The course is designed as an intensive Yiddish language training. The goal is to teach German speakers to read, write and speak in Yiddish. The curriculum relies on the German language skills of the students, and focuses on differences between Yiddish and German grammar and vocabulary. Upon the completion of the course, students should be able to read Yiddish literary texts with a minimal use of dictionary. Note: graduate students can take the course in preparation for their Yiddish competency test.

The course is designed as an intensive Yiddish language training. The goal is to teach German speakers to read, write and speak in Yiddish. The curriculum relies on the German language skills of the students, and focuses on differences between Yiddish and German grammar and vocabulary. Upon the completion of the course, students should be able to read Yiddish literary texts with a minimal use of dictionary.bNote: graduate students can take the course in preparation for their Yiddish competency test.

This course offers an introduction to the German language, literature, and culture of the Middle Ages. We will read and translate Middle High German texts, study facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, and inquire into epochal cultural concepts like courtly love and chivalry as well as courtly and clerical designs of identity. Authors discussed will include Hartmann von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide among others. The course fulfills the departmental requirement in Middle High German.

This course is an introduction to medieval German literature, using the greatest love romance of medieval Germany as an example: Tristan and Isolde by Gottfried von Strassburg. Part of a new wave of chivalric literature in early 13th-century Germany, this text is a key document for the establishment of a new, refined aristocratic culture following French models. It tells a story of adventure and adulterous love, but also of coming-of-age, self-realization, and the legitimacy of art in an aristocratic world. The course focuses on one of the integral texts of the medieval German literary canon. Ample room is reserved for the comparison of the German versions to related accounts in other languages (including French and Old Norse). Through short introductory modules on Middle High German, the course also enables students without previous exposure to medieval German to read and interpret the texts in their original language. The course fulfills the departmental requirement in Middle High German.

We will engage in a careful reading of Goeth's major work — what he called "Das Hauptgeschäft" — the monumental drama Faust. Faust is arguably one of the most important myths of modernity. It occupied the poet for 60 years and is one of the most complex pieces of theatre ever written, incorporating elements of classical drama, opera, even visions of mediality bordering on the cinematic. Goethe himself called it an incommensurable production. Georg Lukacs stated that the content of Faust is the fate of all humanity. Alexander Pushkin called it an Iliad of modern life. And Leo Löwenthal pointed to the importance of Goethe's play for critical theory. Through the lens of this work, students will gain familiarity with the emerging trends of German modernity in the turbulent years between 1770 and 1832. German speakers will read the text(s) in the original. English translations are available.

From the moment he published his first novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werther, at the age of 24 to the appearance of Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre three years before his death, Goethe's novels set the tone for prose writing in German. His novels are daring, bold, experimental, never satisfied with repeating formula or meeting reader-expectations. In them, he tests the limits of narrative prose, and explores the boundaries between fiction and science, psychology, and fantasy. The world of Goethe's novels raises some important questions for our own age, as we try to discover an appropriate language for talking about truth, globalization, and power. In this course we will read all of Goethe's novels with an aim to rethinking current ideas on language and truth.

What is the canon of German literature? Who is part of the German canon? And who is not part of it? When for example the famous literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki published "Der Kanon" (2002), an anthology of outstanding German literature (Romane), his selection contained mainly male (white) German writers and poets. The selection (and also the following anthologies of novels, plays, essays, and stories) set off a controversial debate that has over the course of the past 20 years become more complex. It is not Reich-Ranicki selection itself but rather the actuality of the canon, what is still taught in schools and universities as outstanding German literature.

In this course, we will engage with the canon from a postcolonial and intersectional approach in order to understand the circumstances of the "center" as well as learn how to decenter it at the same time.

The starting point of this course is Plato's estimation of mania in Phaedrus, as the gift of the gods that allows the human mind to exceed perception and enter a new relationship with signs and meaning, with the self and others, with passion and rationality. The course will focus on works in German literature that test this estimation, pushing the limits of rationality, and in doing so testing the limits of language. We will be reading works by authors suffering from mental illness, and those using madness as way of experimenting with truth and reason. Works may include Herder, Goethe, Lenz, Kleist, Hölderlin, Hoffmann, Büchner, Canetti, Dürrenmatt, Weiss, and others.

