not be in-person, we anticipate a vibrant semester of remote talks and workshops.
Spring 2021 Graduate Courses
Theory/Practice of Literary Interpretation: Verschiedene Themen: Finsternis: Literature going Dark
4 credits / T 2:00-4:40p
Taught by Elisabeth Strowick.
Conducted in German.
“[I]f anyone speaks, it gets light”—thus Freud’s well-known quotation of a child frightened of the dark. But what if literature revised this quote and it no longer worded, “if anyone speaks, it gets light,” but rather “if anyone speaks, it gets dark.” How else might Beckett’s voices be heard: “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.” What is it about the figures in Robert Walser’s work that—according to Benjamin—“come out of the night, when it is darkest”? What can it mean when Thomas Bernhard speaks of the fact that “total darkness” prevails in his books? Darkness links questions of mythology, aesthetics, philosophy, and epistemology with considerations on media theory, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial theory. The seminar analyzes literature’s investment in darkness from the perspectives of cultural history and theories of representation. We will discuss acts of creation and decreation, force, thinking, madness, figures of alterity, perception, literary chiaroscuro, scenographies of darkness, dark spaces, dark times, apocalypse now, and dark comedy. By creating from darkness, literature itself goes dark. The seminar will therefore also analyze what writing darkness means with a view to the (precarious) status of literature, or in other words: how literature operates in the mode of Auslöschung (Bernhard). Taught in German.
Topics in Modern German Literature and Poetics: Millstones of history: East German writers reflecting hopes, losses, and guilt
2 credits / M 2-4:40p *Meets 3/10-4/30
Taught by Jenny Erpenbeck, the DAAD Chair for Contemporary Poetics at NYU.
Conducted in English.
Literature at the intersection of “capital H History” and individual histories: What questions can be posed at this intersection? And what outcome do we even desire: answers, or just a form of expression? Does literature lose its essential character when it seeks to bring about change, or is that precisely when it arrives at its true essence? Does solidarity with the weak or the strong, with power or resistance – does partisanship as such – have consequences for literary form? In our readings and discussion of texts by a number of authors who spent their formative years in the GDR – e.g. Wolfgang Hilbig, Brigitte Reimann, Irmtraut Morgner, Thomas Brasch, Christa Wolf, Heiner Müller – we will ask in which works and in which ways these writers display a consciousness of their own status as historical subjects – whether as hope or as utopia, with humor, anger, or arrogance, in mourning or in resignation. Writing between the poles of distance and involvement.
Literature & Philosophy: The Tyrannical Soul: From Plato to Kafka & the Film Strip
4 credits / R 12:30 - 3:10 PM
Taught by Avital Ronell.
Conducted in English.
Pressed by contemporary ruthlessness we want to learn from philosophy, literature, film and the arts how to configure the tyrannical temptations of the human frame. The marginalization of Plato's "democratic soul" will lead an investigation into patriarchal crime scenes double-headed by Freud and the Ancients in their effort to manage human waywardness, sadistic excess, incessant trespass and violent slams. Sacher-Masoch, Melanie Klein and Werner Herzog's thinking of the "bad object," destructive drives, masochist politics, and the premises of reparative justice will power our discussions of lawless abandon. Above all, participants will be supplied with materials for their projects and intellectually-pitched aspirations.