Department ofGermanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures

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Graduate Seminars

Graduate Seminars

GER 581: Brecht and Post-Brechtian Theater

(Dr. Samuel Frederick)

T/TH 10:35-11:50am

Undoubtedly the most influential playwright of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht was a master of contradictions. His plays stage unresolvable conflict and ask the audience to grapple with what they’ve seen. In the seminar’s first half we will explore several of Brecht’s key works for the theater, from his early reactions to Expressionism to his collaborations with composers such as Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, from his Lehrstücke (learning plays) to the fully formed Epic Theater of his last decades. Along the way, we will interrogate Brecht’s numerous programmatic and theoretical writings. The second half of the seminar will explore different German-language dramatic works of the postwar years that were influenced by Brecht’s work, some turning away from his aesthetics and politics, others pushing them to new extremes. Authors will include Peter Handke, Peter Weiss, Elfriede Jelinek, Heiner Müller, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and may also include Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, Yoko Tawada. All readings will be available in the original German and in English translation. Class will be conducted in English; non-German graduate students are welcome.

GER 593/LING 597: Morphological processing  

(Dr. Michael Putnam)

T/TH 12:05-1:20PM

Although units such as ‘words’ are readily identifiable by children and adults, linguists often struggle to define their exact properties, as well as how they are produced and understood. In this course, we examine the role of the morpheme, with a particular goal of addressing questions concerning lexical and morphological representations in processing. Another central goal in this course is to carefully examine the predictions of decompositional approaches to morphology in the mental lexicon in a way that involves and integrates both theoretical and experimental approaches. In this seminar we review recent studies with an eye towards building upon them through the creation of new studies that contribute to this ever-growing field of inquiry.  

GER 430: History of the German Language

(Dr. Mike Putnam)

TTh 12:05-1:20pm

Wenn man Goethe liest, merkt man sofort, dass die Sprache anders ist als heutzutage. Zum Beispiel benutzt man in der heutigen Sprache das Wort Frauenzimmer nicht mehr, und statt sie ward, sagt man sie wurde. Jede Sprache verändert sich im Laufe der Zeit. Dieser Kurs vermittelt den Studis einen Überblick über die Veränderungen in der deutschen Sprache seit der indoeuropäischen Zeit. Die Geschichte des Deutschen wird im Zusammenhang mit kulturgeschichtlichen Entwicklungen der Sprache als System behandelt. In diesem Kurs gehen wir tiefer in die Entwicklung der deutschen Sprache ein, um ein besseres Verständnis von Tendenzen in der modernen Sprache zu gewinnen, die weiterhin andauern.

GER 592: Gothic Haunts: The German-English Nexus

(Dr. Daniel Purdy)

MW 2:30-3:45pm

How does German Romanticism haunt English literature? This course will investigate the ways in which German and English Romantic texts intersect and compete with each other in order to 1) organize interior feelings, along the axes of knowledge, sexuality, and power; 2) establish a domestic terrain and boundaries for the nation state; 3) define differences between home and foreign spaces. Gothic architecture, ruins, paintings and landscape gardens will precede texts that lead us through ancient Italian labyrinths, psychic caverns, neo-gothic monasteries, cartographic landscapes, broad boulevards, dark alleys, and bureaucratic compartments. The gothic depicts the archaic as it survives as subterranean remainder in the modernizing world. We will also ponder the difference between the beautiful and the sublime. Romanticism stressed the unique qualities of place. The poetic descriptions of natural sites such as the Rhine, the Danube or the Alps will receive our particular attention. Primary theoretical authors include: Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Literary texts will include works by Friedrich Schiller, Ludwig Tieck, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, Angela Carter. Discussions and most readings will be English. German students are asked to read the originals in German and meet for a separate German discussion. Assignments include one in-class presentation, active participation, and a final 15-page research paper.

GER 593: Psycholinguistics in the Foreign Language Classroom

Dr. Carrie Jackson

TTh 9:05-10:20am

The primary goal of this course is to think critically about how recent advances in psycholinguistic research, and psycholinguistic research on bilingualism in particular, can inform foreign language instruction. We will approach this larger question from several perspectives, including: (1) exploring theories of second language learning that emphasize how online processing strategies facilitate or hinder learning (e.g.,

Processing Instruction by VanPatten and colleagues; the role of attention in language learning) (2) how the manipulation of language input impacts learning (3) how lab-based experimental methodologies may be adapted for classroom-based activities (e.g., syntactic priming) and to investigate learning (e.g., eye-tracking). Students will have the opportunity to develop their own research project, laying the foundation to then carry out that project in a subsequent semester.