Why did the generation of poets born in the two decades preceding the French Revolution begin to demand a completely new kind of literature? What were their hopes for the novel, whose German word Roman gave the movement its name? What were their hopes for poetry? Why did they see a need to push poetics in the direction of philosophy and vice versa? The closing years of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century saw some of the most innovative, radical, and influential writing in the history of German literature and philosophy. In the stories, novels, and poems of the Romantic period, but also in their theoretical writings, a generation gave expression to the sense of giddiness, awe, and inspiration caused by a rapidly changing world. Modern life required a modern form of expression, and the Romantics wanted to do everything they could to find this form. In this seminar we will be following them on their encounters with modernity — we will read their writings in search of their innovations, disappointments, visions, and hopes.

How do we feel the suffering of others? Can we identify with this suffering? How has suffering been represented in literature (and other media)? Is it morally permissible to represent suffering, and find pleasure in its depiction? Does the representation of suffering have a cathartic effect on the audience? How have authors engaged with the psychology and aesthetics of suffering? In this course, we will examine these and related questions by discussing literary texts from the 17th to the 19th century. We will also draw on theoretical texts ranging from eighteenth-century empirical psychology to today's studies in the cognitive sciences. While the focus of the course is on materials from around 1800, we will engage with concepts that originate in both eighteenth-century and contemporary discourses. Students are encouraged to develop their own interests within the course's conceptual framework, and final projects that investigate materials from outside the course's specific time frame are possible.

In this course, we will examine myths of origin in German literature and thought with a specific focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The course is organized in three units: narratives about the origin of the individual (childhood and the novel of formation), narratives about the origin of man (monogenesis versus polygenesis, anthropology and race), and narratives about the origin of societies and groups (family, state, contract theory). We will read texts by Karl Philipp Moritz, Joachim Heinrich Campe, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schlegel, and Sigmund Freud.

This course will examine the major writers of German and Austro-Hungarian modernism in the context of their age. We will pay particular attention to literary modernism's relation — sometimes contentious, sometimes symbiotic — to philosophy and psychoanalysis (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud). Authors discussed could include Gerhart Hauptmann, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Schnitzler, Hermann Hesse, etc.

Environmental sciences help us understand natural process. They can tell us what is happening to the earth in the Anthropocene but are not equipped to tell us why. The Environmental Humanities seek to explain and transform the cultural and historical foundations of environmental crisis. The term Environmental Humanities has emerged as both a descriptive and aspirational designation. It describes existing aggregations across environmental philosophy, environmental history, ecocriticism, cultural geography, cultural anthropology, and political ecology, but it also seeks to integrate discourses produced in different disciplinary contexts. The Environmental Humanities have opened up new modes of interdisciplinarity both within humanistic fields and in conjunction with social and natural sciences — and enabled new engagements with public debates and policies bearing on environmental questions. This interdisciplinary work has become more and more urgent with the escalating climate crisis. The course explores cultural imaginings and interrogations of the Anthropocene across a range of media. Key readings in environmental humanities approaches including, ecocriticism, eco-feminism, energy humanities, posthumanism, animal and plant studies, cultural history and theory. Primary texts include literature, film, and other cultural artifacts from the German context in particular.

This course examines the oeuvre of Franz Kafka, as it developed in a remarkably short period: from his 1911-12 novel, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and his 1912 breakthrough novella, The Metamorphosis; to his middle years, during World War I, when he wrote The Trial and the burst of stories collected in A Country Doctor; to The Castle and the final stories he penned before dying, at age forty, in 1924. We will attempt to understand why Kafka, who published so little and never completed any of his novels, left a powerful legacy on world literature and culture.

In this course, we will "search" for "Sebald" — borrowing from the title of a controversial new biography — but not so much for the man as for the source of the powerful effects of his fiction. We will focus on Sebald's revolutionary style and on the recurrent themes that emanate from it: the unreliability of memory, the catastrophic history of humankind, and the conundrums of writing about the Shoah.

