Courses

Foundations in German Studies I (taught by rotating faculty)

Foundations I offers a survey of German literature, language and culture from 1000-1700 as well as an introduction to research methods in medieval and early modern German literature. It is during this period that German literature begins to differentiate itself from other discourses like that of religion, philosophy, rhetoric and history and in which early aesthetic forms begin to take shape at the interface between orality and textuality. In order to be able to read medieval literature in the original and produce viable scholarly translations, students will be introduced to the Middle High German language, including grammar and semantics. Our journey through different genres and cultural contexts will be guided by the following questions:

• What are the cultural conditions—social, political, economic, ideological—for literature to establish itself as a discourse?
• What role does material culture play for the concept of literature?
• What are early medial forms and what is their relationship with literature?
• Is there a medieval/early modern aesthetics or a medieval/early modern literary theory and how does it relate to ‘modern’ literary and aesthetic theory?
• What is literary about religion? What is religious about literature?
• What are the specifics of medieval/early modern narration, drama and poetry? How are they comparable to later forms and what can we conclude from the changes?
• What is an early modern/medieval author?
• What concepts of fiction and reality does medieval/early modern literature have?
• What is the medieval/ early modern meaning and significance of transhistorical literary motifs and concepts like love, violence, power, gender, sociability, individuality, nature, culture etc.?
• What are the conditions and limits of literary interpretation?

Over the course of the semester, we will read one courtly romance in its entirety, translate individual passages and discuss grammatical and semantic transformations that occurred in the German language between 1200 and the present. We will ask how philological questions are tied to literary and cultural ones.

Readings include texts and authors such as Parzival, Tristan, Nibelungenlied, writings by Meister Eckhart and Luther, carnival plays as well as literary-philosophical treatises and love lyrics.

Foundations in German Studies II (taught by rotating faculty)

This seminar offers an intensive survey of literary, cultural and intellectual developments in German-speaking lands between the years of 1750-1900, supplemented by attention to research methods of the field. Success in Foundations II does not require a command of the material covered in Foundations I. We begin with the Enlightenment and move through the sometimes intersecting and sometimes divergent movements of Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, Weimar Classicism, Biedermeier, Vormärz, and Realism, as well as considering thinkers who defy categorization. 

Our goal is to cultivate an understanding of literary history as a cultural formation that changes over time by paying particular attention to:

• the respective stylistic particularities, genres, textual forms, generic properties and idiosyncratic features of cultural production as reflected in their historical moment/movement;
•  the historically-bound ideologies and norms – literary, philosophical, historical, political, socio-economic, naturalistic/scientific – that are actively produced or contested through the complexity of aesthetic forms;
• evolving and heterogeneous models of what is German that have shaped the study of the diverse set of texts we are considering;
• the role that shifts in media (literacy, visual and tactile art, various print technologies) and their interrelation played in constructing different concepts of literature; and
• attendant philosophical and theoretical concepts relevant for situating literary texts within larger discursive context within their respective time. 

Throughout, through critical readings from a variety of theoretical perspectives, we will explore distinct approaches to analyzing texts and related cultural artifacts in order to foster a knowledge of the modern tools of scholarly inquiry (editions, translations, dictionaries, critical approaches and methods) that are fundamental to the field of German Studies.. 

This course is designed as a reading-intensive seminar. In addition to completing the readings and participating actively in seminar discussions, students will be expected to take a midterm and final exam and to give several oral presentations. No papers will be required.

Will include authors such as Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Schlegel, Tieck, Hölderlin, Kant, Günderrode, Kleist, Eichendorff, Stifter, Heine, Keller, Büchner, Droste-Hülshoff, Marx, Storm, and Fontane.

Foundations in German Studies III (taught by rotating faculty)

The final seminar in the Foundation’s series, this course completes CDG’s intensive survey of German-speaking cultures between the years of 1900 and the present. Success in Foundations III does not require, however, a command of the material covered in Foundations I or II. Instead of beginning with literary modernism, this seminar begins by introducing students to the birth of cinema and will proceed by bringing film into productive dialogue with both literature and theory. Grasping German literary history throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century will accordingly seek out the productive points of contact with other bodies of thought as well as other mediums of representation. In addition to early narrative and experimental cinema, the course will explore the cinema of the Weimar Republic, Nazi cinema, rubble cinema, the cinema of divided Germany, as well as post-unification cinema like the Berlin School. Similarly, the course will also introduce students to the plurality of styles around 1900 (symbolism, Jugendstil, impressionism), the historical avant-gardes (expressionism, Dada), New Objectivity, völkische Literatur, rubble literature, Gruppe 47, socialist realism (as well as its deviations), documentary literature, new subjectivities, postmodernism, and pop literature.

As with Foundations I and II, this seminar provides CDG students with a comprehensive understanding of essential documents and intellectual histories central for understanding the last 120 years of German-language culture. Particular attention will be paid to:

• German film history; debates around film as it relates to cultural, intellectual, and literary histories; as well as basic methodologies required for analyzing film professionally and the theories of film and media essential for research in film studies;
• German literary history; the succession of literary epochs widely recognized as constituting the canon; as well as the historical shifts in styles, genres, and forms as they relate to the literary and texts under discussion;
• Intellectual history and its philosophical and theoretical concepts as they relate to the primary texts and the larger discursive context.

Throughout, through critical readings from a variety of theoretical perspectives, we will explore distinct approaches to analyzing texts and related cultural artifacts in order to foster a knowledge of the modern tools of scholarly inquiry that are fundamental to the field of German Studies.

This course is designed as an intensive reading and screening seminar. In addition to reading and screening assigned literary works and films, students are expected to participate actively in seminar discussions. Students will be expected to take a midterm and final exam and to give several oral presentations. No papers will be required.

This seminar include filmmakers, authors, and thinkers such as: Adorno, Akin, Altenberg, Bachmann, Balazs, Benjamin, Beyer, Brecht, Brinkmann, Celan, Döblin, Enzensberger, Fassbinder, Freud, Fried, George, Grass, Handke, Harlan, Herzog, Hoffmansthal, Iser, Jelinek, Kafka, Kittler, Kluge, Lang, Lukacs, Th. Mann, Maetzig, Murnau, Özdamar, Pabst, Petzold, Plenzdorf, Riefenstahl, Rilke, Schanelec, Sebald, Seghers, Sloterdijk, Staudte, Stefan, Tawada, Wedekind, von Sternberg, Wenders, Wiene, Wolf.
 

Examining and Assembling the Discipline: Theories and Methods in German Studies (taught by rotating faculty)

This seminar introduces students to methods of academic work in German Studies. We will examine a variety of theoretical approaches to German  literature such as rhetoric, genre theory, hermeneutics, aesthetics, deconstruction, linguistics and speech act theory, psychoanalysis, structuralism and semiotics, critical theory, systems theory, new historicism, gender theory, media theory, digital humanities, as well as theories on literature in conjunction with power, colonialism, and ecology. 

Foreign Language Pedagogy: Theories and Practice (Sophia Strietholt &  April Henry)

German 700 provides students with foundational knowledge for teaching German within a collegiate U.S. educational context. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to engage theoretical knowledge pertaining to language learning, pedagogy, and curriculum with issues from the practical context of the language classroom, e.g., by conducting guided classroom observations, developing extended lesson plans, reflecting on their teaching and students’ learning, and creating a teaching philosophy.

Topics covered in the seminar include: Teaching languages in U.S. higher education, language and language learning theories, language teaching methods and approaches (e.g., communicative language teaching, task- and content-based instruction, literacy approaches), supporting different modalities (writing, speaking, listening, writing), teaching for intercultural understanding, the role of curriculum, and professional development and reflective teaching.

Courses in Program
 

Fall 2024

GERM 715 Foundation in German Studies II

Immersive exploration of literary, cultural, intellectual, and political developments in German-speaking lands, 1750-1900. Movements include: Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, Weimar Classicism, Biedermeier, Vormärz, and Realism. 
Readings will be in German, discussions in English.
Engelstein. WF 1:45 PM – 3:00 PM   -  Duke Campus 

GERM 745S  Brutal Humanism in Postwar Austria

This course explores the reemergence of humanism in the brutal and transgressive literature of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek and cinema of Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl.  We will analyze the philosophical underpinnings of pre-WWII German humanism, the deployment of brutality (as cruelty, disgust, torture, pain, excess, and taboo), and theoretical works from the fields of affect theory, aesthetics, and posthumanism.  
Taught in English.  Readings and films in German and English.  Translations/subtitles generally available.   
Gellen. W 4:40 – 7:10 PM - Duke Campus         

GERM 760  The Concept of the Symbol

There is widespread agreement that symbols are crucial for our understanding of ourselves as humans and as humanists, but there is little agreement about what symbols actually are. This question has acquired new urgency with the development of technologies that allow computers to freely yet mechanically generate symbolic strings. This course provides an introduction to the various concepts of the symbol—from the Eucharist to French and Russian symbolism, from German and English Romanticism to the invention of semiotics, from symbolic logic to the Lacanian symbolic order—that have historically underpinned our western relationships to aesthetic practice and technological innovation.  Class discussions in English; all readings available in translation
 Pourciau. F 10:30 AM – 1:00 PM - Duke Campus 

GERM 860  Experimental Modernism

This explores the development of experimental modernism from the early 20th century to the postwar decades. Starting with historical avant-garde movements like Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism and leading up to various neo-avant-gardes of the 1950’s and 1960’s like Lettrism, Neo-Dada, and the Concrete Poetry movement, we will investigate a host of writing techniques that sought to “test” the foundations, possibilities, and limits of language in unprecedented ways. We will examine how the aspiration to radically break away from the codes of literary tradition and the system of bourgeois art took shape through manifestoes, sound poetry, “automatic” writing, typographic montages, and early computer-generated texts. We will discuss the role of new media technologies and scientific models of experimentation in these contexts. And we will consider the legacy of experimental modernism through the lens of later critical accounts.
Authors include F.T. Marinetti, Gertrude Stein, Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, André Breton, Charles Olson, Haroldo de Campos, Eugen Gomringer, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker, and Max Bense. Additional critical readings by Peter Bürger, Friedrich Kittler, Hal Foster, Marjorie Perloff, Johanna Drucker, and others.  Class discussions in English. Readings will be made available in German and English.
Wilke. T, 4:40 - 7:10 pm. - Carolina Campus

GERM 700 Foreign Language Pedagogy: Theories and Practice

Provides students with foundational knowledge for teaching German within a collegiate U.S. educational context. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to engage theoretical knowledge pertaining to language learning, pedagogy, and curriculum with issues from the practical context of the language classroom, e.g., by conducting guided classroom observations, developing extended lesson plans, reflecting on their teaching and students’ learning, creating a teaching philosophy, and carrying out microteaching assignments.  Topics covered in the seminar include:

Teaching languages in U.S. higher education, language and language learning theories, language teaching methods and approaches (e.g., communicative language teaching, task- and content-based instruction, literacy approaches), supporting different modalities (writing, speaking, listening, reading), teaching for intercultural understanding, the role of curriculum, and professional development and reflective teaching.   Readings and class discussions in German and English. 
Strietholt. TR 3:10 PM – 4:25 PM - Carolina Campus 

 
Crosslisted Courses from Affiliated Departments

PS676S: Hegel's Political Philosophy

Within context of Hegel's total philosophy, an examination of his understanding of phenomenology and the phenomenological basis of political institutions and his understanding of Greek and Christian political life. Selections from Phenomenology, Philosophy of History, and Philosophy of Right. Research paper required. 
Gillespie. MW 10:05 AM - 11:20 AM - Duke Campus

Courses in Program

 Spring 2025

 GERM 714.  Foundations in German Studies I.  

First part of a three-semester sequence offering students a comprehensive, text-based survey of German literary history from the High Middle Ages to the present. The course introduces students to medieval German language, literature, and culture. 
Readings in English, German and Middle High German. Discussions in German
Permission of the instructor for undergraduates
Bernuth. MW 3:10 PM – 4:25 PM.  Carolina Campus

GERM 855.  Gender & Sexuality in German Film: From Weimar to the Present

In this seminar, we will watch seminal films by directors from every era, and representing both East and West Germany including Richard Oswald, Josef von Sternburg, Reinhold Schünzel, Wolfgang Staudte, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Helma Sanders-­‐Brahms. For the period of 1945-­‐1989, we will watch four West German films and three East German films so that we may gain a good understanding of both Germanies during this period. Readings of influential texts from the fields of German studies, history, film studies, feminist film theory, queer and transgender studies will aid our approach to these films and aid seminar participants in contextualizing these films within German (film) history and in considering what their engagement with gender and sexuality means for their respective historical moments.
Taught in English
Layne TH 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM.  Carolina Campus

GERM 866.  Melancholia

Throughout its history, the concept of melancholy has been intimately tied to both insanity and genius, as well as creativity and listlessness. From Aristotle’s  juxtaposition of a preponderance of black bile with human greatness, through the medieval association of religiosity and spiritual despair, to the interrelation of sadness and the lack of political agency in the 17th century, and the contrast between 18th-century sentimentalism and the rule of reason, this seminar will examine the historical variability of melancholy as it relates to works of visual art and literature, as well as philosophical, religious, psychological, and medical discourses from French, German, Italian and English-speaking Europe. Emphasis will be placed on German literature from the Middle Ages to the 20th century and on exploring the inherent melancholy of its modes of imagination, expression, and representation. 
Readings in German and English, class discussions in English.
Crosslist: CMPL 866.
Prica. M 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM.      Carolina Campus

Courses in Program

Spring 2023

GERM 614 Foundations in German Studies I 

This course offers a survey of German literature, language and culture from 1000-1700, as well as an introduction to research methods in medieval and early modern German literature. During this period, German literature begins to differentiate itself from other discourses like that of religion, philosophy, rhetoric and history; early aesthetic forms begin to take shape at the interface between orality and textuality. In order to be able to read medieval literature in the original and produce viable scholarly translations, students will be introduced to the Middle High German language, including grammar and semantics.  