GER/LING 597: Variation in Modern German (Language Contact) 

Prof. Mike Putnam

T/R 12:05-1:20pm

This course explores the linguistic boundaries of GERMAN in time and space, i.e., what are the unifying linguistic properties across time and space that define whether or not individuals or groups are (still) “speaking German”? Here we examine the range of domain of linguistic attributes (e.g., phonology, morphology, syntax, etc.) that are canonically associated with GERMAN. Ignoring prescriptive norms in most cases, our focus will be on contemporary German dialects and regiolects (i.e., since 1900). The second half of the course will zero in on extra-territorial varieties of German, i.e., Sprachinseln, in Europe and throughout the world. The development of these Sprachinseln takes center stage, as we probe the retention of dialectal vestiges and linguistic innovations in these vernaculars through the lens of contemporary treatments of language contact phenomena. 

Photography, Race, Genocide (GER / VSTUD 597)

Prof. Sabine Doran

M 6-9pm

This course explores the role of photography in the context of the racialized politics of genocides and their aftermaths. The course aims to critically examine photographic evidence of genocidal violence, revealing the long shadow of modern genocides from colonialism, to the Holocaust, the Armenian, Cambodian, Rwandan genocides, to the present. At the intersection of modern constructs of race as they culminate in genocidal violence, the course investigates the political and ethical potential of photography. Topics include: the spectrality of photography and its origins (W. Benjamin, Barthes, Flusser, Sontag, Batchen); the civil contract of photography (Azoulay); atomic light (Lippit); studies in black and white (Sheehan); constructs of race (Kant, Nietzsche, Fanon, Bernasconi, Moten); modern genocides (Kiernan); memory’s edge and after-images (Young, Didi-Huberman); photography in film and literature: Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais); Ararat (Egoyan), The Photographer (Jablonski), Austerlitz (Sebald); The Missing Picture (Penh); race after technology (R. Benjamin).

German Phonetics and Phonology (GER 513)

Prof. Richard Page

M, W, F 1:25–2:15pm

This course is about the sounds and the sound system of the German language. The first part of the course will focus on German phonetics. Phonetics is the study of speech sounds, and we will pay particular attention to German speech sounds that native speakers of English find difficult.  We will use both articulatory and acoustic phonetics to describe German speech sounds and to compare them to corresponding English speech sounds. The second part of the course will examine German phonology. Phonology is the study of speech sounds as a linguistic system. We will focus primarily on Standard German, but we will also address phonological aspects of dialectal variation, language change, and language acquisition. The course will also explore different theoretical models as they are applied to German phonology. No prior knowledge of phonology or linguistics is assumed.

 

GER 511/FRE 581: Teaching of College German/French with Professor Heather McCoy

The course introduces students to the theory and methods of teaching both languages at the college level. It deals not only with techniques, materials, and bibliography of the field but also evaluates the contributions of applied linguistics to college-level language pedagogy. French 581 / German 511 familiarizes students with cur- rent theories of foreign language education as they re- late to post-secondary language acquisition. This course further includes the practical aspects of college-level teaching with special reference to problems related specifically to the teaching and learning of both languages.

GER 593/LING 545: The Mental Lexicon with Professor Michael Putnam

The mental lexicon is commonly understood as the reservoir of lexical items and related information in the mind of an individual. In this course we take a more detailed and refined look at the (de)composition of “lexical items”, with a primary focus on the nature of well-known categories, i.e., nouns, verbs, adposi- tions, and modifiers. Another core component of this course investigates the storage and activation of “lexi- cal items” in monolingual and bi/multilingual individu- als. Here we discuss how our treatment and classifica- tion of ‘lexical items” developed in this course is well suited for off- and on-line research moving forward.
 

GER 561: German Realism and Its Other with Professor Sam Frederick 

This seminar considers key texts from the German nineteenth century that make different claims to real- ist representation. Central to our discussion will be the ways in which these claims require, as Fredric Jameson puts it, a “negotiation with the shock and scandal of the Other.” The main task of the seminar will be to under- stand the German realist project in terms of that Other, which appears in a variety of forms (e.g., social, sexual, racial, theological, even aesthetic). In what ways does the supposedly proper or successful representation of the world in fact demand the exclusion or perhaps assimilation of the Other? What do these alternatives mean for the resulting work (both ideologically and formally) and for the ways in which realism has been theorized? How useful is “realism” (an epistemological category) as a conceptual tool for talking about aesthetics, anyway? These and related questions will guide our engagement with the texts. The seminar, however, is also de- signed to provide a survey of nineteenth-century German literature after Romanticism. As such its aim is to introduce students to a constellation of canonical works from roughly 1815 to the turn of the twentieth century that continue to be important touchstones for scholars, theorists, and teachers. We will read prima- ry texts (all in German) alongside theoretical works (both contemporary to these texts and more recent theory) and exemplary interpretations (from a wide range of methodologies). Discussion will be in English. Authors may include: Gotthelf, Droste-Hülshoff, Mörike, Büchner,  Aston, Heine, Lewald,  Stifter, Keller, Storm, Sacher-Masoch, Fontane, Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal, among others. Theorists may include: Kristeva, Jameson, Lukács, Adorno, Barthes, Auer- bach, Jakobson, Deleuze, Benjamin, among others.
 