German thought from the Enlightenment onward provided a basis for rethinking the world. In this course, we will investigate the history of these ideas throughout the long nineteenth century, from Kant's ground-breaking three "Critiques" (1781-90) to Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (1856-1939). Our goal will be threefold: 1) to provide a solid basis in the history of German thought, much of which defines theoretical debates to this day; 2) to consider the literary style of these thinkers; and 3) to question the course's own title by asking what it means to construct a history of ideas, of the mind, or of the spirit ("Geist"). Do ideas have their own history? If yes, how might we construct this, especially within German-speaking Central Europe in the long nineteenth century? And how might our own philosophies of history determine this kind of history of philosophy? Finally, how do the great German/Austrian thinkers from the second half of the nineteenth century put such a history into question — by unseating "ideas" and "philosophy" from their lofty positions and replacing these with dialectical materialism, radical historicism, and the psychology of the unconscious?

Beginning in the 1970s German literature began to rethink its colonial past. Still trying to evaluate the brutality of Nazi government and the Holocaust, the relationship with the colonial past complicated the general picture of German history. Writers began to ask how to portray the colonial past. It immediately became apparent that the struggle to understand the colonial past set up interferences with the Nazi past and the cold-war present. As the present moved from the cold war to post-wall Germany and then neoliberal globalism, this struggle became even more complex. In this course we will follow literary experiments with the colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial past and present from roughly 1975 until the present. We will relate this to major moments in postcolonial and decolonial theory. Texts will include texts by Germans reconsidering colonialism, such as Uwe Timm Morenga (1978), Urs Widmer, Im Kongo (1996), Daniel Kehlmann, Die Vermessung der Welt (2005), Christian Kracht, Imperium (2012), but also writers from colonial or postcolonial backgrounds writing in German, such as May Ayim, Jean-Félix Belinga-Belinga, André Ekama, and others.

The course explores cultural visions of the Anthropocene across a range of media, focusing primarily on examples from the German-speaking context. Our main concern will be to explore how producers of culture are negotiating the far-reaching anthropogenic impacts on the planet's geology and ecosystems that have led scientists to proclaim that we have entered into a new era of geological time. Readings in ecocriticism and cultural history and theory; primary texts include film, literature, and other cultural artifacts.

Maren Ade's recently acclaimed Toni Erdmann (2016) has brought renewed attention to women's film authorship in Germany and a growing cadre of women directors making films that are engaging, intelligent, and deeply thought-provoking without being didactic. Their work accords with counter cinematic practices sometimes loosely identified under the 'Berlin School' moniker, which have emerged in response to the changing social and economic landscape following unification. Rejecting the mode of production and ideology underlying German blockbusters such as Downfall or The Lives of Others, some filmmakers have instead embraced realist aesthetics to explore everyday life worlds and subjectivities against the backdrop of eroded social democratic structures and post-Fordist labour policies.

Via readings in feminist film theory, new materialism, animal studies, gender and queer theory, and cultural studies, we will place these compelling contemporary productions into conversation with those of pioneers the feminist film movement of the 1970s, such as Helke Sander and Ulrike Ottinger. Echoes of that movement are, for example, evidenced in the way Maren Ade has leveraged her success to draw public attention to imbalances within the German film industry and called for gender parity in the distribution of subsidies. With an eye towards both continuities and divergencies in aesthetics, mode of production, and culture, we will investigate to what extent recent German and Austrian directors, e.g., Barbara Albert, Angela Schanelec, Valeska Grisebach, Tanja Turanskyj, and others share among themselves and/or with an earlier generation a common focus on disparate experiences of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and precarity. How does their work accord with such labels as 'oppositional,' 'subversive,' or 'resistant,' and in what ways does it enact intersectional alliances with feminist, queer, anti-heteronormative, and anti-racist projects?

Frequently rejected out of hand by critics, the remake has been a quintessentially 'bad object' of film criticism. Yet the remake is as old as the cinematic medium itself. In many ways film is 'repetition' — the recycling of other films and literature. Films are forms of repetition in series, different cuts or versions (as the result of censorship, synchronization, restoration, etc). In fact the very first film by the Lumière brothers, La sortie de l'usine Lumière à Lyon (1895), exists simultaneously in three variations. And films are structured by repetitions in the form of intertextual associations, processes of cultural flow and exchange, visual and aural quotes, homages, etc. The course will explore the remake phenomenon in its historical, industrial, transnational, and theoretical dimensions with a focus on films that intersect with German contexts — from remakes of Weimar classics, such as M and Nosferatu, to Hollywood reprises of German films, such as City of Angels, to self-conscious meditations on the nature of the remake itself, as in Wim Wenders' The State of Things.

