Spring 2022, Germanic Languages: Literature and Advanced Courses

SP22 Department of Germanic Languages

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

GERMAN LITERATURE 3000+ LEVEL CLASSES

CLGR GU 3212.001

POSTWAR MODERNISM M/W 12:10—1:25 PM This course will examine how postwar European authors grapple with the inadequacies of language in the wake of unspeakable violence. We will explore how postwar experimentation intensifies modernist innovations that were already underway, and the ways in which these texts perhaps reflect an unprecedented historical breach. The postwar period sees a number of philosophers who champion the ambiguity of literature as socially or morally salutary, and write in an increasingly expressive prose. Yet many literary works thematize their own limits and begin to adopt philosophical and political terminology. Why and how do the boundaries that typically distinguish literary genre, and literature and thought, break down at this particular point in the 20th century? How does art--and the reformulation of language and genre--play a role in healing, mourning, or changing society in the aftermath of mass death? An analogous question will be: how do these texts, written amid European crises of roughly a century ago, speak to us in our contemporary moment of crisis and upheaval?

Readings will include works by Koeppen, Brecht, Beckett, Heidegger, Adorno, Ausländer, Celan, Bachmann, and Domin.

(3.0 credits)

CALL# 15483

INSTRUCTOR: EVAN PARKS

CLGR GU 4210.001

AESTHETIC THEORY: THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL Critical theory was the central practice of the Frankfurt School. Founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and later based in New York, this interdisciplinary institute influenced fields like sociology, political science, film, cultural studies, critical theory, and comparative literature. The course begins by examining the genealogy of the Frankfurt School in Marxism and its critique of fascism and traces its afterlife in aesthetic theory, deconstruction, and gender studies, as well as the specter of “Cultural Marxism” recently floating around rightwing circles. We read texts by key figures of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas as well as works by adjacent figures like Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Siegfried Kracauer.

(3.0 credits)

W 2:10—4:00 PM CALL# 13962 INSTRUCTOR: ANNIE PFEIFER

CLGR GU 4360.001

FAUST (IN ENGLISH) T 4:10—6:00 PM CALL# 13963

INSTRUCTOR: DOROTHEA VON MUECKE A humanist scholar’s nefarious pact with the devil, i.e. the Faust legend, will be the focus of this class. By analyzing the original and highly divergent adaptations of the Faust legend by Christopher Marlowe, Goethe and Thomas Mann, we will deal with changing critiques of humanism, scientific progress, religion, the cult of genius, and the historical impact of the protestant reformation reaching far into the 20th century.

(3.0 credits)

CLGR GU 6720.001

European (and more locally, German) modernity has been thoroughly shaped by its concepts and imaginations of gender and sexuality, as deeply entangled with each other as well as racialized notions of culture and religion. Conceptual claims and fantasies about differences between men and women and a spectrum of sexualities, often connected to distinctions between West and East or Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions worked to configure—as well as contest—individual and collective identities throughout the moments of modernism, fascism, and the Cold War. The 1968 “sexual revolution,” second and third wave feminisms, queer and trans* activism, and the contemporary realities of immigration and globalization have challenged and regrouped these cultural fictions of identity, without ever entirely undoing them. And in the twenty-first century, some of these fictions have had forceful comebacks, not limited to but including in contexts of right-wing populism, “antigender” activism, and political conflict around “identity politics.”

The course starts from this contemporary renaissance of cultural fictions of identity and proceeds to deepen and anchor their analysis in the study of selected historical paradigms and texts, before returning to our present moment towards the end of the semester. We will draw on an interdisciplinary range of materials, including literature and film, philosophical, scholarly, and socio-political materials. Geographically, the emphasis is on German and Germanlanguage contexts within the larger frames of Europe, post/ colonialism and globalization. The course is taught in English, and all required materials will be available in English or with English subtitles. However, Germanic Languages and Literatures students (& other German speakers) will be encouraged to read aesthetic and philosophical texts in the original German and explore additional materials for research assignments in German. Other linguistic competencies can be similarly put to use in comparative assignments.

(4.0 credits)

CONFIGURING AND CONTESTING IDENTITIES: GENDER AND SOCIETY IN 20TH & 21ST C. CULTURE AND SOCIETY *NEW COURSE T 2:10—4:00 PM CALL# 15197 INSTRUCTOR: CLAUDIA BREGER

CLGR GU 6821.001

RUMOR & MEDIA:

TECHNOLOGIES, CIRCULATION, At various historical junctures, the emergence of new media has coincided with concerns about accelerated circulations of rumor and the credence gained by unreliable or patently false information. This class will explore rumor, hearsay, disinformation, propaganda, and their interrelations to specific media formats and technologies.

Often considered a purely oral medium, the spread of rumor is rendered possible not only by a mixture of fact and fabulation but also by an interaction between speech and various media formats that range from writing and print to social media. In Homer’s Odyssey, “hearsay” is the only source of information about Odysseus’s fate for his son, but it also stands in for the oral tradition from which the written epic emerges. Later on, rumor is frequently connected to new media technologies and formats. During the French Revolution, pamphlets, flyers, and posters play a crucial role for the wide dissemination of scandalous and incorrect news that plays on real anxieties and grievances. Around the same time, Herder dismissively compares the printing press to the Roman goddess of “fama.” Before ending with social media and the proliferation of disinformation and propaganda today, the seminar will also explore the newspaper, propaganda, and the radio as powerful conduits of rumor.