 GER/VSTUD 597: The Politics of Color in Visual Culture with Professor Sabine Doran
 
This seminar explores the politics and aesthetics of color in visual and literary media. Whether associated with particular moods or mental states (“red with anger,” “pale white”), with particular ideologies (Communist red, the environmental Greens) or with particular races (black for African Americans, white for Caucasians, red for Native Americans, yellow for Asians), color has always been seen as an index of meaning. Yet the broad cultural significance of specific colors is rarely been ad- dressed. Reduced to its symbolic – that is, highly conventionalized – function, color is typically understood as a fixed system of reference that is easily decoded.
How- ever, this approach to color obscures its dynamic nature, its culturally conditioned ambiguities and dualities. “Every hue, real or imagined, bodes a world,” writes Jeffery Cohen in his introduction to Prismatic Ecology. Ecotheory beyond Green (2013) and it is in the in the vibrant worlds of colors that climate changes, both politically and eco- logically, emerge as they energize movements (from “Black Panther” to the “Yellow People Revolution”) and reflections on the color of skin, contaminants, plants, atmospheres. Readings and viewings include Goethe’s Color Theory, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Maggie Nel- son’s Bluets, Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Kieslowski’s Color Trilogy, Kurosawa’s Ran and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing – to look at perspectives that recognize the complex nature of color and its inscriptions in political networks.

 

GER 430: History of the German Language

(Dr. Mike Putnam)

Wenn man Goethe liest, merkt man sofort, dass die Sprache anders ist als heutzutage. Zum Beispiel benutzt man in der heutigen Sprache das Wort Frauenzimmer nicht mehr, und statt sie ward, sagt man sie wurde. Jede Sprache verändert sich im Laufe der Zeit. Dieser Kurs vermittelt den Studis einen Überblick über die Veränderungen in der deutschen Sprache seit der indoeuropäischen Zeit. Die Geschichte des Deutschen wird im Zusammenhang mit kulturgeschichtlichen Entwicklungen der Sprache als System behandelt. In diesem Kurs gehen wir tiefer in die Entwicklung der deutschen Sprache ein, um ein besseres Verständnis von Tendenzen in der modernen Sprache zu gewinnen, die weiterhin andauern.

GER 513: German Phonetics and Phonology

(Dr. Katharina Schuhmann)

This course is about the sounds and the sound system of the German language. Part of the course will focus on German (and English) phonetics. Phonetics is the study of speech sounds, and we will pay particular attention to German speech sounds that native speakers of English find difficult. We will use both articulatory and acoustic phonetics to describe German speech sounds and to compare them to corresponding English speech sounds.

Another part of the course will examine German phonology. Phonology is the study of speech sounds as a linguistic system. We will focus primarily on Standard German, but we will also address phonological aspects of dialectal variation, language change and language acquisition. The course will also explore different theoretical models (derivational approaches and Optimality Theory) as they are applied to German phonology.

No prior knowledge of phonology or linguistics is assumed.

GER 514: German(ic) (morpho)syntax

(Dr. Mike Putnam)

This course explores the structural properties of German and its closest relatives, with a primary focus on contrastive differences between German and English. We will survey a wide range of empirical phenomena, including (but not limited to) the structure of nouns and verbs, core elements of sentence structure, and the formation of complex questions. One of the primary objectives of this course seeks to aid students in gaining experience interpreting empirical data through the lens of a theoretical framework. We will discuss how formal approaches to grammar enhance our understanding of (micro)variation across and within languages such as German and some of its closest relatives (and beyond!) and how these theoretical tools can assist us in refining experimental and pedagogical studies. This course assumes no prior background in formal linguistics.  

GER 530: The Frankfurt School & the Politics of Visual Aesthetics

(Dr. Daniel Purdy)

The course will examine critical theories by members of the Frankfurt School regarding visual strategies for representing and challenging urban consumer culture. The course will center on German Marxist theories about how the rise of urban mass culture at the beginning of the twentieth century produced Modernist forms of visual representation. The course will examine how the spread of fashion-driven behavior had dramatic implications for aesthetic theory, film, architecture, and literature. The course will provide a survey of the most important works in the German critical tradition and the major thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. These include Georg Simmel, Georg Lukacs, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas, among others. Students will learn how these modern theories relate to the German Idealist tradition, particularly Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, as well as the history of German Marxism.