Readings in English, German and Middle High German; Discussions in German.  

Permission of the instructor for undergraduates. 

Prica.  T 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM 

UNC Campus 

GER 711S.01 Mapping Jewish Modernisms

This course explores the multiple ways that Jewish literature maps onto different locations around the world—from traveling characters in novels to migrating authors, international publication and translation practices, and holdings in archives and libraries around the world.  We will explore the transnational, cross-cultural, and multilingual dimensions of modern Jewish literature, and will develop a project for a website and exhibit at Duke’s Perkins Library.  We will read Kafka, Schnitzler, Svevo, Morante, Carrington, Woolf, and Toomer, among others.   

Open to grad students and undergrads; assignments appropriate to enrollment level. 

Gellen, Ziolkowski.  TTH 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM 

DUKE Campus 
 

GER 790–4.01 Adorno and Philosophy 

An introduction to Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophical thinking from both analytical and historical perspectives.  Attention will be given to his relation to the philosophical tradition (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Marx), associates of the Institute for Social Research (e.g., Horkheimer, Pollock, Benjamin), psychoanalysis, and against the background of his understanding of “late capitalism”.   

All readings and discussions in English, with the option of texts in German. 

Pickford.  W 3:30 PM – 6:00 PM  

DUKE Campus 

GER 890S.01 Relationality and the Individual: Self, Other, Environment around 1800 and beyond

We will explore theories of self and other as reciprocally emergent through encounter and communication – of forces, ideas, language, affect, sexual fluids, diseases.  The relationship to other(s), variously imagined as an external “environment,” as sexual other, or as an other recognized as similar, creates and challenges the boundaries of identity and impacts theories of collectivities and ethical relations. Readings: literature, philosophy, and science likely including Fichte, Schelling, Goethe, Novalis, Günderrode, Blake, A.v. Humboldt, Stifter, Droste-Hülshoff, Uexküll, Kafka, Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett.  

No knowledge of German required for non-CDG students. 

Engelstein. M 3:30 PM – 6:00 PM 

DUKE Campus 

Courses in Program

Fall 2023

GERM 616  Cultural Foundations III

This intensive graduate seminar surveys German-speaking cinema and literary history between the years of 1900 and the present. Instead of beginning with literary modernism, this seminar starts by introducing students to the birth of cinema and will proceed by bringing film into productive dialogue with both literature and theory. Grasping German literary history throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century will accordingly seek out the productive points of contact with other bodies of thought as well as other mediums. In addition to early narrative and experimental cinema, the course will explore the cinema of the Weimar Republic, Nazi cinema, rubble cinema, the cinema of divided Germany, as well as post-unification cinema like the Berlin School. Similarly, the course will also introduce students to the plurality of styles around 1900, the historical avant-gardes, New Objectivity, Nazi literature, rubble literature, Gruppe 47, socialist realism, documentary literature, new subjectivities, postmodernism, and pop literature. 

Readings in German; class discussions in German and English.

Instructor: Langston                                           

TTH 3:10 pm – 4:25 pm                                                      

Carolina Campus

GERM 640   Get Real!  Or not…  German Poetic Realism

This course will focus on the rise of Realism and the wake of Romanticism in German-language literature of the second half of the nineteenth century. Emphasis will be on the delineation of realist literary strategies, with a special focus on the genre of the novella, on the political and historical complicities of the movement in terms of both overt (e.g., the rise of nationalism, regionalism) and indirect (e.g., visual practices, gender politics); the relation to other cultural fields (e.g., philosophy, historiography, education, art history); and the relation to other nineteenth-century realist movements in England and France. I have a particular interest in issues of inheritance I hope we can explore: as part of this, we will be asking why Romanticism, the supposedly superseded movement of the earlier part of the century, continued its afterlife in the Realism period.

Although mostly focused on our primary texts, we will also consider various theoretical approaches to the problem of realism in general.

Readings in German, Class Discussions in English

Instructor: Downing

TH 4:40 pm –7:10 pm                                                                                                                              

Carolina Campus

GERMAN 790-4        The History of Ideology

The nineteenth century saw the rise of multiple ideologies or “-isms” that continue to shape our world: nationalism, liberalism, socialism, communism, conservatism, feminism, anti-Semitism, racism, and so on. This seminar will explore the origins, values, and impacts of these nineteenth-century ideologies by looking at key figures and texts in the German context. It will also examine the history and meaning of the concept of ideology itself.  

Discussions in English, readings mostly in German.  

Instructor: Norberg  

W 3:20 pm – 5:50 pm.                                                                                                                            

Duke Campus

GERM 880      Mood, Medium, Milieu: Film Aesthetics, Media Theory, and Anthropocene

In this seminar, we will explore the intersections, in light of contemporary theory as well as historical frameworks, of aesthetics and the environmental, with a particular emphasis on film.

The seminar takes its starting point from the claim that mediation is environmental, and, conversely, the environment a medium. Mood and milieu are media in this sense: they both negotiate inside and outside, mediation and expression. In scientific texts of the 19th and 20th century, milieu is described as medium of life, while form and behavior of the living figured as expression of this medium. Mood, or Stimmung, likewise mediates between the internal and subjective (as mood), can describe a social space or landscape (as atmosphere) and also encompasses the exchange and resonance between internal and external Stimmungen (as attunement). Mood and milieu are thus historical and critical media techniques.

We will ask to what an extent film can be described as environmental medium, and how film aesthetics mobilizes mood and milieu to express the shifting understanding of human, technical and geological forces with respect to environmental agency, climate change, and the digital. How might an aesthetic, understood environmentally, help us grasp the diminished human agency in ubiquitous digital cultures, and the increased human agency in planetary matters?

We will read media theory and aesthetic theory – by Siegfried Kracauer, Béla Balázs, Leo Spitzer, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Lev Manovich, Adrian Ivakhiv, Mark Hansen, Steffen Hven, Rosalind Krauss etc. – alongside texts about ecology, Anthropocene and politics – by George Canguilhem, C. S. Holling, Melinda Cooper, Dipesh Chakrabarty, etc. - and accompany our readings with a diverse German and global film corpus (Murnau’s Faustus, RiefenstaOphüls’ Sans lendemain, Antonioni’s Red Desert, Schanelec’s Marseille, Reichardt’s Night Moves, and others).

Instructor: Pollmann

F 10:05-12:35                                                                                                         

 Duke Campus 

Fall 2022

GERM 700. Foreign Language Pedagogy: Theories and Practice

German 700 provides students with foundational knowledge for teaching German within a collegiate U.S. educational context. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to engage theoretical knowledge pertaining to language learning, pedagogy, and curriculum with issues from the practical context of the language classroom, e.g., by conducting guided classroom observations, developing extended lesson plans, reflecting on their teaching and students’ learning, and creating a teaching philosophy.
Topics covered in the seminar include: Teaching languages in U.S. higher education, language and language learning theories, language teaching methods and approaches (e.g., communicative language teaching, task- and content-based instruction, literacy approaches), supporting different modalities (writing, speaking, listening, writing), teaching for intercultural understanding, the role of curriculum, and professional development and reflective teaching.

Readings and class discussions in German and English

Weiler, Henry. M 04:40 PM - 07:10 PM. UNC and Duke Campuses   

GERMAN 715.Foundations in German Studies II, 1750 to 1900

Foundation in German Studies II offers a survey of literary, cultural, intellectual, and political developments in German-speaking lands between the years of 1750-1900. Our goal is to cultivate an understanding of literary and cultural history by paying particular attention to periods, movements, genres, ideologies, socio-economic developments, and philosophical ideas. The syllabus will include authors such as Lessing, Kant, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, Günderrode, Kleist, Heine, Büchner, Droste-Hülshoff, Marx, and Fontane.

Readings will be in German, discussions in English..

Norberg. F 10:15 AM - 12:45 PM. Duke Campus                              

GERM 860. The Aesthetics of Philosophies of Nature

Aesthetic theories in the eighteenth century are obsessed with nature: is art an imitation of nature—and if so, of a natural “order” and what is this natural order? Is there a difference between natural beauty and artistic beauty—and what is the relation of physis to techne? How do aesthetic paradigms manifest themselves in nature or in judgments about nature, e.g. in the beautiful and the sublime? Endless aesthetic investigations have centered around precisely such questions. This seminar will invert this line of inquiry. Specifically, it will ask the question: are philosophies of nature also, in some way, obsessed with art? And are they perhaps most productively and provocatively aesthetic—exploring epistemic, semiotic or imaginative paradigms with a high potential of transference to aesthetic contexts—when they turn to nature as imagined outside human practices or irreducible to human intelligibility? Would it be possible to develop aesthetic theories or speculative aesthetics as consequences of such philosophies of nature, and what would they look like? The primary focus for this line of inquiry will be Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and poetic experiments with Naturphilosophie (in Novalis, Günderrode, Goethe, Hoffmann, Balzac), as well as some philosophies of nature before Schelling that harbor speculative aesthetics of this sort (Bruno, Leibniz, Theosophie [Jakob Böhme and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger], Schiller, and Hemsterhuis).

Readings and class discussion in German and English.
Trop. W 04:40 PM - 07:10 PM. UNC Campus
 

GERM 865. The Eighties

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, literary critics were quick to dismiss the eighties.
Compared to the new freedoms enjoyed in reunified Germany, the eighties were boring & uniform, shallow & unimaginative, devoid of experience & talent.  Scholars were quick to call the decade transitional, somewhere between late modernism & postmodernism.  Today, neither position does justice to the rich body of literature of the eighties.

This seminar seeks to re-situate canonical (e.g., Grass, Hein, Jelinek, Müller, Ransmayr, Süskind, Strauβ, Wolf) and marginal literary works (e.g., Anderson, Glasser, Goetz, Goldt, Meinecke, Morshäuser, Shernikau) from both East and West Germany into the larger cultural contexts of popular music, painting, film, cultural theory and philosophy.

Of utmost concern is what Raymond Williams calls “structure of feeling”:

What did the eighties feel like?

How did structures of feeling morph over the decade?

How did poetry, theater, and prose—in dialogue with other cultural texts—reflect and contest dominant affective structures?

Readings in German, class discussions in German and English.
Langston. T 04:40 PM - 07:10 PM. UNC Campus     

Courses in Program

Spring 2022

GERM 655 Introduction to Black German Studies

In this course, we will trace the development of Black German Studies from foundational autobiographical texts like Ika Hügel-Marshall’s Daheim unterwegs and the testimonies in Farbe bekennen to the poetry of May Ayim and Philip Khabo Köpsell and the recent novels and theater performances by artists like Olivia Wenzel and Simone Dede Ayivi. We will also read theoretical texts by Black Germans, Black Europeans and African Americans to find the appropriate lens for analyzing Black German texts. Some of the questions we will ask are: Can theories rooted in US racial discourses be useful for understanding Black German texts? Where do we find points of contact and where do we find detours? We will also interrogate the boundaries of German national identity and question to what extent German identity has been/continues to be associated with whiteness? How is Blackness constructed in Germany and to what ends? And what is the process of a Black German subject formation? Authors to be explored include W.E.B. DuBois, Audre Lorde, May Ayim, Fatima El-Tayeb, Katharina Oguntoye, Michelle Wright, Grada Kilomba, Sharon Dodua Otoo and Derrick Bell. 

 Readings in German and English ; discussions in English. Advanced undergraduates need permission from the instructor to register. LAYNE - Tue.  4:10 PM - 7:10 PM. – UNC Campus
 

GERM 501 Structure of German

 This course entails the formal analysis of German grammar (phonology, morphology, word formation, syntax) within the framework of generative grammar, with additional modules on language history, variation, standardization, and language politics, and the German language ex patria.  No prior exposure to linguistics will be presupposed.
Roberg - Tues./Thurs. 3:10PM - 4:25PM - Carolina Campus
cross-listed with LING 567
 

GER 590S : Romanticism in Theory & Practice

Readings in Comparative Romanticism (English and German). Part I considers different models and aims of theoretical inquiry (Burke, Paine, Godwin / W. v. Humboldt, Fichte, Novalis). Part II focuses on the relation between narrative and the formation ("Bildung") of the Romantic subject; authors here will be Goethe and Jane Austen; Part III explores Romantic constructions of the past and the grounding of the modern, Romantic nation state in an aesthetics of mourning, as realized in a variety of lyric forms -- ballad, ode, hymn, and elegy; principal authors will be Wordsworth, Hölderlin, and Keats.
 

