German Graduate Seminars
Spring 2008
German 523: Gothic
Instructor: Richard Page
Tuesday & Thursday 4:15- 5:30
Schedule #:963532
102 Pond
E-mail:brp3@psu.edu
Office # 315 Burrowes
Gothic is the oldest extensively-attested Germanic language with texts dating back to Wulfila's fourth-century translation of the New Testament. Knowledge of Gothic is essential in the fields of Germanic and Indo-European linguistics. The goals of the course are to survey the grammar of Gothic, to read Gothic texts, and to introduce historical and comparative Germanic linguistics. Conducted in English.
German 561: Nineteenth-Century German Literature
Instructor: Daniel Purdy
Monday & Wednesday 2:30- 3:45
Schedule #:949420
304 Burrowes
E-mail:dlp14@psu.edu
Office # 302A Burrowes
The course will concentrate on the relationship between gender and political identity within bourgeois culture and its literary and philosophical critiques. We will examine the first theorists that describe the clash between traditional society and modern industrial capitalism-Karl Marx, as well as Ferdinand Tönnies and Wilhelm Riehl. We will examine the first efforts to conceptualize the relationship between economic and cultural relations, as well as the first examples of cultural anthropology. Our readings will be contextualized in relation to the upheavals brought on by industrialization, the 1848 revolution, and German unification under Prussia.
We will read important literary works by Georg Büchner, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Gottfried Keller, Adalbert Stifter, Hedwig Dohm, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Theodor Fontane, while also examining popular tracts on the workers' movement, feminism, nationalism and anti-Semitism. The different responses writers developed to these modern forces will be our primary concern. How illuminating were the critiques of German modernization formulated by writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche or Heinrich Heine? How did German Realism resist the drive to national unity? What moments of diversity are preserved in literature? We will link recent historical scholarship on the disunity of German unification to the older literary claim that nineteenth-century German realism eschewed the cosmopolitan aspirations of French, English and Russian literature.
We will consider how fictional texts construct gender as a manifestation of political conflict. Among the questions we will consider: To what extent are modes of femininity entwined with the progressive politics? How is national identity inflected in gender relations? How are certain forms of masculinity represented as the advance of modernity? How do other patriarchical norms resist change? We will consider the role homosocial relations play in establishing political unity and we will listen for the queer tones in key canonical texts. We will consider how military masculinity is reinforced by colonialist fantasies. All these themes will be reflected in the architectural debates about building a national capital that would unify German politics and culture.
German 597: Philosophers Read Poets
Instructor: Dennis Schmidt
Tuesday 2:30 - 5:30
Schedule #:109699
402 Burrowes
E-mail:djs61@psu.edu
Office # 202 Sparks
One of the defining features of German philosophy in the past century has been the seriousness with which philosophers have sought to engage poets and poetic texts as serious forms of reflection and as sources for philosophical insight. Some philosophers, such as Heidegger, have even taken this encounter with poetry as opening the central philosophical concerns of our age. Two poets have stood out as especially significant in this regard: Friedrich Hölderlin and Paul Celan.
The purpose of this course is to look at some of the most exciting and important efforts by philosophers of the past century to read these poets. Questions addressed will concern the nature of language and of translation, the character of our relation to the past, memory and loss, nation and people, death and love. We will also need to discuss what is specifically “German” about these works and this project.
Readings
Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “Der Ister”
Walter Benjamin, “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin”
Theodor Adorno, “Parataxis: The Late Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin”
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Who am I and Who are You: Reading Celan
Jacques Derrida, The Ram: Between Two Infinities
Paul Celan, Selected Poems, “Meridian Speech” (German edition: Suhrkamp Verlag)
Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems, “The Death of Empedocles” (German edition: Hanser Verlag)
Requirements
The course will be run as both a lecture and a seminar. The first half will be a lecture, the second half a seminar discussion led by two of the members of the seminar. Each student will be responsible for co-leading two of those discussions. Active participation in all of the discussions is expected. There will be three options for papers for this course: either: eight 3-4 page interpretive summaries, two 10-12 page papers, or one 20-25 page term paper. Those from departments other than the German Department are encouraged to read the text in German.
