Faculty Information

Current / Recent Courses

GER 410/510 - Experimental Course: “The Singing Socrates” (Spring 2009)

Søren Kierkegaard’s dissertation, Begrebet Ironi med Stadigt Hensyn til Socrates (The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates) , opens with a list of 15 theses. The first reads: “The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists essentially in their dissimilarity.” This paradox of being alike and not alike in the same moment becomes clearer when we think about Kierkegaard’s understanding of irony as the ‘way to truth” but not the truth itself. It seems that Socrates represents a movement towards and a distance to religious experience in the same figure of thought. Friedrich Nietzsche’s first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music) criticizes what he understood as the imposition of Socratic rationality on tragic culture. Nietzsche castigated the “lust for knowledge” of the Socratic, theoretical man, and pointed out that Socrates had wanted to learn to compose music himself. What we need, Nietzsche argued, was a music-making Socrates, a philosopher who understands the value of aesthetic and tragic knowledge. As his career progresses, Nietzsche takes aim at Plato, whose portrait of Socrates endures as the most common image of the man and his thought. Nietzsche ties Plato to his critique of Christianity, which he calls “Platonism for the people.” As it emerges from these aspects of thought, this course will address both Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche’s understanding of Socrates as an attempt to make sense of the relationship between aesthetics, religion, and nihilism in the modern world. This course will be taught in English, although students who have the ability are encouraged to read the texts in the original Danish or German.

SCAN 315 - Cinematic Traditions in Scandinavia: “ Assimilation and its Discontents” (Spring 2009)

Today's Danish cinema has been called "the West's most compelling cultural voice." It is not the first time, however, that Scandinavians have assumed the role of cinematic trailblazers. This course examines the history,development and contemporary manifestations of Scandinavian cinematic culture, including major works by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Participants in the course will explore the ways in which Scandinavian directors positioned themselves in relation to on the one hand classic Hollywood cinema, and on the other hand European art cinema, both in terms of narrative structures and content and in terms of cinematic technique. This course is conducted in English. This year’s course will emphasize a trilogy of related themes, namely, youth, outsider status, and challenges to social norms. It is my hope that we use these themes to ask a series of questions about our understanding of the role of cinema in addressing and representing change.

Scan 351- Romanticism and the Modern Breakthrough (Winter 2009)

Explores the literature and the cultural debates of “the long 19th century” in Scandinavia. In this class we will read literary and philosophical texts written between the French Revolution and World War I. During this period Scandinavians experienced profound political and social changes. They saw the increasing proliferation of secular and scientific explanations of the world, the rise of the Industrial state, and the increasing call for expanded political rights. The rise of new ideologies such as feminism, socialism, and nationalism colored the environment. The emerging prominence of the natural sciences accompanied by an acute awareness of history also played a strong role in shaping the cultural production of the period. Yet the emergence of “rational” explanations of the world did not preclude the persistence of other ways of looking at the world and the 19th century also saw an increasing fascination with folklore and an ever more acute desire to reconstruct tradition. In short, the literature of this period provides us with a portal through which we can observe the collisions between competing ways of explaining the world (notions of the modern and the traditional, rationality and irrationality, religion and secularity and the like), and analyze the implications of these explanations upon events. The class is conducted in English.

SCAN 354 - Hamlet, Peer Gynt, and the Stranger (Fall 2008)

We shall begin our course of study with a reading of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Three themes from Hamlet, namely haunting, the equivocation of being and bad dreams will provide us with a basis for an analysis of late 19th-century Scandinavian drama. For certainly the main concerns of the drama of the "Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough" and its aftermath, i.e., the relationship of the individual to history, the instability of subject positions, and the question of sanity are all anticipated by Shakespeare's depiction of the melancholy Prince of Denmark. The plays of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg will carry the remainder of the course. Readings include: Hamlet, Peer Gynt, Ghosts, The Ghost Sonata, Miss Julie, An Enemy of the People, The Father, To Damascus I , and When We Dead Awaken.

SCAN 250 - Masks and Ecstatic Experience (Fall 2007)

This class is designed to prompt an interrogation of mere appearances. To do so, we will read a series of literary and philosophical texts. We will also view three films. All the course material highlights the difficulty of interpretation. In other words, our goal is to develop the critical thinking skills that enable us to more accurately read our experiences and understand our environments. With this goal in mind, I have decided to introduce you to a number of works that use masks and tell tales of ecstatic experiences. The masks can be as simple as a pseudonym or as subtle as formal aesthetic choices. My initial premise is that masks are used to depict ecstatic experience (traumatic events, religious passion, sexual desire, and the like) because these experiences are transformative, and that the face of transformation, the appearance of becoming, needs the mask in order to be legible. Texts include: Isak Dinesen's (Karen Blixen's) "The Blank Page" and "Roads Round Pisa," Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Edgar Allen Poe's "William Wilson" and "The Man of the Crowd," C.J.L. Almqvist's The Queen's Diadem, and Henrik Ibsen's Per Gynt.