Readings and discussions in English
Pfau - Mon. 3:30 PM - 6:00 PM - Duke Campus

Courses in Program

Fall 2021

GERM 616 Cultural Foundations in German Studies III: 1900 to Present

This intensive graduate seminar surveys German-speaking cinema and literary history between the years of 1900 and the present. Instead of beginning with literary modernism, this seminar starts by introducing students to the birth of cinema and will proceed by bringing film into productive dialogue with both literature and theory. Grasping German literary history throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century will accordingly seek out the productive points of contact with other bodies of thought as well as other mediums. In addition to early narrative and experimental cinema, the course will explore the cinema of the Weimar Republic, Nazi cinema, rubble cinema, the cinema of divided Germany, as well as post-unification cinema like the Berlin School. Similarly, the course will also introduce students to the plurality of styles around 1900, the historical avant-gardes, New Objectivity, Nazi literature, rubble literature, Gruppe 47, socialist realism, documentary literature, new subjectivities, postmodernism, and pop literature.
Readings in German; class discussions in German and English
Permission of the instructor for undergraduates
LANGSTON - TTH- 3:10 PM - 4:25 PM - Carolina Campus

GER 750. The Eternal Feminine: Gender & Aesthetic Theory

This seminar asks about the historical role played by feminine figures—muses, maidens, mothers, lovers—in the construction of aesthetic epiphanies and metamorphoses. The notion of Woman as a conduit for inspiration has a long theological, philosophical and literary tradition, from the early Christian topos of the Virgin Mary as an “aquaduct of grace,” to the Beatrices and Lauras of Renaissance poetry, to the “eternal feminine,” “beautiful soul,” and “blue flower” of German classicism and romanticism, to the Salomes and Lulus of European modernism, to the earth mothers and Pandoras of contemporary theory. We will interrogate this topos in search of a different and deeper understanding of what it has meant, historically, to be transformed by a work of art. Authors to be explored include Dante, Rousseau, Goethe, Novalis, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Bachmann, Lacan, Irigaray, Kittler, and Stiegler
Readings Available in Original or in English Translation; discussions in English.
POURCIAU - Mon.  3:30 PM - 6:00 PM. - Duke Campus.

GERM 825. Topics in Early Modern Literature. Life in the First Person: German and Yiddish Autobiography from 16th century to the 18th century

How does one narrate one’s life in German or Yiddish? When does biographical writing in the first person start? What is fictional and what is nonfictional autobiography? When do women start writing about their lives? And how reliable can a first-person narrator be? This seminar will discuss these and such questions, looking at memoirs, “confessions,” self-portraits, and autofiction written by nuns and businesswomen, converts and accountants in German and Yiddish between the sixteenth century and the eighteenth century.
Readings are in German or in English translation; discussion in German
VON BERNUTH - TH 4:40 PM - 7:10 PM - Carolina Campus

GERM 860. Topics in Aesthetics and Criticism: Wagner’s Legacy

No figure has revolutionized opera and modern conceptions of the artwork like the German composer Richard Wagner, whose antisemitic and nationalistic convictions continue to challenge and scandalize cultural critics and opera connoisseurs to this day. This graduate seminar will explore the reverberations of Wagner’s philosophical legacy in the writings of Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou, Kittler, and others. Our Investigations will focus on different approaches to aesthetic artifacts of the past, the liminal space between art and technics, and the socio-political nature of aesthetic modernism after Wagner.
Readings in German or English; discussion in English
NESTER - FRI. - 11:30 AM - 2:20 PM - Carolina Campus

GERM 700. Foreign Language Pedagogy: Theories and Practice

German 700 provides students with foundational knowledge for teaching German within a collegiate U.S. educational context. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to engage theoretical knowledge pertaining to language learning, pedagogy, and curriculum with issues from the practical context of the language classroom, e.g., by conducting guided classroom observations, developing extended lesson plans, reflecting on their teaching and students’ learning, and creating a teaching philosophy.

Topics covered in the seminar include: Teaching languages in U.S. higher education, language and language learning theories, language teaching methods and approaches (e.g., communicative language teaching, task- and content-based instruction, literacy approaches), supporting different modalities (writing, speaking, listening, writing), teaching for intercultural understanding, the role of curriculum, and professional development and reflective teaching.
WEILER - Tues.-  4:40 PM -  7:10 PM.  -  Carolina Campus.

Crosslisted Courses from Affiliated Departments

The Frankfurt School (LIT 690-8/GERM 690)

German thought since Year Zero (1945) has more closely wedded to traditional philosophical discourse than French theory and found its themes and problems more directly impacted by the historical vicissitudes of a country (or in fact, two countries) emerging from rubble. The principal events of the postwar years – the currency reform, the Wall, the Sixties, the Red Army Faction, perestroika, reunification, the European Union have been accompanied by an ever greater embedding of Germany in the global transformation of the world beyond it, to a degree unparalleled in most other countries; and its thinkers are thereby confronted with issues as international in scope as they are more purely national. We will begin with the return of the exiles – the Frankfurt School in the West, Brecht in the East – and follow the evolution of Left thought in the 1960s – Marcuse, Enzensberger, Rudolf Bahro – and its aftermath in the reflections on history of Negt and Kluge and later on by Peter Sloterdijk. There will be an examination of the career and dominance of Juergen Habermas.  Other writers touched on will be Sohn-Rethel, Luhmann, Bohrer, Kittler, Peter Weiss, Peter Burger, and Hartmut Rosa. The course will begin with an extended reading of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (use the translation from Stanford Press), along with a consideration of the postwar influence of Heidegger. Undergraduates should consult with the professor before enrolling.
Instructor: Fredric Jameson -  ONLINE - TTH - 10:15 AM - 11:30AM

Spring 2021

GERM 502 Middle High German

Introduction to medieval German language, literature, and culture. Readings in English, German and Middle High German. Discussions in German. This course offers a survey of German literature, language and culture from 1000-1700, as well as an introduction to research methods in medieval and early modern German literature. During this period, German literature begins to differentiate itself from other discourses like that of religion, philosophy, rhetoric and history; early aesthetic forms begin to take shape at the interface between orality and textuality. In order to be able to read medieval literature in the original and produce viable scholarly translations, students will be introduced to the Middle High German language, including grammar and semantics.
Instructor: Aleksandra Prica

GER 740S East/West/Zion:  German Jewish Modernism

A graduate course about Jewish literary writing in the first half of the 20th century. Topics include space and place, tradition and modernity, identity and belonging, language, nationality, religious practice, and politics. Special focus on the role of Eastern Europe in the literary imagination of German-Jewish writers, and the use of modernist form and style.
Class discussions in English; readings mostly in German, with some additional texts in Polish, Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Most texts available in English.
Instructor:  Kata Gellen - Duke University

Instructional Mode planned for this course as of October 28, 2020: Synchronous Remote

GER 790S Topics in German Idealism

An introductory exploration of certain aspects of German Idealism (Kant and Hegel) with some attention to their legacy in later thinkers.  Topics may include: Self-consciousness, the nature of judgment, experience, and the philosophy of action.
All discussion and primary readings in English, though knowledge of German is helpful.
Crosslist:  Philosophy.
Instructional Mode planned for this course as of October 28, 2020: Synchronous Remote
Henry Pickford -  Duke University.

Fall 2020

GERM 615 Foundations in German Studies II (taking the place of Foundations I).

This seminar offers an intensive survey of literary, cultural and intellectual developments in German-speaking lands between the years of 1750-1900, supplemented by attention to research methods of the field. Success in Foundations II does not require a command of the material covered in Foundations I. We begin with the Enlightenment and move through the sometimes intersecting and sometimes divergent movements of Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, Weimar Classicism, Biedermeier, Vormärz, and Realism, as well as considering thinkers who defy categorization.
Our goal is to cultivate an understanding of literary history as a cultural formation that changes over time by paying particular attention to:

1) the respective stylistic particularities, genres, textual forms, generic properties and idiosyncratic features of cultural production as reflected in their historical moment/movement;
2) the historically-bound ideologies and norms – literary, philosophical, historical, political, socio-economic, naturalistic/scientific – that are actively produced or contested through the complexity of aesthetic forms;
3) evolving and heterogenous models of what is German that have shaped the study of the diverse set of texts we are considering;
4) the role that shifts in media (literacy, visual and tactile art, various print technologies) and their interrelation played in constructing different concepts of literature; and
5) attendant philosophical and theoretical concepts relevant for situating literary texts within larger discursive context within their respective time.

Throughout, through critical readings from a variety of theoretical perspectives, we will explore distinct approaches to analyzing texts and related cultural artifacts in order to foster a knowledge of the modern tools of scholarly inquiry (editions, translations, dictionaries, critical approaches and methods) that are fundamental to the field of German Studies. This course is designed as a reading-intensive seminar. In addition to completing the readings and participating actively in seminar discussions, students will be expected to take a midterm and final exam and to give several oral presentations. No papers will be required.
Will include authors such as Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Schlegel, Tieck, Hölderlin, Kant, Günderrode, Kleist, Eichendorff, Stifter, Heine, Keller, Büchner, Droste-Hülshoff, Marx, Storm, and Fontane.  Readings in German.  Class Discussions in English.
Koelb  MW 4:00 PM to 5:15 PM. 

GERMAN 790 German Political Thought

This graduate seminar serves as an introduction to German political and social thought from Kant to Marx (roughly 1770-1850). Readings, often short essays or excerpts, drawn from the writings of Kant, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Marx, and other thinkers. Special emphasis on conceptions of statehood, sovereignty, and national community, against the background of an era of revolution, war, and territorial reconfiguration. No familiarity with the topic required.
Readings in German, class discussions in English.
Norberg  Th 5:15PM - 7:45pm

GERM 855 Technics of Association and the Literature of Division, 1949-1989

If technē, as Heidegger argues, is “something poetic” that brings forth and reveals truths—it is “knowing in the widest sense,” he adds—then how might we understand literature as bringing forth possibilities of being together especially when myriad internal and external forces of division undermine any togetherness? By exchanging the “form” in Georg Simmel’s century-old theory of “forms of association” with “technics,” this seminar seeks to query postwar German literature—a literature of division—for its historically contingent purchase on being-with, -for, and -beside others. If in our present moment “becoming social” has indeed become a technological problem with dire political consequences, how might the literature of division from an older era provide us with fruitful insights into the poetic conditions for germinating essential political categories like the public sphere or even communism? Theoretical texts by a wide array of thinkers (e.g., Arendt, Badiou, Butler, Foucault, Habermas, Heidegger, Mouffe, Nancy, Simmel, Sloterdijk) will guide discussions of canonical novels, plays and poetry from East and West (e.g., Bachmann, Becker, Böll, Handke, Hein, Kluge, Johnson, Koeppen, Maron, Müller, Schneider, Strauß, Wolf). English translations for non-CDG students; CDG students will read the German originals.
Discussions in English.
Langston  W 5:30 PM to 8:00 PM.    UNC CAMPUS

GERM 860 Poetic Cosmologies

From Plato’s Timaeus to Yuk Hui’s 2016 essay on cosmotechnics, cosmologies condense a variety of discursive operations and generic forms (scientific, religious, philosophical, epistemological, mythopoetic, aesthetic, ethical and political) and represent sophisticated crucibles for stabilizing or reconfiguring norms and practices. This seminar will examine the aesthetic, ethical, and political potentialities of cosmological thinking. Possible authors to be discussed: Plato, Dante, Bruno, Leibniz, Schelling, Novalis, Alexander von Humboldt, Simondon, Latour, Arendt, Heidegger, Rubenstein, Yuk Hui among others.
Readings in English translation, with some supplemental readings in German; Class discussions in English.
TROP: T 04:40 PM-07:10 PM

GERM 700 Foreign Language Pedagogy: Theories and Practice

German 700 provides students with foundational knowledge for teaching German within a collegiate U.S. educational context. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to engage theoretical knowledge pertaining to language learning, pedagogy, and curriculum with issues from the practical context of the language classroom, e.g., by conducting guided classroom observations, developing extended lesson plans, reflecting on their teaching and students’ learning, and creating a teaching philosophy.
Topics covered in the seminar include: Teaching languages in U.S. higher education, language and language learning theories, language teaching methods and approaches (e.g., communicative language teaching, task- and content-based instruction, literacy approaches), supporting different modalities (writing, speaking, listening, writing), teaching for intercultural understanding, the role of curriculum, and professional development and reflective teaching.
Readings and class discussions in English.
Students register on either campus.
Henry, Weiler.  M 5:30 PM to 8:00 PM.   

Crosslisted Courses from Affiliated Departments

CMPL 841 History of Literary Criticism I (Classicism)

The course introduces students to some of the major strains in literary criticism from the Classical Period to the 18^th century. Readings of major authors will be paired not only with literary examples contemporary with our chosen critics, but also with modern day theoretical responses to their works. 

Our objective is a working knowledge of dominant trends in European literary criticism up to (and including) the Enlightenment, useful in understanding the literature of the successive historical periods and also as a continuing, vital influence on twentieth- and twenty-first century poetics.  We will also be devoting some time to the primary non-Classical tradition of early Western literary criticism, namely Biblical interpretation.

