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GER 366: Themes in Literature: Figures of the Oriental in Modern and Contemporary German Texts - The theme of the course this time is: figures of the "Oriental" in modern and contemporary German literature and film. In a world where East and West are coming together in new ways--sometimes wonderful and sometimes violent and sad--we are prompted, for the sake of enhancing future understanding, to study the history of East-West interactions and attitudes in as many ways as we can. In this course we will ask: how does German culture work out its particular version of the modern Western obsession with Asian cultures? What is the logic behind the peculiar combination of admiration and condescension that characterize the Western (and in this case German) attitude toward the East? How does the German-Oriental relation shift after World War II, and especially after the reunification, with the rise of hyphenated German-Asian identities within prominent cultural production? To pursue these and related questions, we will begin by looking at short fictions by German writers that imagine Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, and ancient Israelite culture, texts from the Romantic period and then especially the early twentieth century (we will also consider some early cinema). We will then look at some brief contemporary texts and films by German-Turkish and German-Japanese writers and filmmakers. (Authors include: Novalis, T. Mann, F. Kafka, E. Lasker-Schüler, M. Buber, F. Lang, Y. Tawada, Z. Senoçak, Fati Akin.)
GER 407/507: Angst - Anxiety--or "Angst," as we say in English--is often conceived as a fear of something indefinite, fear without an object, fear of nothing. Why be afraid of nothing? Isn't that irrational? Oddly, the modern philosophical and literary traditions seem to be quite interested in anxiety. In post-Enlightenment modernity, anxiety becomes a privileged mode of access to the essence of the human experience, a sign of the times (or of time as such), and a principal aesthetic object, theme, and mood. Indeed, one could make the case that the aesthetics of modernism is the aesthetics of anxiety. Why does a mood of profound uncertainty--even to the point of uncertainty about the object of one's own uncertainty--become so central to the post-Enlightenment modern experience? To pursue this and related questions, we will read such texts as: Kierkegaard's "The Concept of Anxiety: a Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin" (1844); selections from Heidegger's crucial book, "Being and Time" (1927), plus his essay "What is Metaphysics?" (1929); Freud's "Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety" (1926), and Bernhard's novel, "Beton" (1982). Texts to be made available in German for German majors and German Graduate students, in English for interested students from other programs. |