Course Offerings 2017-2018

FALL 2017

H 001    Elementary German  MWF 9:30-10:30; T/Th 9-10 Schlichting-Artur

H 101    Intermediate German MWF 9:30-10:30  Brust

H 223    Visualizing Nations: Africa and Europe T 1:30- 4pm Brust
This course explores ideas of nation building in, as well as the transnational relations between Europe and Africa. We will discuss African and European experiences of nation-creation to distinguish between exclusionary and inclusionary visions of nation states. We will investigate the ideas of the nation state in particular from a visual perspective along the lines of race, class, and gender. We will take into account the roles that film, literature, history, economics, and politics play within the formation of nations. Finally, we will contemplate how globalization challenges nation states.

H 305    Modern German Drama - A Moral Compass? MW 11:15 am- 12:45 pm Brust
In 1784 Friedrich Schiller started a discussion about theatre as a moral institution. With this in mind, this course will provide an overview of the historical development of drama within the German-speaking world and also explore foreign influences on German drama. We will read and watch a variety of different plays from Lessing to Jelinek, and engage with different theatrical genres: classical, epic, documentary, absurd, and feminist theatre. In addition, we will discuss the function of the institutionalization of theatre within the German national imaginary, with a particular focus on gender and race. This course is taught in German.

H 399  Senior Conference  TBA Brust

SPRING 2018

H 002   Elementary German  MWF 9:30-10:30; T/Th 9-10 Schlichting-Artur

H 102   Intermediate German MWF 9:30-10:30 Brust

H 201   Advanced German  MW 12:45-2:15 Schönherr
This course is intended for students who wish to refine their speaking, writing, and reading skills beyond the Intermediate level. Designed as a comprehensive introduction to modern German culture, we will discuss a variety of literary, political, historical and philosophical texts, including feature films and video materials. In addition, students have the opportunity to enrich the curriculum, by giving class reports on current events of their choice. Weekly grammar reviews will complement these activities.

H 262 Visualizing Europa/The European Union MW 11:15 am- 12:45 pm Brust
The seminar is designed to provide a broad overview of the various aesthetic trends as well as political contexts, which have shaped the contemporary imagination/creation of the European Union. Engaging a variety of different texts, media, and disciplinary perspectives, this course will retrace and engage with the historical development of the idea of Europe from Ancient Greece to contemporary times, and assess the importance of visual representations of this idea in the current era of globalization and mass communication.

H 321/Coml 321 Intermedial Transformations: Musico-Acoustic Imaginations in Literature and Film T 1:30-4 Schönherr
How could an apparently innocent medium such as music become the contested subject of cultural-political debates over the last 2000 years, upon which even the decline and/or continuation of civilization depends? How shall we understand the longevity of the myth of music’s power, even though mythological figures such as Orpheus already demonstrated its ultimate powerless¬ness? Why did literary authors so often favor music over their own medium, and even regarded music as a utopia of expression capable of representing the ineffable? How can we explain the gendering of music as the other of male reason and patriarchal order that threatens the socio-cultural monopoly of men? And how shall we explain the persistence of these questions after the emergence of new audio-visual media of recording, reproduction, and transmission that dissolved the natural connection between voice and body, instrument and sound, time and space, that led to a radical transformation of our culture? The course intends to explore these questions, by drawing on the rich and diverse representation of music in all its socio-aesthetic complexity from antiquity to the present. The thematic scope will range from mythological, philosophical, and religious interpretations of music through issues of gender, race, and politics in literature, opera, and film, to theories of intermediality, and psychoanalytical implications of voice and sound. Focusing on exemplary models, we will reconstruct the changing social functions and highly ambiguous attitudes towards music in Western culture, oscillating between fear and fascination. In addition, we will also continuously confront the semiotic question of whether literature can justifiably be read in analogy to musical forms, and whether music as a language is also plausible in reverse.

H 399 Senior Conference TBA Schönherr