Authors read include Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Horace, Longinus, Philo, Proclus, Plotinus, Augustine,  Scaliger, Luther, Boileau, Sidney, Burke, Young, and Lessing; Homer, Pindar, Callimachus, Ovid, Vergil, Dante, and Pope; and Auerbach, Derrida, Genette, Ricouer, Benjamin, and Bernal.
Readings in German and English; class discussions in English.
Students register on either campus
Downing   - TH 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM  

Spring 2020

Courses in Program

The King's Image: A History of Representation (GER 890S)

Repraesentatio, “to make present” or “set before the eyes,” was originally a juridical concept, which gained theological import in the early Christian debates about the true doctrinal meaning of the Eucharist. But the dynamic of Darstellung has always also been an aesthetic problem: the nexus between theories of power and theories of art—between the making-present of the sovereign and the making-present of the Idea—plays a central role in the history of literature from the middle ages to the modern. In this course, we will examine some of the key German-language texts in this lineage, by authors like Lohenstein, Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Grillparzer, Wagner, Hofmannsthal, Kafka and George, alongside a few of the foundational theoretical attempts (Kantorowicz, Schmitt, Benjamin, Agamben) to make sense of this tradition.  
Pourciau.  Tues. 4:40p - 7:10p  Duke Campus - Old Chem. 119

Form is Bliss: On a Basic Category in German Philosophy, Aesthetics and Literature (GERM 860)

In his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-1929) the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer described mankind as “capable of form.” He thereby pointed out the interrelatedness of forms with the conditions of human existence, in other words, the relationship between life and aesthetic expression. The seminar takes this idea as a starting point and a leitmotif. On a journey through the long history of poetics and philosophy of form from Antiquity to the 20^th century, we will examine how humans shape an otherwise amorphous reality. Readings include Plato and Aristotle; form in the classical rhetorical tradition; Plotinus and his thoughts on form and the beautiful in juxtaposition with Augustine and Thomas Aquinas; form and creation in excerpts from the Cosmographia by the medieval philosopher and poet Bernardus Silvestris (12^th century) in juxtaposition with Derrida’s Chora (1987); form and the Eucharist in Minneleich by the German medieval poet Frauenlob (around 1300); form between knowledge, perception and being (Sein) in the age of Goethe, including texts by Karl Philipp Moritz, Schiller, Goethe and Hegel; a discussion of form and formats using the example of genre in Schlegel’s essay on the sonnet and in André Jolles’ Einfache Formen (Simple Forms, 1931); form and culture in Georg Simmel’s essays Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur (Tragedy of Culture, 1911), Der Bildrahmen (The Picture Frame, 1902) and Die Ruine (The Ruin, 1911) and in Ernst Cassirer´s response to Simmel´s position; form as distortion in Viktor Sklovskij’s substantiation of formalism and in Brecht´s Kleines Organon für das Theater (Little Organon for Theater, 1948) and Über Stoffe und Formen (On Materials and Forms, 1929) and Deleuze´s Barthelby or the Formula (1989); Niklas Luhmann’s medium-form differentiation in Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Art as a Social System, 1995) and Das Zeichen als Form (The Sign as Form, 1993). We will also include lyric poetry by Gottfried Benn, Ingeborg Bachmann, Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire.
Prica  Mon.  4:40p - 7:10p  UNC Campus

History of the German Language(GERM 500)

This course introduces students to the historical development of the German language from the earliest times until the modern period. We shall look at some of the phonological and morphosyntactic changes that differentiate German from English, Dutch and other related languages, and give the modern language its hallmark linguistic features.
We shall further examine the historical and cultural context in which German developed, noting the impact of important events, from Christianization to the Reformation, from courtly poetry to the invention of printing, on language use.
Students will read short texts in the main historical forms of the language — Old Saxon, Old High German, Middle Low German, Middle High German and Early New High German.
Taught in English
Prerequisite: Advanced reading proficiency (minimally) in German
Roberge  W 3:40p - 6:10p  UNC Campus

Crosslisted Courses from Affiliated Departments

The Bauhaus: Architecture, Design, Politics (ARTHIST 731S/GER 731S)
This seminar analyses the history of the Bauhaus, from its roots in Weimar Germany to its impact on framing post World War II international Modernism. It covers major scholarship on Modernism, architecture and design as well as central questions of 20th-century art and politics. Grounded in the foundation and activity of the school in Germany after World War I, the seminar will also cover the spread of Bauhaus ideas, faculty, and students internationally including in Japan, Turkey, the United States, and on both sides of the Cold War.

(Please note that this course will also have a travel component: students will be doing a 3-day on-site analysis of Bauhaus related architecture and design in Chicago after spring break [exact time to be scheduled]. This travel will be funded by the AAH&VS department.)
Jaskot  Mon. 3:20p. - 5:55p  Smith Warehouse  Duke Campus

Fall 2019

Courses in Program

GERMAN 716: Cultural Foundations in German Studies II

This seminar, a required course for graduate students in the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies, offers an intensive survey of literary, cultural and intellectual developments in German-speaking lands from 1800 to the present, and includes a sampling of major authors and works from Romanticism, Biedermeier/Vormärz, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, National Socialism and exile literature, as well as postwar literature in East Germany, West Germany and Austria, and the contemporary period. Works will be placed within their literary-aesthetic, as well as their social and intellectual contexts. Authors include Büchner, Stifter, Fontane, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Brecht, Grass, Handke, Jelinek, and others.
Readings in German; class discussion in English. Gellen.  WF 03:05 PM-04:20 PM.  - Duke Campus

GERM 825:  The Early Modern in the Modern

The early modern period and its vast literary production became a point of departure both for literary analysis and theory as well as a source for adaptations and new narratives in German literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Walter Benjamin wrote his habilitation thesis on the baroque Trauerspiel; Berthold Brecht used various early modern sources including Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus for his play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder; and several literary works from East Germany are based on early modern texts such as Peter Hacks’ Das Volksbuch vom Herzog Ernst, Thomas Brasch’s Vor den Vätern sterben die Söhne, and Stefan Heyms’ Ahasver. Early modern literary figures also play a role in recent books such as Ingo Schulze’s Peter Holtz and Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll. This seminar will focus on a selection of early modern texts and their modern interlocutors. It will discuss questions concerning the relationship of literature and politics, folly and society, utopia and dystopia, violence and freedom. Readings and Class Discussions in German
von Bernuth.  TTH 03:10 PM-4:25 PM.   UNC Campus.

GERM 880:  Film Theory, Film Analysis, and Film Philosophy via German Cinema

This course provides an introduction to critical developments in film theory, film analysis and film philosophy by attending closely to German cinema from the late nineteenth century to the present day in the context of the larger European, Anglo-American and global film landscape. We will examine the historical formation of film analysis and its requisite objects such as montage, mise en scène, cinematography, and sound; we will survey the history of film theory, that is, engage the questions asked by film scholars since the medium’s inception: What is the material of cinema? How does the film medium compare and contrast with the other, older arts such as literature, music, painting, or architecture, and how does it fit within the current media landscape? What makes it a unique form of expression? What is the nature of the film image and what relationship does it bear to the physical world? How do the sounds, images, bodies, and narratives onscreen impact us – politically, emotionally, physically, mentally? Do technological factors, like the advent of sound or the shift from photochemical to digital “film” call for a fundamentally different theory of the medium and its expressive possibilities? Finally, we will ask how films could be forms of philosophical thought. Can the audiovisual language of moving images, this form of light and shadow, formulate ideas and concepts? How could a film contain a theory of cinema? What can film contribute to philosophy, and vice versa?

In order to engage with these questions of analysis, theory, and philosophy, we will read the classical German film theories of Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin alongside classical and contemporary international theorists, from Jean Epstein and Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Deleuze, Vivian Sobchack, Laura Mulvey, Marie-Luise Angerer, and others. Among the film-theoretical approaches we will discuss are phenomenology, feminism, psychoanalysis, affect theory, and critical race theory. Each week, we will discuss 1-2 German films and important international interlocutors in light of these theories and larger questions, including Nosferatu, Dr. Mabuse, The Legend of Paul and Paula, Redupers, Western, Phoenix, and Toni Erdmann. [Language of readings and class discussions TBA]
Pollmann.  F 10:10 AM-01:10 PM.   UNC Campus

GERMAN 890S:  Kleist and His Interlocutors

In constant conversation with the fluidly defined movements of Romanticism, Classicism, Idealism, and Naturphilosophie, Heinrich von Kleist remained adamantly nonconformist and unclassifiable.  Acerbic and incisive, tantalizing and enigmatic, violent and kaleidoscopic, Kleist’s oeuvre invites, rewards, and frustrates interpretation.  In this seminar, we will read dramas, stories, novellas, and occasional essays by Kleist in pairings with works of some of his chief interlocutors, primarily literary and philosophical.  Authors will include contemporaries such as Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, as well as Kleist’s afterlives in writers such as Kafka and Christa Wolf.  We will ask questions about signification, literary form, ideology, ethics, politics, subjectivity, bodies and life processes, and nationalism, among other topics.  Suggestions for additional interlocutors will be taken into consideration.
Readings in German; English translations will be available.  Class discussions in English
Engelstein.  M 04:40 PM-07:10 PM.   Duke Campus

GERMAN 700: Foreign Language Pedagogy: Theories and Practice

German 700 provides students with foundational knowledge for teaching German within a collegiate U.S. educational context. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to engage theoretical knowledge pertaining to language learning, pedagogy, and curriculum with issues from the practical context of the language classroom, e.g., by conducting guided classroom observations, developing extended lesson plans, reflecting on their teaching and students’ learning, and creating a teaching philosophy.
Topics covered in the seminar include: Teaching languages in U.S. higher education, language and language learning theories, language teaching methods and approaches (e.g., communicative language teaching, task- and content-based instruction, literacy approaches), supporting different modalities (writing, speaking, listening, writing), teaching for intercultural understanding, the role of curriculum, and professional development and reflective teaching.
Crane.  W 04:40 PM – 07:10 PM.   Duke Campus.

Spring 2019

Courses in Program

Middle High German (GERM502)

This course teaches the basic elements of the Middle High German language and exposes students to a variety of textual genres from the high Middle Ages such as courtly romance, heroic epic, love lyric, and religious literature.  The focus is on language and translation, but the close textual work also provides an introduction to medieval literature and culture.
Readings in English, German and Middle High German. Class will be conducted in German.
Von Bernuth.  F 10:15 AM-01:15 PM. Register at UNC; Course meets on  Duke Campus - Link Seminar Room 4

Later 20th Century Literature: Multicultural Germany. (GERM 655)

What does it mean to be German? On what does a German identity depend? A common language? A common religion? A common legal status? Since the end of World War II with the arrival of numerous guest workers, foreign students and refugees, Germany has become increasingly diverse. How does this influence German notions of national identity? We will explore these issues through discussion and readings of literature, theoretical and non-fictional texts, as well as viewing films.
Readings in English or German; class discussions in English. Layne.  MW 03:10 PM-04:25 PM. UNC Campus.

Marx and Philosophy (GERM/PHIL 790)

An introduction to the philosophy of Karl Marx from both analytical and historical perspectives. We shall study his early, explicitly philosophical texts and his later writings on political economy. Focus will be on his transformation of fundamental concepts from the philosophical tradition (chiefly Aristotle and Hegel), his critique of political economy, his concepts of historical materialism, ideology, and critique, as well as his reception by some later Marxist thinkers. Readings in English or German; class discussions in English. Pickford.  T 04:40 PM-07:10 PM. -  Allen 326 - Duke Campus.

Crosslisted Courses from Affiliated Departments

ENGLISH 890S: The Melancholy of Art

Theodor Adorno at various points in his oeuvre remarked that the illusory and ephemeral world spun in art, literary or otherwise, often tends to engulf the reader/audience in sadness.  Because all art “is bound up with semblance, [it] is endowed with sadness; art grieves all the more, the more completely it suggests meaning.” As it responds to a welter of inchoate and antagonistic forces that comprise our empirical existence, art and the artistic temperament knows that it can only ever bring all these conflicting perceptions, desires, fears, etc. into fleeting (symbolic) alignment. Profoundly cognizant of its own transience as a merely symbolic world, art is bound up with melancholy.  Or, as Adorno puts it, “melancholy is the shadow of what in all form is heterogeneous, which its form strives to banish: mere existence.  … In the utopia of its form, art bends under the burdensome weight of the empirical world from which, as art, it steps away.”
The focus of this seminar is not melancholy as a “theme” in art but, rather, the inherently melancholic disposition of art and representation. It is no accident that the nexus of art and melancholy becomes pronounced just as the idea of aesthetic autonomy begins to take shape – that is, of art beginning to detach itself from metaphysical and cosmological frameworks and certitudes at the threshold of the sixteenth century. – Thus, following some exploratory theological readings that frame melancholy as a sin (acedia) – John Cassian, Gregory the Great, Aquinas – we will consider some artworks, such as Albrecht Dürer’s “Melancholia I” (1514) and Lorenzo Lotto, which offer a secular echo of the Pietá motif. We will then move on to selections from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a work that both explores and embodies its eponymous condition in strangely digressive and shapeless prose. The discussion will be complemented by W. G. Sebald’s self-conscious tribute to early-seventeenth-century melancholia in The Rings of Saturn (1997). – The majority of the seminar will be taken up with constellations of melancholy in nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative: Joseph Roth, Radetzkymarch (1932); Sandor Marai, Embers (1942), and Guiseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1958). The pièce de resistance will be Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), which perhaps more than any other European novel throws into relief the melancholy intrinsic to artistic creation, while also placing the catastrophe of European fascism in intricate dialogue with the post-Schismatic, early-modern Europe of Dürer and Luther. – In addition, we will screen two films: Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Lights (1963) and Theo Angelopoulos’ modernist cinematic reimagining of Homer: Ulysses’ Gaze (1995). Readings and class discussions in English. Instructor: Thomas Pfau.