Topics include the psychology of the metropolitan individual, the commodification of culture, money, and interpersonal relationships, the architecture of shopping, visual advertising through posters and photography, and cinema as a means of understanding social relations, as well as the role of visual media in public debate. The course will consider how modernist architecture, particularly from the Bauhaus school, redefined urban spaces and introduced new functionalist designs. The course will examine how Frankfurt School thinkers responded to the provocative design proposals presented by modernist architects. Students will examine specific modernist designs for consumer products to examine the relationship between the appearance of a commodity and its use, in order to understand how appearance and function are interdependent within modernism. In broad terms, class discussions will focus on such questions as: How does the relationship between the visual image and society change under industrial capitalism? What political functions do visual images have in consumer culture? What visual mechanisms does the “culture industry” deploy to organize public consciousness? What critical responses are available to visual artists within a mass-market economy? The course will provide students an historical understanding of early twentieth-century German consumer culture and its visual representation, while also offering them critical intellectual tools to understand the social and economic implications of visual images within consumer culture. The course will be taught in English with readings in both languages.

GER/VSTUD 534: History and Theory of German Film and Photography

(Dr. Sabine Doran)

This course will examine the history, theory, and practice of German photographic and moving picture technology from its origins to the digital age. The course will be structured around important innovations in visual technology, including (but not limited to): 1) the pre-history and invention of photography, 2) pre-cinematic moving pictures (Anschütz), 3) the invention of cinema (Skladanowsky Bros.), 4) sound and color innovations, 5) video, digital, and installation work. The aim of the course is to provide an historical overview of visual culture in which the radical shifts inaugurated by new technologies are examined in terms of their aesthetic, philosophical, and political impact. In the German context these shifts have been examined by important theoreticians of visual culture (most notably Arnheim, Balácz, Benjamin, Kracauer, and Flusser) whose work has changed the way we think about our relation to images.

Sessions will focus on topics such as: ontology of the celluloid image; the “New Vision” of Weimar photography; post-war Austrian avant-garde cinema; the rubble film and the limits of space; Nazi aesthetics in the feature film; the problem of “capturing” time in pre-cinematic experiments and early cinema; the “Other” of Wilhelmine cinema; Weimar-era animation; the politics of New German Cinema; feminist cinema in the GDR; new digital media and the future of the cinematic.

Viewings to include films by Mack, Rye, Wegener, Murnau, Lang, Ruttmann, Sagan, Reiniger, Fischinger, Pabst, Fanck, Riefenstahl, Sierck (aka Sirk), Harlan, Staudte, Beyer, E. Schmidt, Wicki, Kubelka, Tscherkassky, Kluge, Fassbinder, Wenders, Reitz, among others.

Readings will be available in German and in English. Class discussion will be in English.

GER/VSTUD 537: Photography, Race, Genocide

(Dr. Sabine Doran)

This course explores the role of photography in the context of the racialized politics of genocides and their aftermaths. The course aims to critically examine photographic evidence of genocidal violence, revealing the long shadow of modern genocides from colonialism, to the Holocaust, the Armenian, Cambodian, Rwandan genocides, to the present. At the intersection of modern constructs of race as they culminate in genocidal violence, the course investigates the political and ethical potential of photography. Topics include: the spectrality of photography and its origins (W. Benjamin, Barthes, Flusser, Sontag, Batchen); the civil contract of photography (Azoulay); atomic light (Lippit); studies in black and white (Sheehan); constructs of race (Kant, Nietzsche, Fanon, Bernasconi, Moten); modern genocides (Kiernan); memory’s edge and after-images (Young, Didi-Huberman); photography in film and literature: Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais); Ararat (Egoyan), The Photographer (Jablonski), Austerlitz (Sebald); The Missing Picture (Penh); race after technology (R. Benjamin).

GER 540: Seminar in German Culture and Civilization

German Orientalisms (Dr. Daniel Purdy)

Reading theorists from Edward Said to Robert Bernasconi, we will examine the development of

particularly German styles of Orientalism. Along the way we will consider the issues in using

contemporary categories on historical images and texts. While Orientalism among German writers may be distinguished from French and English variations, the different cultures all share the same images and texts as sources for their representations. We will consider the relationship between firsthand travel accounts, first to each other, whereby each traveler writes in response to his predecessors, and then to domestic European syntheses of these travel narratives. Topics may include: The intercultural conventions of hospitality concerning the treatment of strangers. The Balkans and the Black Sea as zones of confrontation between Christians and Muslims. Leibniz’s engagement with Chinese philosophy in the context of fashionable Chinoiserie and his disparagement of Ottoman Turks. The cultural negotiations implicit in Enlightenment depictions of religious tolerance. Is German Orientalism more concerned with Biblical exegesis than colonial power? Topics include: Romantic fascination with religions on the Indian subcontinent, stretching from Novalis to Schopenhauer to Hermann Hesse. German hippies in India. Franz Kafka and other Habsburg writers’ ironic appropriation of China as a political foil. Anti-Semitism as Orientalism. The adequacy of world-systems theory as a means to describe the cultural negotiations inherent in Asian trading relations. The revitalization of Muslim stereotypes in immigration and assimilation debates across Europe. The self-conscious maneuvering around Orientalism in contemporary transnational writing in German. The persistence of Romantic images of India well into the twentieth century. Early German cinema and photography about China. Students will be asked to give a class presentation and to write a 20-page research paper.