SCAN 354 - Hamlet, Peer Gynt, and the Stranger (Fall 2007)

German 460/560: Nietzsche: Continuity and Difference (Winter 2007)

The name Nietzsche slipped into the discourse of modernity with remarkable facility. As a result there has been a wide variety of contradictory readings of the philosopher’s work. Zionists, Nazi’s, cultural conservatives and radicals alike have grafted Nietzschean motifs onto pre-established ideological positions. This semantic elasticity is a hallmark of the history of Nietzsche reception from the late 19th through to the middle of the 20th century. This same tendency has held true in what we have come to call post-modernity. The number of monographs published and the variety of their interpretative perspectives seems to suggest that there is no one Nietzsche, but rather several “Nietzsches” who are at once feminist and sexist, elitist and liberating, who seem to provide grist for every mill. In this course, we will return to the “texts.” Starting with Nietzsche’s 1886 prefaces, we will read and discuss a representative sample of the Nietzschean corpus. We will also explore the basic Nietzschean ideas (the tragic, the Dionysian, the will to power, the eternal return of the same, genealogy, the re-evaluation of values, intoxication, and the like) with an eye to the continuities and the differences within the body of Nietzsche’s philosophical production. All readings are in English.

Scan 259: “The Saga and Hybrid Culture”: (Winter 2007)

In this course we will conduct a study of six medieval Icelandic Sagas. We shall begin by establishing a premise. The hybridity of the cultural environment in which these sagas were written is discernable when we understand that these narratives depict a time that rests on the cusp of the Icelandic conversion to Christianity. It is just as important that we keep in mind that the sagas that we will read were written retrospectively, that is, they were written two to three hundred years after the “fact,” and during a time when Icelandic independence was under threat. Therefore, it is only fitting that we begin our survey with an exploration of the 13th century Icelandic reconstruction of Old Norse belief systems. We will then turn to a heroic saga, which has its roots in a larger European tradition, and look at the specific Icelandic cast of this story. After that, we shall read a series of Icelandic “family” sagas, all set in Iceland, and attempt to understand both their cultural context and how they themselves contextualize cultural tensions. Readings include The Prose Edda, The Saga of the Völsungs, The Vinland Sagas, Egil’s Saga, Njal’s Saga, and Gisli Sursson’s Saga.

SCAN 250 Masks and Ecstatic Experience (Fall 2006)

Humanities 300: Love and Betrayal (Winter 2005)

This course explores representations of love from Plato to Pop Music. We will start by discussing Plato’s separation of erotic and ideal love and continue with an investigation of the chastening of desire in the medieval court. We will stop to reflect on the terra incognita of seduction, and then stand witness to the affairs of the 19th-century bourgeoisie. Our course ends where we begin, as we will parse the conflicts in our desire for the other by looking at some contemporary contributions to our notions of love, and the twin discourse that establishes love’s fearful symmetry: the discourse of betrayal. Readings include : Plato’s Symposium, Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde, Kierkegaard’s Diary of the Seducer, Kipnis’s Against Love, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and Freud’s Civilization and It’s Discontents. We will also view two films: Adam’s Rib and Mississippi Masala.

Humanities 103: Progress and Its Other (Spring 2005)

This course is an investigation of the Janus face of European modernity, as we will interrogate the notion of historical progression with an eye to the accompanying concept of the “primitive.” Our approach will be comparative, incorporating texts from several European Countries, Senegal, Martinique, and the United States. We will also consider a variety of forms of expression in order to trace the development of the intellectual and geographical imposition of the western categories of progress, development, and freedom. Our course of study is mainly literary, but includes the plastic arts, philosophy, music, and film. Readings include: Montaigne’s “On Cannibals,” Shelley’s Frankenstein, Marx and Engel’s The Communist Manifesto, Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” Fanon’s “On Violence,” Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King.

German 624:Repetition: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,Freud (Winter 2005)

In this course we will investigate the concept of repetition in three moments. The first moment belongs to Søren Kierkegaard. His pseudonym, Constantine Constantius justifies his “experiment” by claiming that repetition is the philosophical category par excellence for modernity. He employs masks, irony, and staging to confront us with a labyrinthine structure that defies any simple answer to his question: is repetition possible? This ambiguity causes me to want to rephrase his question: Is it desire that repeats or is it the desire to repeat that remains unrecognizable in its aspect? Friedrich Nietzsche depicts our second moment. His Zarathustra faces the problem of his own disgust. Is his own repulsion enough to make him shrink back from the thought of eternal recurrence? Is Zarathustra’s desire for return threatened by the intensity of his anticipation? Is it possible for one to experience repetition without volitional certitude, without the mask of a fiction couched in tragic terms? Pyschoanlysis addresses these problems. It’s founder, Sigmund Freud provides us with a diagnosis in our third moment. Though I wonder if repetition is merely a symptomatic compunction? Our reading of Lacan’s commentary on the Freudian text allows us to explore repetition as an interpretative model. In other words, we will conclude by allowing the good doctor to be interrogated.