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GER 407 - Mermaids: The Beauty and Threat of the Unattainable - Mermaids, nymphs, undines and gorgons penetrate the history of mythology, folklore, literature, music and art. These figures represent the tensions between sexes, between the longing for and loss of transcendence, between fantasy and reality, nature and culture. Our discussions will focus on poetic texts and intertexts from the 16th to the 2oth centuries, including texts by Paracelsus, Goethe, Eichendorff, Heine, Fouque, Keller, Kafka, Schwitters, Bachmann, Sachs. Class will be conducted in German.
GER 666 - Ethics and Gender - Literature and culture have always exposed gender troubles that were theorized much later. This class will examine how cultural texts anticipate and participate in (and perhaps modify) such theoretical discourses. Current postmodernist debates broaden the gender specific discourses of first- through third-wave feminisms and explicitly link ethics to gender. We will first focus on Judith Butler’s disagreement with Luce Irigaray’s gender concepts in “Gender Troubles” and on both authors’ revisions of their perspectives later. These discussions will offer the theoretical framework for our readings. Texts and films may include: Fontane’s Effie Briest, Wedekind’s Frühlingserwachen and Lulu plays, Brechts Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, poetic texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salome, Gottfried Benn, Else Lasker Schueler, Bertolt Brecht and Margarete Steffin, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jellinek, Marlene Steeruwitz, and Irmgard Treut’s film “Gendernauts.” Class will be taught in German, discussions in English or German.
GER 258 - German Thought and Culture: The Uncanny - Discussions of representative modernist texts/films (from Romanticism to the Expressionist Crises) which critically investigate the social bourgeois realities of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Centuries. Major topics include: Nietzsche and the Questions of Modernism; The Role of Magical, Fantastical, 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, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, Frand Wedekind, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Thomas Mann. Fulfills Arts and Letters and Multicultural IC requirement. Taught in English.
GER 356 - German Fairy Tales - This course examines the tradition of German Fairy Tales as the historical basis of the popular, familiar genre of fantasy literature. Analyses of the Grimm brothers’ tales and their revisions in popular culture (e.g. Disney) and literary culture (A. Sexton, A Carter) will provide a foundation for a discussion of markedly different cultural frameworks of classic, romantic and modern narratives by Goethe, Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann and M. Ende. Lectures and discussions will focus on identifying aesthetic, sociological, psychological and pedagogical implications and genders issues of the texts and films.
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