ENGLISH 590S Special Topics: Culture, Civilization, World

Subjects, areas or themes that cut across historical eras, several national literatures, or genres, 1860 to the present. Satisfies the Area III requirement for English majors.  Instructor: Corina Stan 
*please refer to instructor page for details

ROMST 532S - Comparative Modernisms

This course investigates the debated term modernism. We will explore a wide range of critical works on periodization, avant-garde movements, irony, stream of consciousness, and other key terms, to examine several major literary works of modernism, including selections from Woolf, Rilke, Marinetti, Pirandello, Musil, Joyce, and Kafka.  Each student will select a representative work from a national literary tradition to contextualize for the class and research.  Instructor: Saskia Ziolkowski

ARTHIST 730S - A Cultural Analysis of the Ghettos

This seminar explores the cultural and spatial history of the Ghetto. From its origins in Venice through the spread of ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe to the segregation of African-American populations in Chicago, specific spaces have been designated as ghettos. This designation has had an impact on the social understanding of architectural form, but it has also generated many cultural responses in material culture, art, photography, film, and other media. The course will explore the cultural understanding of the ghetto with a specific emphasis on the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe but with a comparative look at Venice and Chicago. Instructor: Paul Jaskot

LIT 890S: Special Topics: Reading Freudo-Marxism

An introduction to critical perspectives on the union of psychoanalysis and Marxism. Can Freud and Marx be brought into conversation? Should they be? To what end?
The collision of psychoanalysis and Marxism in the first half of the twentieth century gave rise to a diverse set of efforts to synthesize Freud’s understanding of the psyche with Marx’s dialectical view of social transformation. This seminar examines how major philosophers, theoreticians, and literary writers from the 1920s on imagined the intersection of psychological and socio-economic structures. We address two major questions:

(1) Do theories of the psyche (psychoanalytic and beyond) have consequences for society at large, or are their conclusions limited to the individual/family? 
(2) What possibilities does a joint reading of Marx and Freud open for such concepts as cruelty, exploitation, and domination? For freedom?

Course readings cover early Soviet debates on psychoanalysis; work by the Frankfurt School and its interlocutors (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas); French responses to Lacanian theory in the 1960s and 1970s (Althusser, Deleuze, Guattari); Žižek’s interventions in the study of popular culture; Freudo-Marxist feminism; Derrida’s writing on psychoanalysis and sovereignty. The seminar further investigates how fictional texts (Balzac, Beckett, Godard, Sacher-Masoch) function as important sites for considering psychoanalysis and Marxism together. Instructor: Catherine Reilly

LIT 690: Special Topics: Paradigms Modern Thought - Adorno vs Brecht

Brecht and Adorno represent two antagonistic poles of 20th century Marxism which are not adequately summarized by the conventional oppositions of activism versus aestheticism, practice versus theory, performance versus hermeticism, East versus West, collective theater versus the intellectual "school", etc.  We might also see them as two of the forces struggling over the soul and the inheritance of Walter Benjamin; or two strategies for dealing with the ossification of the Stalinist party.  Both at any rate produced considerable bodies of work over several historical periods: Weimer, the Nazi period, the European immediate postwar; and both projected new ways of thinking dialectically and or coming to terms with the dilemmas of aesthetic modernism.  We will read Brecht's major plays, poems, and fictions, his theoretical work in Me-ti and on so-called "epic theater", and probably some biographical material (including Peter Weiss, Aesthetics of Resistance Vol II).  Adorno's vision of history in Dialectic of Enlightenment will be studied, along with his autobiographical notes (Minima Moralia), his musical and artistic essays Notes on Literature, and the seminars on negative dialectics and on aesthetic theory.  Instructor: Fredric Jameson

Fall 2018

Courses in Program

Cultural Foundations in German Studies I (GERM 615)

This seminar, a required course for graduate students in the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies, offers an intensive survey of literary, cultural and intellectual developments in German-speaking lands from 1200 to 1800. Starting with a sampling of the major epics and poetry of the High Middle Ages, the course will move into the Early Modern period. The final section of the course will be dedicated to the drama, poetry, aesthetic writings and narrative fiction of the eighteenth century. In addition, a sample of short theoretical texts on topics such as historical discourse analysis, new historicism, and new philology will be read alongside.
Readings in German ; class discussions in English. KOELB.  TR 3:10 PM - 4:25 PM.  CAROLINA CAMPUS

The Emergence of Literary History (GERM 790S)

Graduate education in German involves the teaching of literary history. Graduate seminar syllabi are structured by means of literary history (periods, genres over time, literary movements etc.), comprehensive exams test the acquisition of literary-historical knowledge, and dissertations frequently relate to standard literary-historical accounts. But historically, literary history has not been the only or dominant way of organizing literature; it is a fairly modern device. This seminar looks at the emergence of literary history in Germany, or at the discovery of literature’s historicity, in the late 18th and early 19th century and pays attention to writings of Herder, Schiller, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, among others.
Readings in German; class discussions in English. NORBERG.  Wed.  4:40 PM – 7:10 PM.  DUKE CAMPUS

Immanence (GERM 860)

Taking our point of departure from a reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, we will examine the way in which philosophical and literary texts become invested in immanence—both as a concept and as a mode of attentiveness to sensuous self-organization. We will particularly examine the ramifications of immanence for aesthetic and conceptual-discursive form.  Aesthetic, ethical, theological, and political consequences of literary and philosophical immanence will be considered.
Readings and class discussions in English or German (depending on the enrollment). TROP.  Tues.  4:40 PM – 7:10 PM.  CAROLINA CAMPUS.

Elemental Media (GERM 885)

If our digital age has thoroughly re-shaped our relations with ecological and economic systems, then how has contemporary German literature of the last 15 years attended to these relations?  How is literature’s own mediality always already engaged with or even intervening in the relations elemental media give rise to?  How does literature re-frame the ways in which we perceive the digital transformation of our relationships with other humans and nature?  Authors to be discussed:  Delius, Duve, Enzensberger, Grünbein, Jelinek, Kluge, Mayröker, Peltzer, Vanderbeke, and Wondratschek. Additional readings by Blumenberg, Böhme, Goethe, Groys, Hesse, Kittler, McLuhan, Peters, Vogl, etc. Readings in German; discussions bilingual.
LANGSTON.  TH 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM.  CAROLINA CAMPUS.

Foreign Language Pedagogy Theories & Practice (GER 700)

Overview of current research in the fields of second language acquisition and foreign language pedagogy, and its implications for the teaching of the German language, literature, and culture at all levels. Readings and discussions on competing theories of language acquisition and learning, issues of cultural identity and difference, learner styles, and the teaching of language as culture; training in contemporary teaching techniques and approaches.
CRANE.  Mon. 4:40 PM - 7:10 PM - DUKE CAMPUS 

Crosslisted Courses from Affiliated Departments

English 890S.01 - Special Topics:  Hannah & Arendt

The primary goal of this course is to focus closely on Arendt as awriter, with the goal of understanding how her concepts, and her related mode and style of writing, can reconfigure our understanding of the relationships among politics, texts, interpretation, and the arts. (For example, we will consider Arendt’s interpretation of Homer, which is important for her overall project; her critique of the form of the novel; etc.).  In order to enable this focus, we will read small selections from a number of her texts, as well as some of the authors upon whom she was drawing (e.g., Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger), but devote much of our time to a close and patient reading of The Human Condition, which synthesizes many of her Arendt’s key concerns.
Instructor: Robert Mitchell

Italian 590S.01  -  Special Topics: Svevo & World Literature

Italo Svevo (1861-1928) wrote some of the most important modern Italian novels, like La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience), but has never achieved the world status one might expect, especially for someone who was taught English by no less a figure than James Joyce. Described as “hovering” near international fame, Svevo has been categorized as Italian, Jewish, Triestine, Austrian, German, and Modernist. This class examines Svevo in these various contexts to understand the strengths and weaknesses of classifications according to language, religious or cultural background, nation, education, and literary movement. By reading Svevo in the company of other authors, such as Pirandello, Proust, Kafka, and Shakespeare, as well as thinkers like Freud, Schopenhauer, and Darwin, students will explore Svevo’s work in detail, while also investigating ideas of literary influence and the meanings of world literature. Course taught in English.
Instructor: Saskia Ziolkowski

Spring 2018

Courses in Program

Structure of German

Introduction to German linguistics (phonology, morphology, word formation, syntax), language history, variation, standardization and language politics, overseas German.
Readings and discussions in English.
ROBERGE. TR 03:10 PM - 04:25 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS.

Forming, Classing, Grounding: Science and Litearture in the Age of Goethe

Literature and philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whether classified as Romanticism, Classicism, Enlightenment, Idealism, or Naturphilosophie, shared an obsessive interest in the manner of human embedment in the natural world and the possible grounding and extent of human exceptionalism. The jurisdictions of literature, philosophy, and natural history frequently overlapped as each discipline, in differing ways, explored and experimented with natural forms, classifications, and foundations and methodologies for the study of nature. In this seminar, we will investigate various emerging life sciences, and literary works which interrogated theories of organisms and their social, political, epistemological, and ethical implications and assumptions. We will focus on the form of organisms (generation, morphology, Bildung, Bildungstrieb, inheritance, and teleology), their classifications (transformationalism, metamorphosis, race, and language family), and the methodological and epistemological grounds of knowledge about nature, including the particular methodoligical challenges attending the human position as both subject and obkect of naturalist investigation. Authors will include Herder, Blumendach, Kant, Goethe, Kleist, Fichte, Novalis, Schelling, Hoffmann, Kielmeyer, and Treviranus, among others.
Readings in German; Class Discussions in English.
ENGELSTEIN. W 04:40 PM - 07:10 PM. DUKE CAMPUS.

Topics in German Cultural Studies: Bildungsroman

This course explores the development of the German Bildungsroman tradition from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. Based on close readings of exemplary texts, the focus will be on identifying both common generic traits (formal and thematic) and changing notions of the subject, aesthetics, and the relations of the subject and social sphere. While mostly addressing the literary tradition, we will also consider some of the other discursive dimensions to Bildung, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will also be experimenting with varied theoretical approaches, including those of psychoanalysis, gender studies, and Foucault-inspired historicism. Works to be read include Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Schlegel’s Lucinde, Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich, Mann’s Der Zauberberg, and, time permitting, Handke’s Der Kurze Brief zum langen Abschied, and Wolf’s Nachdenken über Christa T.
Readings in German; Class Discussions in English.
DOWNING. T 04:40 PM - 07:10 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS.