This course is designed to introduce students with little or no prior second language teaching experience to the theories and practices of second/foreign language learning and teaching in post-secondary environments. Participants will gain a critical understanding of major SLA theories, methods, and techniques with a focus on lesson planning, task design, feedback and assessment, as well as on distinctive features of online language instruction. Assignments will include lesson-planning, class observation reports, and task design. Students will apply the learned techniques through micro-teaching and peer-teaching exercises. The overall objective of this course is to provide participants with pedagogical tools and meta-linguistic awareness that will allow them to become competent, attentive, and reflective language instructors.

This course addresses a glaring absence in the Department's course offering of a dedicated 19th century literature course and one of the central aspects of German 19th century literary programs, poetic realism. The course examines the particular styles and forms of poetic realism in Gottfried Keller's writing. Keller is one of the most subtle authors of poetic realism. Questions to be examined will be Keller's literary politics to voice difference, dissent, and critique. Targets of Keller's critical engagement are the emerging Zurich bourgeoisie, colonial fantasies, and the problematic way the traces of colonialism shape Swiss society, but also literary canons and canonicity amid the marginalization of German language texts by Swiss writers in the face of German nationalism.

This is a reading course on a topic relevant to Germanic Languages and Literature/ Yiddish Studies. Please consult the Associate Chair Graduate for further details and procedures.

This is a reading course approved on a highly selective basis for the purposes of writing an MA Thesis.

This is a reading course approved on a highly selective basis for the purposes of writing an MA Thesis. The goal is to conduct an original research in the field of Yiddish studies and write up the results. The project must be based on analysis of Yiddish-language primary sources, such as works of literature, art, theatre, personal narratives, and media with the research questions derived from the field of literary analysis or history. Unless other arrangements are made, this course is mandatory component of the Yiddish Field MA.

What does "desire" mean to a Yiddish writer? Desire most commonly refers to sexuality and the erotic life. The object of desire may be a person, but it can also be a thing, an idea, an art form, and more. How does our milieu affect our sense of who or what we desire? Yiddish writers have always been necessarily multicultural, multilingual, trans-continental in knowledge and perspective. They responded to an extraordinarily diverse array of political and social movements including emigration/immigration, various forms of nationalism, socialism, religious belief, rejection of religious observance. In exploring the short fiction and poetry that address these concerns, we will consider authors whose names may be familiar to some (e.g., Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Aleichem); we will certainly read authors who are largely unknown despite English translations of their work (e.g., Celia Dropkin, Lamed Shapiro, Yankev Glatshteyn, and more). Experimenting with modern literary forms and modern personal and political choices, these authors reveal the remarkable range of Yiddish writing in the twentieth century. (All works will be read in English translation, though Yiddish texts will also be made available.)

This is a team-taught course that allows faculty and graduate student to choose a recent work of German or Yiddish literature or film and to present it to participants in the course. The presenter will also lead the discussion on the chosen work. The express aim of the course is to explore the latest trends in German literature and film, based on the perceptions of faculty and students.

In this course German reading knowledge is taught following the grammar-translation method designed for graduate students from the humanities. It is an intensive course that covers German grammar with focus on acquiring essential structures of the German language to develop translation skills. The course is conducted in English, and consequently participants do not learn how to speak or write in German, but rather the course focuses exclusively on reading and translating German. Prior knowledge of German not mandatory. By the end of the course, students should be able to handle a broad variety of texts in single modern Standard German. This course is not intended for MA or PhD students in German.

Master's students completing the major research paper option will have this course noted on their academic file.

This core course has several aims. First, it will introduce you to the world of graduate studies. We do this by reading and discussing texts in a respectful manner, recognizing different perspectives, exploring the process of framing a research project, and discussing what follows a master's degree — from further studies, to work, to activism (none of which are mutually exclusive). As such the course places a heavy emphasis on seminar discussions and group work. Second, it will introduce key writings in the geographical tradition. We explore how geography as a discipline has evolved and, related, how other social science and humanities work consider geographical questions.