This course counts as a Visual Studies elective.

GER 540: Seminar in German Culture and Civilization

The German Empire in History, Theory and Film, 1871 – 1918 (Dr. Jens Guettel)

This seminar studies one of the culturally, socioeconomically, and politically most important periods in Modern European History, the era of the German Empire from 1871 until the end of World War I. The founding of the German Empire during the Franco-German War in 1871 created a new political entity and upset the European balance of power as it had been organized since 1815. On the one hand, between 1871 and 1918, the newly united Germany could boast major cultural, scientific, and economic achievements: from Richard Wagner’s operas to the development of the first modern medications (from Aspirin to a cure for diphtheria) to overtaking Great Britain in economic output by the early years of the 20th century. On the other hand, we find growing domestic social tensions, fantasies and realities of colonial expansion (and linked to the latter the first genocide of the 20th century in German-colonized Namibia), the exclusion of the growing Social Democrat Party from the political decision making process, and finally a game of extreme, nationalism-motivated political brinksmanship that helped to bring about the “original catastrophe” of the 20th century, the First Word War, which also resulted in the Empire’s demise in 1918.

This seminar examines significant literary, theoretical, and political texts of the time, as well as posterior historical and artistic analyses of this particular period. We will discuss literary works, among others, by Heinrich Mann and Theodor Fontane, as well as major historiographical works on the history of the German Empire by Geoff Eley and Reinhart Koselleck, among others. We will also confront theoretical and political works on the German Empire by, for example, Max Weber, Karl Kautsky, and Carl Schmitt. Last but not least, we will watch and discuss movie representations of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany.

GER 540: Seminar in German Culture and Civilization

The Holocaust in Visual Culture and Theory (Dr. Sabine Doran)

This seminar studies representations of the Holocaust in art, museums, literature, and film. We will examine theoretical questions involved in any attempt to capture what appears to be beyond our comprehension in terms of moral outrage and the sheer scale, inhumanity, and bureaucratic efficiency of the violence perpetrated by the Nazis. We will focus on the ways in which “trauma” has become a key analytical concept in these debates. We will discuss literary works, such as Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, films such as Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, The Pianist, The Tin Drum, The Photographer, A Film Unfinished, as well as photographs, poems, installations, and other artifacts. We will also confront questions of memorialization, national guilt, survivor’s guilt, stigmatization, and the ethics of historical representation, in theoretical readings by Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Cathy Caruth, Hayden White and others.

GER 561: German Literature of the Nineteenth Century—from Biedermeier to Realism

German Realism and Its Other (Dr. Samuel Frederick)

This seminar considers key texts from the German nineteenth century that make different claims to realist representation. Central to our discussion will be the ways in which these claims require, as Fredric Jameson puts it, a “negotiation with the shock and scandal of the Other.” The main task of the seminar will be to understand the German realist project in terms of that Other, which appears in a variety of forms (e.g., social, sexual, racial, theological, even aesthetic). In what ways does the supposedly proper or successful representation of the world in fact demand the exclusion or perhaps assimilation of the Other? What do these alternatives mean for the resulting work (both ideologically and formally) and for the ways in which realism has been theorized? How useful is “realism” (an epistemological category) as a conceptual tool for talking about aesthetics, anyway?

These and related questions will guide our engagement with the texts. The seminar, however, is also designed to provide a survey of nineteenth-century German literature after Romanticism.  As such its aim is to introduce students to a constellation of canonical works from roughly 1815 to the turn of the twentieth century that continue to be important touchstones for scholars, theorists, and teachers.  We will read primary texts (all in German) alongside theoretical works (both contemporary to these texts and more recent theory) and exemplary interpretations (from a wide range of methodologies). Discussion will be in English.

Authors may include: Gotthelf, Droste-Hülshoff, Mörike, Büchner, Heine, Stifter, Grillparzer, Keller, Storm, Sacher-Masoch, Fontane, Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal, among others. Theorists may include: Kristeva, Jameson, Lukács, Adorno, Barthes, Auerbach, Jakobson, Riffaterre, Taussig, Nietzsche, among others.