Fall 2017

Courses in Program

The Nearest Thing to Life: Theory and Methods of Reading

Reading is one of the core cultural techniques through which we inhabit, understand, engage with and reflect upon a common world. In this seminar we will focus on historical and contemporary methods of reading, interpretation and critique. We will also investigate in what way methods of reading apply to non-textual phenomena, such as images, objects, the world, or human lives.
Possible readings include Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Carlo Ginzburg, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hans Blumenberg.
Readings and Class Discussions in German.
Prica: MW 3:10 PM – 4:25 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS

Rilke & Phenomenology, 1900-1926

At the center of this seminar will be an in-depth exploration Rilke’s lyric oeuvre beginning with Das Stundenbuch (1899/1905) and Das Buch der Bilder (1902), extending via Neue Gedichte (1907) through his Duineser Elegien and Sonette an Orpheus (1922) and other late poetry. Additionally, we will take up some of Rilke’s prose writings on aesthetics, including his short monograph on Rodin (1902), his letters on Cézanne (1907), a few short prose pieces, and a selection of his far-flung and remarkably probing letters.
Rilke’s overriding concern lies not with “things” as such, nor for that matter with their mimetic or specifically ekphrastic “representation.”  Rather, his poetry (especially in Neue Gedichte and beyond) is concerned with capturing the way that perception of things and the spaces that contain them is qualitatively experienced by consciousness. It is this focus on experience as constitutive of the object- or thing-character of the world (and implicitly also of the consciousness experiencing the Lebenswelt) that is also being developed, during the same years, in the work of Edmund Husserl. The texts most pertinent for our purposes are Husserl’s lectures on Phantasie und Bildbewußtsein (1905) and his Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie (1913), of which we will read selections. Far more than Husserl, however, Rilke is also concerned with the challenge of transposing so-called intentionale Erlebnisse into expressive verbal form. In scrutinizing and giving metaphoric expression to Ding, Bild, and Raum, Rilke conceives of lyric speech as the crucial supplement to, or fulfillment of, the “noetic” states that Husserl is only able to parse in descriptive, taxonomic fashion.
Finally, the last third of our seminar will trace Rilke’s shift, in the Elegien and other late poems, to a phenomenology of existence or Dasein that has often, if not always convincingly, been mapped onto Heidegger’s writings of the later 1920s. In fact, Heidegger appears to flatten Rilke’s stunning metaphoric creativity when it comes to capture fleeting, albeit potentially epiphanic experiences that serendipitously present themselves to Dasein. Thus, in affirming “die herrlichen Überflüsse / unseres Daseins,” and maintaining that “noch ist uns das Dasein verzaubert; an hundert / Stellen ist es noch Ursprung” (RW 2: 262) Rilke understands the encounter with the ontic realm (“der unerschöpfliche Gegenstand”) to be shaped by an interweaving of finitude and transcendence: “Gesang, wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr, / nicht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes; / Gesang ist Dasein.“
Course Readings:
Rilke, Die Gedichte (Insel Verlag, 2006)
(All other readings will be placed on reserve as .pdf documents)
Preparatory Readings (strongly recommended for the summer):
Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge UP, 2000)
Readings in German; class discussions in English.
Pfau: T 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM. DUKE CAMPUS

Stimmung and Film Aesthetics

In this course, we will trace the history of Stimmung (mood, atmosphere, attunement, tonality) as an aesthetic term from the Enlightenment to Romanticism to Realism to Modernity (Kant, Fichte, Nietzsche, Simmel, Hoffmansthal, Heidegger) and discuss its relevance for and application to literature and art along the way (Stifter, Riegl).
Our main question, however, will be the role of Stimmung for moving image aesthetics. Narrative and non-narrative films not only creates their own spatiotemporal worlds, but, as a medium that works by means of sensorial impact and immersion, film also imbricates the spectator in unique ways. We will explore the recourse to Stimmungsästhetik in early film theory (Hoffmannsthal, Lukács, Balázs, Eisner) and in particular its application to expressionist and Kammerspiel films of the 1920s. In a second step, we will look at contemporary global art cinema production (Malick, Arnold, Schanelec, Petzold) and discussions of Stimmung and related terms.
Questions we will ask include: What is the relationship between Stimmung and narrative? How do elements of mise-en-scène (such as performance, décor, or framing), editing, and camerawork (camera movement, position, angle, lenses, focus) contribute to a Stimmung? What is the relationship between Stimmung, realism, and anthropocentrism? What is our conception of the spectator when we think about Stimmung? And finally, how does Stimmung help us think critically about past and current stylistic transformations?
Readings and films in English and German (with translations); class discussions in English.
Pollmann: M 04:40 PM - 07:10 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS

Crosslisted Courses from Affiliated Departments

English 590S.01 - Special Topics: Comparative Modernism in Arts

This course explores modernism as a rich mosaic of intermedial aesthetic practices, focusing closely on intersections between music, visual, and literary arts. This exploration will often take us behind the scenes of modernism, listening in on conversations in literary salons that inspired composers, or looking over the shoulder of writers jotting down ideas in diaries, while listening to music. Consider, for example, the lively portraits of artists emerging from Gertrude Stein's unusual Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; or Parade (1917), produced by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with costumes by Pablo Picasso, music by Erik Satie, and a scenario signed by Jean Cocteau; or Oskar Schlemmer’s eccentric piece of Bauhaus brilliance, the Triadic Ballet (1922), partly inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1913), both emancipated from the constraints of theatrical and operatic traditions that had dominated Western art for centuries.

Spring 2017

Modernism, Language, Theory

According to one narrative, literary modernism emerged out of the crisis of language articulated by such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Karl Kraus. This crisis implicated various aspects of language, from its communicative potential to literary figuration, and from the formulaic to the formless, as well as issues of accent, dialect, idiosyncratic speech, phraseology, and oral versus written practices. The works of numerous writers in the modernist literary tradition--including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Robert Musil--can be read in this context. Whether they reformulate the problems of language in modernity or offer explicit or implicit solutions to it, a critical, often skeptical view of language is central to their works. Decades later, numerous structuralist and post-structuralist critics picked up on this concern with the limits and possibilities of linguistic expression in modernism. The crisis of language thus enjoys an afterlife in the critical writings of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Dorrit Cohn, and others. This course will trace the crisis of language in modernism in some of its philosophical, literary, and critical manifestations.
Class discussions in English. Students are encouraged to read all texts in the original, but English translations will be available.
Gellen. TH 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM. DUKE CAMPUS

Germans, Jews, and the Theatre

“What good actor today is not a Jew?” Friedrich Nietzsche asked in 1882, posing a question that drew on a long tradition of regarding Jewish efforts at integration into the modern world as a mode of dissimulation. This seminar explores the real and symbolic roles that theatre played in shaping Jewish identity and relations between Germans and Jews from roughly 1750 to 1900. Examining a range of dramas and writings about theatre, the course explores relations between concepts of Jewishness and understandings of theatricality as these shift over time. We will consider antisemitic conceptions of Jews as actors and mimics while studying the role that the theatre played in promoting idealized conceptions of Jewish men and creating affective communities of compassion with the suffering of exotic Jewish women.
We will begin by considering Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Die Juden (1749) and Nathan der Weise (1779) against the backdrop of German adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Moving into the nineteenth century, we will study Julius von Voss’s Der travestierte Nathan (1804) alongside both Karl Sessa’s anti-Jewish farce Unser Verkehr (1813) and Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn’s German-Jewish family drama, Leichtsinn und Frömmelei (1798). The next section of the course will consider two dramas that became fixtures in theatre repertoires throughout the German-speaking world: Karl Gutzkow’s Uriel Acosta (1846) and S. H. Mosenthal’s Deborah (1849). After a detour to consider the Orientalist exoticism of Karl Goldmark’s grand opera, Die Königin von Saba (1875), we will conclude the semester by studying Karl Emil Franzos’s Bildungsroman Der Pojaz (1905), a recasting of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in which the Yiddish-speaking protagonist longs to play Shylock on the German stage. Close readings of texts will be supplemented by discussion of reception documents, contemporary responses, and theoretical readings on questions of identity and performance.
The primary goal of the seminar is that students produce a paper similar in scope and format to an article that would be published in a scholarly journal. To this end, students will spend a significant portion of the semester working on an individualized research project and sharing their work with the seminar. Students will be expected to contribute to the seminar through regular oral presentations, a fifteen-minute conference paper to be presented in the final weeks of the semester, and a final research paper due at the end of the semester.
Reading knowledge of German essential; class discussions in English. Hess. F 9:05AM – 11:55AM. CAROLINA CAMPUS

Fall 2016

Courses in Program

Afrofuturism, Cyborg Feminism and Afro-German Literature

Though Afro-German literature reaches as far back as the early twentieth century, it has only became a concrete field of study in the past 30 years. The first recognized Afro-German authors primarily produced autobiographies and literature addressing the quotidian experience of being black in German society. However, in the past twenty years, Afro-German authors, poets and playwrights have increasingly looked to Afrofuturism as an inspiration for rethinking what it means to be black and German. The turn towards Afrofuturism in Afro-German literature is especially revolutionary, considering its potential for countering Afro-pessimist discourses circulated in Europe and abroad.
This course seeks to explore what is at stake in Afro-German artists’ turn to futurity. In order to investigate this topic, we will begin by asking what is Afrofuturism? What differentiates it from an earlier movement like Futurism? What motivates African diasporic artists to engage with the modes of science fiction and speculative fiction? And what can futurist discourses in feminist theory and queer theory contribute to these questions? In this course we will trace discourses around Afrofuturism in literature, film and music by engaging with texts from across the African Diaspora. We will also read a range of theorists including Arjun Appadurai, José Estaban Munoz, Shulamith Firestone, Donna Haraway and Leslie Adelson.
Discussions in English. Readings in English and German (translations will be provided).
Layne. MW 3:10 PM – 4:25 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS

German Literature

This course looks at the category of German literature historically. How did “German literature” come into being as an object of interest and independent field of study? Many elements had to be assembled for this field to appear. German had to become an official university language rather than a vernacular of little scientific or aesthetic use; the field of writing had to become internally differentiated into various domains, one being highbrow literature; individual texts had to emerge not as products of a rhetorical practice but as objects of aesthetic reception and careful interpretation; a national canon had to be discovered or built, comprising ancient and near-contemporary texts of indisputable value; a course of study with plausible practical-preparatory relevance for a post-university life had to be drafted etc. This course traces the emergence of German literature as a particular formation deemed worthy of sustained and methodical study and explores the implications of this history for our situation today.
Readings in German and English, class discussion in English.
Norberg. TH 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM. DUKE CAMPUS

Aesthetics and Poetry

This course will examine the relationship between aesthetics and poetry starting in the eighteenth century and continuing into the twenty-first century. Baumgarten's Philosophical Reflections on Poetry (1735) launches the birth of aesthetics by rethinking the philosophical status of poetic objects: not only does poetry become an appropriate object of philosophical discourse, but it produces and embodies its own particular media-specific form of truth. This seminar will follow threads that link aesthetic discourses, poetic practices of production and reception, the precise yet elusive form of poetic objects, and the discursive and philosophical fields of meaning and truth-production--ethical, political, scientific--in relationship to which poetic objects position themselves. Authors include: Baumgarten, Kant, Hölderlin, Schelling, Novalis, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Lukàcs, Celan, Rancière, Badiou, among others.
This course, which emphasizes the continental aesthetic tradition and will include later nineteenth- and twentieth-century contributions, has been designed to complement Professor Robert Mitchell’s class on aesthetics at Duke which will be held Wednesdays 11:45 AM – 2:15 PM.
Class discussion in English, readings in English (the German and French originals will be available for those who can read these languages).
Trop: T 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS

Spring 2016

Courses in Program

History of the German Language

This course introduces students to the historical development of the German language from the earliest times until the modern period. We shall look at some of the phonological and morphosyntactic changes that differentiate German from English, Dutch and other related languages, and give the modern language its hallmark linguistic features. We shall further examine the historical and cultural context in which German developed, noting the impact of important events, from Christianization to the Reformation, from courtly poetry to the invention of printing, on language use. Students will read short texts in the main historical forms of the language — Old Saxon, Old High German, Middle Low German, Middle High German and Early New High German.
Taught in English.  Advanced reading proficiency in German required.
Roberge: MW 03:10 PM-04:25 PM  CAROLINA CAMPUS

Form and Experience: Film and the Melodramatic

Melodrama is pure cinema. Films are marked by excess in both mise-en-scène and affect and by an intricate relationship between form and emotional content as well as between the personal and the social-political. Though often derided as low form, kitsch, “just” woman’s film or tearjerker, film scholars have long recognized that melodramas are stylistically highly complex and push the boundaries of cinematic form and spectatorship. We will approach melodrama as a question that concerns all of cinema. Rather than engage with melodrama as a genre, we will define the contours of a melodramatic style in the cinema—a style that, as some have argued, seems synonymous with narrative film itself, as the melodramatic is defined by pure visibility, external signs, and a focus on gesture. By looking at films from a variety of national contexts we will refine our understanding of the melodramatic as a mode that conveys concrete historical experience.
Our course is divided into four sections. We will begin with a survey of the main characteristics of film melodrama and its indebtedness to 19th century stage melodrama. We will then focus on two case studies, Douglas Sirk (Detlef Sierck) and Max Ophüls, who started their career in Germany and Austria and went into exile during the 1930s (Netherlands, Italy, USA, and France). Their films will not only allow us to probe the relationship between film form, affect and national and cultural environment, but will also highlight how elements of German cinema from the 1920s (New Objectivity, Expressionism) infiltrate American melodrama and how this film language cycles back to Germany and amalgamates with French cinema. Finally, we will look at diverse examples of contemporary films that recycle, and redefine, melodramatic elements. The class discussion will be in English and all readings will be provided in English (and the German original where applicable); German and other foreign films will be subtitled in English.
Pollmann: R 04:40 PM-07:10 PM

Consent: Sex and Governance in the Age of Revolution

Now is not the first period of rampant interest in consent. This seminar will explore the ways in which consent came to serve as the foundation of both political and marital legitimacy in the 18th century. Women's contractual agency remained ambiguous in both cases, embedding discourses on rape and disenfranchisement within political theory. We will focus on constructions of will, desire, reason, autonomy, political voice, and law in theory and literature, and will examine their legacy for liberalism. Particular attention will be paid to the reciprocal authorization between political theory and the emerging field of biology. We will also engage with current debate on consent. Readings to include Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Marquis de Sade, Heinrich von Kleist, Percy Shelley, Hannah Arendt, and Carole Pateman. Students will have the opportunity to suggest readings.
Readings available in German and English. Discussions in English. 
Engelstein: T 04:40 PM-07:10 PM. DUKE CAMPUS

Fall 2015

Courses in Program

Get Real! Or not… German Poetic Realism

This course will focus on the rise of Realism and the wake of Romanticism in German-language literature of the second half of the nineteenth century. Emphasis will be on the delineation of realist literary strategies, with a special focus on the genre of the novella; on the political and historical complicities of the movement in terms both overt (e.g., the rise of nationalism, regionalism) and indirect (e.g., visual practices, gender politics); the relation to other cultural fields (e.g., philosophy, historiography, education, art history); and the relation to other nineteenth-century realist movements in England and France. I have a particular interest in issues of inheritance I hope we can explore: as part of this, we will be asking why Romanticism, the supposedly superseded movement of the earlier part of the century, continued its afterlife in the Realism period. Although mostly focused on our primary texts, we will also consider various theoretical approaches to the problem of realism in general.
Readings in German and English; class discussions in English.
Downing. T 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS.
GER 790.01

Frankfurt School Critical Theory

This course serves as an introduction to the “Frankfurt School” and Critical Theory, with particular emphasis upon rationality, social psychology, cultural criticism and aesthetics. Through close readings of key texts by members of the school, we will work towards a critical understanding of the analytical tools they developed and consider their validity.
Readings available in both German and English;discussions in English.
Pickford. W 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM. DUKE CAMPUS.

