GER 258 – German Culture and Thought (Winter 2009)

Discussions of representative modernist texts/films (from Romanticism to the Expressionist Crises) that critically investigate the social bourgeois realities of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Centuries. Major topics include: Nietzsche and the Questions of Modernism; The Role of Magical, Fantastic, and Uncanny Realities; Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious; Rebellions and Transformations of the Social Order; The Role of the Artist/Genius. Authors include the Grimm Brothers, ETA Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, Frank Wedekind, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Thomas Mann.

GER 407, 507 - Seminar: Magic, Uncanny, Surrealistic and Fantastic Tales (Fall 2008)

Crossing cultural and genre boundaries, fairy tales have always been vibrant sources for revisions and exploration of controversial issues, as for example, questions of aesthetic utopias, class and gender struggles, child abuse, civil rights etc. We will first study the cross-cultural connections between Italian, French and German versions of popular fairy tales and their further revisions in various contemporary media. Focusing on wonder tales—one of the most popular types, according to Stith Thompson's classification of folk tales—we will trace the connotations of their magic as it interrupts and interferes with other fictional realities. In the second part of the quarter we will examine the transitions from magic to uncanny, surrealistic, and fantasy tales concluding with the discussion of one of Cornelia Funke's recent novels "Inkheart" and/or "Inkspell." They rewrite romantic motifs and present the processes of writing and reading as magical processes that activate the fluid borders between various fictive realities. Literary texts to be discussed may include tales by Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ludwig Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Franz Kafka, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christian Kracht, and Cornelia Funke. CLASS WILL BE TAUGHT IN GERMAN.

GER 607 - Weimar Modernisms (Spring 2003)

The Weimar period has been described as a "laboratory of modernity." This course will examine the innovative and controversial facets of Weimar culture. We will ask how dramas, films, poetry, novels, theoretical manifestos and the visual arts address the controversial issues of technology, life in mass society, and the desire for a new aesthetics. Texts and films include Brecht's and Pabst's a "Dreigroschenoper," Toller's "Masse Mensch," Kaiser's "Gas," Lang's "Metropolis," Doeblin's "Alexanderplatz" and Mann's "Mario der Zauberer." In-class presentations and final research paper or take-home exam are required.