GER 571: German Literature from the Turn of the Century to 1945

German Modernisms 1900-1945 (Dr. Samuel Frederick)

This seminar surveys and introduces German literature and media from the first half of the twentieth century. Its focus will be on different—and often conflicting—conceptions of “the modern,” as articulated by various aesthetic movements and post-1960s theory. How did writers, filmmakers, and artists conceive of their own modernist projects and how has more recent theory revised our understanding of their interventions? How has the history of German modernism been differently written from that of Anglo-American (or Soviet or French) modernism? What vectors of influence are at play? We will look at different—and sometimes competing—modernist programs, including Aestheticism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, and New Objectivity, as well as fascist forms of modernism, all with an eye to the relation between politics and aesthetics. We will primarily focus on literary texts, but will also spend some sessions on collage, painting, film, and photography.

Readings/viewings may include works by: Gottfried Benn, Alfred Döblin, Irmgard Keun, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Robert Walser, Ernst Jünger, Hannah Höch, Lotte Reiniger, Walter Ruttmann, F.W. Murnau,  Emmy Hennings, Kurt Schwitters, Hugo Ball, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Franz Kafka, Carl Einstein, Maria Lazar, Marie-Luise Fleißer.

GER 572: Post-War and Contemporary German Literature

Nation, Migration and Contemporary German Literature (Dr. Bettina Brandt)

This course, open to both advanced majors and graduate students, examines how the imaginative contours of German worlds have been reshaped in contemporary literature in German since 1945. It does so through the lens of migration and minorities.  In contrast to the United States, Germany, did not consider itself a country of immigration, despite evidence to the contrary, until recently. The complicated German past marked by the holocaust and the German East-West division also produced a unique situation in which minorities in Germany find themselves, to which they respond, and which they alter with their own textual and visual narratives. Considering the German writings of both so-called Biodeutsche and by authors of Italian, Jewish, Turkish, Arab, African, Eastern European or Russian background we will look at how they critically reimagine Cold War as well as post-Wende German identities in specific aesthetic, historical and geopolitical settings. Along with our literary readings we will watch documentaries and films, visit virtual museums, look at paintings and collages, and think about issues of cultural politics including literary prizes, memory culture and issues of translation.

GER 582: Topics in Germanic Philology and German Linguistics

Language Attrition (Dr. Mike Putnam)

The primary aim of this course is to explore contexts in which grammatical abilities once acquired have been lost have become difficult to use/activate, commonly referred to as language attrition. Through course readings, in-class discussions, and occasional guest speakers, we will attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the linguistic effects of attrition as well as potential extra-linguistic factors (e.g., lack of activation, qualitative/quantitative input during acquisition, working memory, cognitive aging, etc.) that lead to production and comprehension deficits in L1 and L2 populations. We will also discuss how research on language attrition impact theoretical models as well as particular challenges in designing and carrying out experimental research on language attrition.

GER 582: Topics in Germanic Philology and German linguistics

Language Contact (Dr. Richard Page)

This course provides an overview of language contact phenomena in the domains of child bilingualism, adult second language acquisition and societal multilingualism with a particular emphasis on language contact in immigrant and indigenous communities that speak a minority language.  Diachronic as well as synchronic aspects of language contact will be discussed. We will not be covering pidgins and creoles in any depth, but we will look at contact varieties of German (e.g., Kiezdeutsch), Spanish, English and other languages. The class will use the textbook Language Contact by Yaron Matras and read selected articles. Students will write a research paper on an aspect of language contact chosen in consultation with the instructor.

GER 591: German Literary Theory and Criticism

German Narrative Theory (Dr. Samuel Frederick)

Narrative theory is what Jonathan Culler calls a “poetics”: a method of literary scholarship that seeks to find out how a text generates meaning (as opposed to “hermeneutics,” which seeks to find out what a text means). A poetics of narrative is in this sense closer to linguistics: it begins with the effects and apparent meanings of a text and tries to determine what features make these possible. This seminar will introduce the basics of narratology via a selection of classic interventions from the German tradition (with side glances to some of the important Russian, Czech, French, and Anglo-American contributions). This selection addresses broader questions of genre and form, but also includes detailed investigations of perspective, fictionality, narrative voice, and the representation of consciousness. The goal of the seminar is to understand classic and contemporary debates about narrative and to acquire a critical toolbox with which to describe with detail and accuracy the distinct features of any given narrative work. We will practice applying this toolbox to various texts, with an eye to how it can provide the groundwork for other modes of critical investigation. Our scope will be from the Enlightenment to the present with emphasis on the last several decades and will include authors such as Friedrich von Blanckenburg, Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Käte Hamburger, Franz Stanzel, Dorrit Cohn, Monika Fludernik, and Ansgar Nünning. The following works of narrative literature will be read alongside the theory: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche, Adalbert Stifter’s Der Hochwald, Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, Thomas Bernhard’s Ja, W.G. Sebald’s Schwindel.Gefühle, and Melinda Nadj Abonji’s Schildkrötensoldat, among other shorter works. Discussion in English. Readings in English and German.