Reformation Literature

The heavy impact of the Reformation on early modern religious life, on politics, and on society is well known. But how did the literary world of the period change? This course will investigate German literature written in the period from the end of the fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century, which shows the range of literary production, genres, and styles. The course will focus on songs, pamphlets, translations, and dramas by Martin Luther, Sebastian Brant, Andreas Karlstadt, Thomas Müntzer, Hans Sachs, Paul Rebhun, and Paul Gerhardt.
In addition, current scholarship as well as exhibitions of the Reformation’s 500th anniversary in 2017 will be used to examine the way in which the Reformation is conceived today.
Readings available in German and English; class discussions in German or in English, depending on the students enrolled.
Some course meetings will take place at Duke University’s Perkins Library.
von Bernuth. TH 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS.

Crosslisted Courses from Affiliated Departments

PolSci 577.01 - Nietzsche's Political Philosophy

Study of the thinker who has, in different incarnations, been characterized as the prophet of nihilism, the destroyer of values, the father of fascism, and the spiritual source of postmodernism. An examination of his philosophy as a whole in order to come to terms with its significance for his thinking about politics. One course / 3 units.

Spring 2015

Courses in Program

German Grammar in Context

GERM 400 is an intensive German grammar course for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Over the course of the semester, we will study current German structures and their usages, as well as idiomatic expressions. We will work to strengthen your writing and speaking skills, as well as your attention to different modes of expressions. Required book: Grammatik mit Sinn und Verstand (2011) by Wolfgang Rug and Andreas Tomaszewski.
Readings in German, class discussions in German and English.
Wegel. F 12:20 PM - 2:50 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS.

Classics of Literary Criticism

This course will examine some of the great literary critics of the 20th century, writers whose ability to produce focused, inspired, and influential readings of major works of literature has been widely recognized. Our focus will be on studying, and learning from, exemplary readings of major literary works. In other words, this is not a course in literary theory. Readings of landmark critical texts will be combined with selections of canonical texts of English and continental European literature. While the syllabus has not yet been finalized, we will almost certainly attend to the following critics/literary works: William Empson and Stanley Fish on Milton’s Paradise Lost; Erich Auerbach, T.S. Eliot, and Charles Singleton on Dante’s Divine Comedy; Christopher Ricks, John Bayley, and Cleanth Brooks on Keats; Frank Kermode and Rene Girard on secrecy and desire in the nineteenth-century novel; Geoffrey Hartman and Alan Liu on Wordsworth; Jean Starobinski and Paul de Man on Rousseau, and Walter Benjamin on Goethe’s Elective Affinities.
This will not be a lecture course but a discussion-intensive seminar for advanced undergraduate and first- and second-year graduate students.
Readings and class discussions in English.
Pfau. M 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM. DUKE CAMPUS

Postcolonial German Literature

In this seminar, our main focus will be German texts and films that could be considered postcolonial. Some of these texts might be set in the so-called “Third World,” while others might depict the experiences of foreigners in postwar Germany. A few of the questions that will guide our discussion over the course of the semester are: What is postcolonial German literature? Do the German authors of the postwar period succeed in a cultural exchange with the “Third World” that does not simply repeat the racism and fetishism found in colonial literature? And to what extent is a postcolonial approach useful for discussing texts by foreign authors who are not from former colonies? In addition to reading aesthetic texts, we will also read essays from postcolonial theory and German Studies to complement our analyses and help us consider what differentiates German post-colonial theory from the theoretical texts from other countries.
Readings in German; class discussions in English.
Layne. TTH 3:10 PM – 4:25 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS

Theater, Culture, and Commerce in 19th-Century Germany

The nineteenth century witnessed the construction of an unprecedented number of theaters throughout the German-speaking world. As the theatergoing public expanded exponentially, a cultural sphere that had been dominated a century earlier by court theaters and itinerant theater troupes experienced tremendous diversification. In part because of the rapidity with which the theater established itself as a staple of middle-class urban life, the stage remained for much of the nineteenth century an object of fierce cultural politics. Critics who celebrated drama’s potential to stage ethical conflicts and launch a national culture of worldwide renown complained extensively about the decline of the German theater and the commercialization of Friedrich Schiller’s “moral institution.” Deploring the lack of great German drama following the golden age of Weimar classicism, critics railed against the endless imitators of Schiller and sensational, effect-driven spectacles that catered to the lowest common denominator of public taste. Yet amid all the strife and complaints about commercialism, the period produced tremendous innovations in acting, directing, and staging and the creation of many theatrical institutions that have lasted until the current day.
This course offers an introduction to nineteenth-century theater history that focuses on the interplay between cultural innovation and the market, studying the texts of dramas against the backdrop of their performance and reception history. A significant portion of the seminar will be devoted to close reading and analysis of plays that dominated the theater repertoire in the nineteenth century. In this context we will consider both canonical dramas (Schiller’s Maria Stuart, Grillparzer’s Medea, Shakespeare’s Der Kaufmann von Venedig) and more popular fare (Kotzebue’s Die deutschen Kleinstädter, Birch-Pfeiffer’s Die Waise von Lowood, Mosenthal’s Der Sonnwendhof, etc.). We will supplement our readings of these texts with an exploration of nineteenth-century productions of them throughout the German-speaking world and abroad. Our discussion of these dramas and their performances will be set in dialogue with both nineteenth-century theoretical writings on
drama and research into key players in the world of the nineteenth-century theater: representative theater companies, directors, actors, etc.
Student participation will be key to the seminar’s integration of close reading with original research, and the seminar will be designed in such a way as to help students develop the skills to engage in historical research that contributes in a meaningful way to our understanding of literary texts. Students will give a series of short presentations throughout the semester, participate actively in class discussion, and produce a conference presentation-length final paper (10 pp.). Preliminary drafts of the final papers will be presented at a mock conference on “Theater, Culture, and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century Germany” to be held in the final weeks of the semester.
Readings in German, class discussion in English.
Hess. F 9:05 AM – 11:35 AM. CAROLINA CAMPUS

History of Literary Criticism I (Classicism)

This course is designed to introduce students to some of the major strains in literary criticism from the Classical Period to the 18th century. Readings of major authors will be paired not only with literary examples contemporary with our chosen critics, but also with modern day theoretical responses to their works. Our objective is a working knowledge of dominant trends in European literary criticism up to (and including) the Enlightenment, useful in understanding the literature of the successive historical periods and also as a continuing, vital influence on twentieth-century poetics. We will also be devoting some time to the primary non-Classical tradition of early Western literary criticism, namely Biblical interpretation. Authors read include Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Horace, Longinus, Philo, Proclus, Plotinus, Augustine, Scaliger, Luther, Boileau, Sidney, Burke, Young, and Lessing; Homer, Pindar, Callimachus, Ovid, Vergil, Dante, and Pope; and Auerbach, Derrida, Genette, Ricouer, Benjamin, and Bernal.
Readings and class discussions in English.
Downing. TTH 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS

Crosslisted Courses from Affiliated Departments

PoliSci 676S.01 - Hegel's Political Philosophy

Within context of Hegel's total philosophy, an examination of his understanding of phenomenology and the phenomenological basis of political institutions and his understanding of Greek and Christian political life. Selections from Phenomenology, Philosophy of History, and Philosophy of Right. Research paper required.

Fall 2014

Courses in Program

“Mensch ohne Welt”: 20th-Century German-Jewish Literature

This course will offer a survey of German-Jewish literature from 1900 to the present. Readings will include works by Jakob Wassermann, Franz Kafka, Alfred Döblin, Arthur Schnitzler, Joseph Roth, Soma Morgenstern, Arnold Zweig, Veza Canetti, Else Lasker-Schüler, Paul Celan, Ilse Aichinger, Nelly Sachs, Edgar Hilsenrath, Robert Menasse, Ruth Klüger, and Barbara Honigmann. We will be attentive to historical and geographical contexts, as well as theoretical issues, such how German-Jewish writers negotiate questions of modernity and modernism, tradition and ritual, multilingualism and multiculturalism, memory and nostalgia, and trauma and violence. What are the distinguishing features of German-Jewish writing in the twentieth century? How German is it and how Jewish is it? Are there stylistic and formal continuities between the works under consideration, or only thematic ones? Who writes this literature, for whom is it intended, and who actually reads it? How does it reflect and negotiate historical and political realities, such as assimilation, Bundism, Zionism, exile, and the Holocaust? How do these authors help shape modern German-Jewish identity—culturally, religiously, politically, aesthetically, and otherwise? The course takes it title from the German-Jewish critic, philosopher, and writer Günther Anders’s 1984 collection of essays on literature. The assertion of humanity in the face of a fundamental homelessness is a predicament shared by all the German-Jewish authors in this course.
Readings in German and English; discussion in English.
Gellen. T 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM. DUKE CAMPUS.

German Political Thought

This course serves as an introduction to German political and social thought. No previous knowledge is required. We will read short but important and influential texts by, for instance, Immanuel Kant, J. G. Herder, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt. Our discussions will cover the central concerns and key concepts of the German tradition of political and social thought, such as autonomy, state, society, people, and community. The seminar is intended as a complement to studies in German literary and intellectual history.
Readings in German and English; class discussion in English.
Norberg. F 10:05 AM – 12:35 PM. DUKE CAMPUS.

Kleist

All of the major and minor works of Kleist, including letters and occasional pieces, form the basic subject-matter for the course. In addition, we will examine some of the biographical material available documenting his short life, along with some of the pertinent secondary literature. The course goals will be:
• to become familiar with the corpus of his works;
• to obtain a rough working knowledge of the facts of his biography;
• to understand the literary and cultural context in which he worked;
• to develop strategies for interpreting his (often difficult and even downright bizarre) plays and stories.
We will work in seminar format as much as possible, with lecturing by the instructor taking second place to informed discussion by the course participants, and so reading assigned material in preparation for class will be essential. Assignments assume a fluent command of written German and can be lengthy. Students will develop a topic of research, share that research with the class in an oral presentation, and finally write up the results in a formal paper of 15-20 pages.
Conducted in English, with readings primarily in German.
Papers and presentations in German or English.
Koelb. TIME CHANGE: WF 3:10 PM – 4:25 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS

Crosslisted Courses from Affiliated Departments

History 532.01 - Fin-de-siècle and Interwar Vienna: Politics, Society, and Culture

Fin-de-siècle and Interwar Vienna: Politics, Society, and Culture. Advanced undergraduate and graduate colloquium and research seminar focusing on the cultural milieu of fin-de-siècle and interwar Vienna. Readings in the Austro-Marxists, the Austrian School of Economics, Freud, Kraus, the Logical Positivists, Musil, Popper, and Wittgenstein. Monographs on the Habsburg Empire, Fin-de-siècle culture and technology, Viennese feminism, Austrian socialism, philosophy of science, literature and ethics, and the culture of the Central European émigrés.

PoliSci 577S.01 - Nietzsche's Political Philosophy 

Study of the thinker who has, in different incarnations, been characterized as the prophet of nihilism, the destroyer of values, the father of fascism, and the spiritual source of postmodernism. An examination of his philosophy as a whole in order to come to terms with its significance for his thinking about politics.

Spring 2014

Courses in Program

History of the German Language

Why is it that there are so many differences between modern German and English? Why do Germans say Bücherei for library, Friseur for hairdresser, Handy for cell phone, but no longer use the word Jungfernzwinger for monastery? This course introduces students to the historical development of the German language from the earliest times up to the modern period. It looks at some of the most important developments and changes of the language and explores the cultural and historical background of the German language. Students will read texts in Old High German, Middle High German, Middle Low German, and Early New High German.
von Bernuth. WF 3:10 PM – 4:25 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS.

Lyrik und Sprachbild, 1772-1848

Dieses Seminar bietet eine Einführung in die romantische und nachromantische Lyrik, wobei der Schwerpunkt auf detaillierten Einzelinterpretationen kanonischer Lyrik liegt. Das Seminar wird mit Lesungen von Goethe’s “Sesenheimer Liedern” (1772) beginnen. Ein zweiter thematischer Komplex betrifft die plötzliche Wendung der deutschen Lyrik von der Empfindsamkeit zum Klassizismus hin, wobei Goethes, Schillers und Hölderlins Experimentieren mit Ode und Elegie zwischen 1790 und 1802 im Vordergrund stehen werden. – Die zweite Hälfte des Seminars konzentriert sich auf das zwiespältige Verhältnis von Kunstgedicht und Volkslied, wie es sich von Brentano über Eichendorff und Heine bis hin zu Mörike entwickelt. – Ein konstanter Fokus unserer Diskussion wird das sprachlich fixierte Bild sein; wie entwickelt sich Bildlichkeit? Wie werden lyrische Bilder erfahren? Welcher Wahrheitsanspruch manifestiert sich im lyrischen Bild? Lässt sich das lyrische Bild auf rein säkulärer Basis überhaupt lesen? – Sekundärliteratur von Peter Szondi, David Wellbery, Peter von Matt, Winfried Menninghaus, sowie einige Texte zur Bildtheorie werden in die Interpretation von Primärtexten mit einbezogen. – Das Seminar wird auf Deutsch abgehalten; Seminararbeiten können wahlweise auf Deutsch oder Englisch verfasst werden.
Pfau. M 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM. DUKE CAMPUS.

Man, Animal, Cinema

This course proposes a cinematic investigation into—and intervention in—the historical and current debate about the ontological, political, biological, and emotional relationships between human beings and animals. To familiarize ourselves with this fundamental debate, we will read not only key philosophical texts, but also literary and scientific texts that approach this problem from the perspective of their own media and disciplines. However, the central goal of this course will be to consider the role of technology and mediation—and of the cinema in particular—for the “question” of the animal. To this end, we will confront philosophy and science with a variety of films as well as engage film criticism that focuses on the ways in which film communicates, mediates, and transforms creaturely life. What happens to animals when they are technologically mediated, what happens to technology in conjunction with the animalistic, and what happens to (human) spectators in the film experience of wild, anthropomorphous, strange, or horrifying creatures?
In addition to key texts of the current debate (Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe, and others) and classic positions, we will also look at the long history of the man/animal question, beginning with Aristotle but focusing on debates that took place primarily in Germany (and to a lesser extent in France) in the early 20th century, involving authors such as Jakob von Uexküll, Martin Heidegger, Georges Canguilhem, Wolfgang Köhler, and Max Scheler. This canon is supplemented by literary texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, J. M. Coetzee, and Marion Poschmann. The films cover a broad range of genres, styles, and periods, and encompass early safari and hunting films, popular science films, animation, documentaries, narrative films featuring animals, and contemporary experimental film and video, including films by Werner Herzog, Robert Bresson, Carolee Schneemann, Stan Brakhage, Jean Painlevé, and F. W. Murnau.
Readings and class discussions in English.
This course requires occasional film viewings outside of class.
Pollmann. T 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS.

Crosslisted Courses from Affiliated Departments

LIT612S.01 -Theories of the Image

Different methodological approaches to theories of the image (film, photography, painting, etc.), readings on a current issue or concept within the field of the image. Examples of approaches and topics are feminism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, technology, spectatorship, national identity, authorship, genre, economics, and the ontology of sound

Fall 2013

Courses in Program

Nietzsche, Freud and Benjamin: On History

This course examines the positions of Nietzsche, Freud, and Benjamin on human history. It focuses on close readings of primary texts, with were, how these ideas related to their broader projects, and how their ideas of history compare both with each other and with other, relatively contemporary positions on history. Readings include Nietzsche's vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben and Zur Genealogie der Moral; Freud's Totem und Tabu and Das Unbehagen in der Kultur; and Benjamin's "Theologisch-politisches Fragment," "Ueber den Begriff der Geschichte," and several other essays.
All readings will be in German, though non-German students are welcome to take the course and work with the texts in translation: discussion will be in English.
Downing. TTH 3:10 PM – 4:25 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS.

Difference/Indifference: Texts and Contexts in the Eighteenth Century and Beyond

This seminar explores the way in which aesthetic and philosophical texts "account for differences," focusing on the legacy of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and philosophy. Special emphasis will be placed on interrogating the limits of the Cartesian subject as it emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In response to the supposed separation of the subject from the exterior world, certain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers seek out processes of "indifferentiation" (as opposed to mere indifference) that call into question not merely subject-object boundaries, but instances
of discrete separation as such. We will examine the diverse strategies developed by artists and thinkers to overcome (or embrace) the perceived threats and problems of subjectivism through figures of difference, identity, and indifferentiation, reading literary works by Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Musil, along with philosophical and theoretical texts by Descartes, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Barthes, Deleuze, Luhmann, Derrida, and Badiou. Readings available in German or English; class discussions in English.
Trop. T 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS.

Science +/- Fiction

The future. Spaceships. Alien encounters. Underlying this superficial stuff of “science fiction” are fundamental concerns regarding the historical status of knowledge production and the relationship between narrative and experience in our modern era governed by scientific progress. This graduate seminar will query both sides of science fiction: on the one hand, the composition and transformation of the genre throughout the entirety of twentieth-century German literary history. On the other hand, the seminar investigates the epistemic functions fiction awards scientific inquiry (compared to literature’s own) and to the truths and fabrications it attributes to the scientific process as well. Primary literature: Lasswitz, Scheerbart, Benn, Döblin, Brecht, Dürrenmatt, Schmidt, Koeppen, Kluge, P.M., Wolf, Steinmüller, Dath, Kehlmann. Secondary literature: Chu, Foucault, Habermas, Haraway, Jameson, Latour, Rheinberger, Schnädelbach, Stengers, Suvin, Vogl. Readings in German and English. Discussions in German.
Langston. TH 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM. CAROLINA CAMPUS.
GERM 700

Spring 2013

Courses in Program

Political Disengagement? Forays into Contemporary German Literature

In light of select contemporary authors, this seminar will examine the phenomenon of literature’s alleged “disengagement,” its liberation from social agendas. We will take as our starting point the “killing off of the fathers” (Gruppe ’47) and the great Literaturstreit of the early nineties, in which influential critics attempted to disassemble the legacy of East German literature. Theoretical readings by Adorno, Saul Friedlaender, Egon Schwarz, Habermas, and Wolf.  he class will feature a visit and reading by Barbara Honigmann.  Primary texts will be read in German; discussions in English and in German. 
Donahue. Mondays 4:40 – 7:10.  DUKE CAMPUS

Twentieth Century Austrian Literature

Austrians have arguably produced a disproportionate number of outstanding works of twentieth-century literature in the German language. In this course we will examine great works by writers from this tradition, including Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Ilse Aichinger, Peter Handke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, and Christoph Ransmayr. We will also consider various sites, groups, and movements associated with artistic and intellectual life (from Kaffeehaus culture to Wiener Aktionismus) in their relation to literature. Throughout the course we will remain attentive to historical and cultural contexts, but our primary concern will be the exploration of literary form and language. Some broad questions that will guide our readings and discussions are:

What, if anything, distinguishes Austrian literature from German literature?
•   To what extent have specific political formations and events (Habsburg monarchy, Red Vienna, the Anschluss, consensus democracy) influenced the nation’s literary culture?
•   What other features of Austrian life and history have proven crucial to its literary development (provincialism, cosmopolitanism, anti-Semitism, “Easternness”)?
•   Why has Austria been such fertile ground for avant-garde movements?
•   How has the experience of exile shaped Austrian literature?
•   Why have postwar Austrian writers developed such a strong tradition of “Österreichkritik”?
In addition to weekly readings of primary texts, we will read some relevant secondary literature. You can choose to write either 3 short papers (6-8 pp.) over the course of the semester or one longer research paper (20-25pp.) at the end. The course will also have a pedagogical dimension, which will involve working with undergraduates in a German theater course who will be reading and performing Schnitzler’s “Liebelei.”
Readings in German; class discussions in English.
Gellen.  Tuesdays 4:40 PM – 7:10 PM.  DUKE CAMPUS.

Kafka

This seminar will examine almost all of Kafka’s literary output: the  stories, novels, and major fragments, plus selected letters and material from the notebooks. In addition to discussing this corpus in detail with the instructor, each student will develop a research project culminating in 1) a class presentation of the sort given at scholarly meetings (GSA, MLA) and 2) an essay based on that presentation that aspires to be a genuine contribution to Kafka scholarship.    
Readings in German; class discussions in English. 
Koelb.  Fridays 1:00 PM – 3:50 PM.  CAROLINA CAMPUS

Spring 2024

GERM 706  Examining and Assembling the Discipline: Theories and Methods in German Studies

This seminar introduces students to methods of academic work in German Studies. We will examine a variety of theoretical approaches to German  literature such as rhetoric, genre theory, hermeneutics, aesthetics, deconstruction, linguistics and speech act theory, psychoanalysis, structuralism and semiotics, critical theory, systems theory, new historicism, gender theory, media theory, digital humanities, as well as theories on literature in conjunction with power, colonialism, and ecology. 
Readings and class discussions in German and English
Prica. M 4:40 PM - 7:10 PM. - Carolina Campus
 

GERMAN 735S    Introduction to Turkish-German Literature and Cinema

In this course we will study the emergence and development of Turkish culture in Germany. How do Turkish-German authors and filmmakers address the discourses on migration, Heimat, integration, intercultural dialogue and multiculturalism? How do they engage with the German history? What is the relevance of their works for the discourses on refugees today?  Throughout the course we will explore the intricate relations of aesthetics, political representation and memory across a variety of genres and media and investigate the continuities and discontinuities between the labor migration in the 1960s and 70s and the current debates on migration in Germany.
Readings in German; class discussions in English.
Reisoglu. W 4:40 PM - 7:10 PM. - Duke Campus

GERM 825  Play Time: Theater in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World

Civic performances, ritual enactments, dramatic stagings, plays, and public spectacles were a ubiquitous feature of life in German-speaking lands long before the creation of the modern theater in the 18th century. This course explores the vibrant world of medieval and early modern performance and theater through the lenses of performance theory; gender theory; philology; material history; and religious history (Christian and Jewish). Students will discover how religious and secular plays were a formative component of marking time and creating community through their integration into liturgical practice, with Jews performing Purim plays and Christians staging plays at Christmas, during Carnival and Lent, and Easter. They will encounter entire medieval cities transformed into public spaces of performance, often for days at a time, through plays and processions in which city dwellers became simltaneously actors and audience. They will learn about the ideological and political battles of the Reformation by reading dramas that present, in effect, arguments in support of the Reformed cause. They will reflect on the origins of modern notions of the theater, and the reasons that traditional Germanistik has excluded medieval and early modern works from its definitions of theater, by reading the first German opera Dafne, an early enlightenment play by the early female playwright Luise Gottsched, and a Yiddish play by Aaron Halle Wolfssohn.  
Readings in German and/or English; class discussions in German
Von Bernuth. Tues. 3:10 PM - 5:40PM  - Carolina Campus

                    
Non-CDG Course That May Be of Interest

CMPL 841  History of Literary Criticism I: The Origins of Theory and Critic

The course introduces students to some of the major strains in literary criticism from the Classical Period to the 18^th century. Readings of major authors will be paired not only with literary examples contemporary with our chosen critics, but also with modern day theoretical responses to their works. Our objective is a working knowledge of dominant trends in European literary critics up to (and including) the Enlightenment, useful in understanding the literature of the successive historical periods and also as a continuing, vital influence on twentieth- and twenty-first century poetics. We will also be devoting some time to the primary non-classical tradition of early Western literary criticism, namely Biblical interpretations, Authors read include Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Horace, Longinus, Philo, Proclus, Plotinus, Augustine, Scaliger, Luther, Boileau, Sidney, Burke, Young, and Lessing; Homer, Pindar, Callimachus, Ovid, Virgil, Dante, and Pope; and Auerbach, Derrida, Genette, Ricoeur, Benjamin, and Bernal.
Downing TH -  3:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Carolina Campus                  

ARTHIST 731S  The Bauhaus: Architecture, Design, Politics

This seminar analyzes the history of the Bauhaus, from its roots in Weimar Germany to its impact on framing post World War II international Modernism. It covers major scholarship on Modernism, architecture, and design as well as central questions of twentieth-century art and politics. Grounded in the foundation and activity of the school in Germany after World War I, the seminar will also cover the spread of Bauhaus ideas, faculty, and students internationally including in Japan, Turkey, the United States, and on both sides of the Cold War.
Jaskot  Wed. - 1:25 PM - 3:55 PM - Duke Campus
 

LIT 890S.02  Ways of Knowing: Philosophy and Literature

Do works of poetry and fiction produce distinctive forms of knowledge, or are they simply vehicles for the circulation of independently-specifiable philosophical concepts? This graduate seminar explores the mutual implications of philosophy and literature for critical epistemology. We’ll draw on debates on the aesthetics and politics of literary knowledge in the history of philosophy, contemporary literary cognitivism, Black studies, Frankfurt School, as well as romantic and modernist literary theory. Readings include Hume, Kant, Douglass, Baudelaire, Russell, Eliot, Woolf, Stevens, Adorno, Wright, Morrison, Davis, Gilroy.
Kronfeld  TH. - 3:20 PM - 5:50 PM - Duke Campus