GER 593: Seminar in German Philology and Germanic linguistics

Tense-Mood-Aspect: Description and Analysis (Dr. Mike Putnam)

The primary focus of this course centers on tense-mood-aspect (TMA) properties of natural languages. In this course we’ll establish definitions of each of this domains, while discussing important ways in which they intersect and differ from one another. In addition to the semantic-pragmatic contributions of TMA-distinctions, we will also investigate the profound impact these distinctions have on structural traits (i.e., morphological and syntactic) of languages. Beyond defining these typological distinctions, we will also explore and further develop experimental methods on how to best elicit this information from speakers in both field and laboratory settings.

GER 597: Special Topics

Jewish Vienna (Dr. Bettina Brandt)

This course focuses on Austrian-Jewish relations of the last 150 years and examines the interactions between the city of Vienna and its Jewish inhabitants. It looks at Jewish experiences in Vienna in four time periods: from Jewish Emancipation to WWI; from “Red Vienna,” to the “Anschluss;” from 1938 to 1945 (Nazi Vienna); and from 1945 to today. At the same time, students will receive an overview of the most important Austrian cultural, artistic and literary developments from the last decades of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy up to the end of the twentieth century.

Keywords:  #anti-Semitism; #Jewish experiences; # Jewish spaces; #nationalism, #Herzl, # Lueger, #Visual Studies #Viennese Architecture and Design around 1900# Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka # Schönberg # Mahler #Red Vienna #Sigmund and Anna Freud #Hugo Bettauer #Schnitzler#Zweig #Elias and Veza Canetti # Anschluss # Adolf Eichmann # Ruth Klüger# Murmelstein #Forced Exile #Family Separation #Kindertransporte, # Old Age Transporte #Theresienstadt, #Hilde Spiel #Third Man #Victim Theory #Kurt Waldheim #Memory Culture# Thomas Bernhard# Woman in Gold #Hare with the Amber Eyes# contemporary Austrian-Jewish writers

 GER/LING 597: Special Topics

Morphology: structure, acquisition, & attrition (Dr. Mike Putnam)

Although the term and concept word is omnipresent is foreign language instruction and linguistic research, its attributes and functions are poorly understood. In this course we attempt to define the concept of wordhood through the formal study of its content, i.e., morphology. Developing a derivational approach, we will gain a better understanding of the structural properties of words and their relationship with other aspects of grammar (i.e., phonology, semantics, & syntax). Our discussion of the structural properties of words will aid us in enhancing our understanding of the acquisition (in both L1 and L2 contexts) and attrition of morphology.

GER/VSTUD 597: Special Topics

Gothic Romanticism (Dr. Daniel Purdy)

This course will investigate how German and English Romanticisms construct space in order to 1) organize interior feelings, along the axes of knowledge, sexuality, and power; 2) establish a domestic terrain and boundaries for the nation state; 3) define differences between home and foreign spaces.  Gothic architecture, ruins, paintings and landscape gardens will precede texts that lead us through ancient Italian labyrinths, psychic caverns, neo-gothic monasteries, cartographic landscapes, broad boulevards, dark alleys, and bureaucratic compartments.  We will also ponder the difference between the beautiful and the sublime. Romanticism stressed the unique qualities of place.  The poetic descriptions of natural sites such as the Rhine, the Danube or the Alps will receive our particular attention.  Primary theoretical authors include: Kant, Schlegel, Benjamin, Goethe, Hegel. Discussions and most readings will be English.

GER/VSTUD 597: Special Topics

German Horror (Dr. Kobi Kabalek)

The seminar surveys various depictions and concepts of horror in the different German societies. We will read theoretical and empirical studies from various disciplines to ask what constitutes horror as an emotion and genre in each case and how it is expressed through a mixture of the fantastic and the real. The materials include horror films and thrillers, artworks, photography, and literature, but also visual and textual depictions of the monstrous and shocking in descriptions of criminality and the political language of Imperial Germany, during WWI, in the Weimar Republic, in Nazi propaganda before and during WWII and the Holocaust, in postwar memories of Nazism, as well as in various conceptualizations of the respective social and political menace in East, West, and unified Germany. The course thus suggests looking at diverse experiences and realities in Germany using a cultural prism that combines emotion and imagination.

GER/VSTUD 597: Special Topics

The Politics of Color in Visual Culture (Dr. Sabine Doran)

This seminar explores the politics and aesthetics of color in visual and literary media. Whether associated with particular moods or mental states (“red with anger,” “pale white”), with particular ideologies (Communist red, the environmental Greens) or with particular races (black for African Americans, white for Caucasians, red for Native Americans, yellow for Asians), color has always been seen as an index of meaning. Yet the broad cultural significance of specific colors is rarely been addressed. Reduced to its symbolic – that is, highly conventionalized – function, color is typically understood as a fixed system of reference that is easily decoded. However, this approach to color obscures its dynamic nature, its culturally conditioned ambiguities and dualities. “Every hue, real or imagined, bodes a world,” writes Jeffery Cohen in his introduction to Prismatic Ecology. Ecotheory beyond Green (2013) and it is in the in the vibrant worlds of colors that climate changes, both politically and ecologically, emerge as they energize movements (from “Black Panther” to the “Yellow People Revolution”) and reflections on the color of skin, contaminants, plants, atmospheres. Readings and viewings include Goethe’s Color Theory, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Kieslowski’s Color Trilogy, Kurosawa’s Ran and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing – to look at perspectives that recognize the complex nature of color and its inscriptions in political networks.

GER/LING 597: Special Topics

Filler-gap dependencies: Theoretical and experimental perspectives (Dr. Mike Putnam)

This course takes a deeper look at one of the most peculiar features of human language; namely, the fact that words that go together in meaning can occur arbitrarily far away from each other in an utterance (e.g., What1did Jack buy __1?). We explore the properties of utterances that consist of fillers (what) and gaps (__), with an eye towards developing a more nuanced understanding of the complex nature of filler-gap dependencies cross-linguistically from both a theoretical and experimental perspective. Here we will review theoretical proposals in connection with distributional and experimental results. A key component of this course focuses on the design of experiments targeting utterances containing filler-gap dependencies, highlighting domains of inquiry that to date remain under-researched.

GER 597: Special Topics

Bauhaus100: Modernism’s Crib (Dr. Daniel Purdy)

Bauhaus100 will examine the history and legacy of Modernism’s most important school of design, founded in 1919.  We will review the aesthetic and political agendas within avant-garde Modernism generally by concentrating Bauhaus’s central teachings about the relationships between architecture and design, the body in its social environment, and the radical potential of new media in redefining experience.  In addition to reviewing the architecture of Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Hannes Meyer, we will devote our attention to Bauhaus innovations in photography, dance, theater, painting, fashion, and publicity.  As we reconsider the established (masculine) dogma of High Modernism, we will turn attention to women’s innovations in Bauhaus design, particularly the metal-work and collages of Marianne Brandt, in order to formulate more complexly gendered critique of industrial design and media. We will also examine Bauhaus ideas as they circulated in the Americas in the second half of the century, in order to consider how the field of Visual Studies emerged during the Cold War through the reception of photography and theory generated by László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes.  Finally, we will look to the 1960s design of Dieter Rams in order to reveal the links between Apple and Bauhaus. Taught in English and in conjunction with Bauhaus Transfers,an international symposium on September 19 – 21, 2019, sponsored by the Department of Architecture and the Max Kade German-American Research Institute at Penn State.

GER 597: Special Topics

Media and Romanticism (Dr. Daniel Purdy)

This course will examine the juxtaposition between the deterministic claims of contemporary German media theory and the poetic inwardness of Romantic writing. The course readings will commence with the early poetry of Goethe and Wordsworth, in order to consider how these authors struggle with the media technology of their own era as they seek to establish an autonomous poetic voice. The class will examine canonical Romantic literature to consider whether subjectivity is largely determined by cultural techniques and media technology? The course will also consider how late Romantics used media technologies in their own construction of poetic experience. How did communications media around 1800 address the Romantic desire for immediate sensations? Central to our discussions will be the concept of the “Romantic image.” Why did Romantics place such great importance on visual images as their ideal form of aesthetic perception? What is the relationship between the image and tone in Romantic writing about Beethoven’s music? To enhance our reflections, we will read recent media theories by Friedrich Kittler, Jochen Hörisch, Bernhard Siegert, Wolfgang Ernst, and Willem Flusser in relation to some of the most important literary works of German Romanticism (broadly defined): J.W. Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Bettina von Arnim, among others.

GER 597: Special Topics

Recent Issues in Instructed Second Language Acquisition (Dr. Carrie Jackson)

In this course we will explore recent topics in instructed SLA research. Topics to cover include debates over the effectiveness of explicit versus implicit instruction (and related discussions of deductive instruction vs. inductive instruction vs. guided induction), the role of corrective feedback, and the impact of attention and awareness on learning processes and outcomes. Students will also have the opportunity to propose additional topics to discuss based on their own interests. Students will complete a variety of assignments over the course of the semester to help them become more familiar with seminal areas of research in this area. Students will also be expected to carry out a small-scale pilot study (or propose a larger scale study) that revolves around the larger themes in the course. Students at all stages of their PhD program or qualified undergrads are welcome to sign up for this course. Previous work in linguistics not required. No knowledge of German is required.