(4.0 credits)

CREDENCE *NEW COURSE

W 10:10—12:00 PM CALL# 15196

INSTRUCTOR: STEFAN ANDRIOPOULOS

GERM UN 3780.001

BERLIN/ ISTANBUL: MIGRATION, CULTURE, VALUES An intensive seminar analyzing questions of migration, identity, (self-) representation, and values with regard to the Turkish minority living in Germany today. Starting with a historical description of the „guest worker“ program that brought hundreds of thousands of Turkish nationals to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, the course will focus on the experiences and cultural production of the second and third generations of Turkish Germans, whose presence has profoundly transformed German society and culture. Primary materials include diaries, autobiographies, legal and historical documents, but the course will also analyze poetry, novels, theater plays and films. In German.

(3.0 credits)

W

4:10—6:00 PM CALL# 13990 INSTRUCTOR: CLAUDIA BREGER

GERM UN 3991.001

SENIOR SEMINAR:

THOMAS MANN’S BUDDENBROOKS The senior seminar will focus on one momentous book: Thomas Mann’s breakthrough novel Buddenbrooks (1901), which earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. But we will use this book as a prism to explore German society at the height of its power at the turn of the century: the rise of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century, capitalism, antiSemitism, gender relations, Wagner and Wagnerism.

A guiding question will be the relation between storytelling and family life, and to what extent the “decline of a family” implies the demise or even the death of the traditional European realist novel. In addition to Mann’s novel, students will read short texts by Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka and Rilke. Readings and discussion in German, although some English secondary material may be introduced from time to time.

(3.0 credits)

T

10:10—12:00 PM CALL# 13991 INSTRUCTOR: MARK ANDERSON

GERM GU 4170.001

KAFKA (IN ENGLISH) R 12:10—2:00 PM Taking its cue from recent debates about surveillance in the age of social media, the course will ask why Franz Kafka, perhaps more than any European writer of his generation, could so expertly depict modern forms of power and surveillance.

Anti-Semitism, homophobia, capitalist exploitation and bureaucracy defined his existence in Prague during the first decades of the twentieth century, allowing him to analyze uniquely modern forms of social power.

The focus of the course will be on close readings of Kafka’s major texts, which will serve as a prism for discussions of larger social and historical issues. No German required! All readings and discussions will be in English, although students with German will be encouraged to work with the original texts. Undergraduate as well as graduate students will be asked to write four short response papers, take a mid-term exam and write a final paper.

(3.0 credits)

CALL# 13992

INSTRUCTOR: MARK ANDERSON

GERM BC 3105.001

COMICAL EXPRESSION IN MULTICULTURAL GERMAN FILM & LITERATURE This course is designed for participants who are interested in learning more about the role of humor in 20th/21st-c. literature and film. The survey begins with an introduction to key elements of the comical in literature and film, including slapstick, clowning, mime, or stunts. Discussions revolve around the issue of how or whether humor is universally recognizable or whether it is regionally, historically, and culturally defined. To shed light on this difficult question we will consider both historical and geographical settings. In close studies of popular films and literary texts we will examine the characters’ proclivities and discuss their gender-based perspectives as well as the influence of racial, religious or age-related identities. Our weekly readings—which include excerpts from major novels, selected scenes from films as well as short stories--provide us with rich and instructive examples of how eating habits, choice of food, calendrical events (holiday vs. weekday) may be related to the formation and expression of cultural identity.

Romantic comedies reveal not only personal preferences and the joy of eating—they also signal collective taste patterns and indicate what kind of fantasies or constraints have governed the daily or festive dietary practices from the early 20th c. on. While the comical is first and foremost represented in time-honored genres such as comedies or jokes, we will concentrate on the modern tradition in this course. This approach allows us to address the social, political, and cultural issue of multiculturalism and to build bridges between individual text/ film and their historical contexts in the German-speaking countries. The emphasis of the course lies on a critical investigation of how cultural identity is related to self-expression and to physical interaction on the page, the stage or the screen.

The course is taught in English, all readings are in English, and there are no prerequisites.

(3.0 credits)

TR 2:40—3:55 PM CALL# 00138 INSTRUCTOR: ERK GRIMM (@Barnard)

GERM UN 3335.001

ADVANCED CONVERSATION AND COMPOSITION TR In this German class, will explore poetic conceptions of “woman” in Frauenlyrik – in texts written by/about women which thematize the existential effects of that gendered category – from 9th century A.D. to today, with a focus on modernity from 1800 to today.

Main focus will be on primary texts but also contextual historical material (and different media) to critically reflect on German cultural history and politics.

The class is in German.

- No prior knowledge of the texts required.

(2.0 credits)

10:10—11:25 AM CALL# 13989 INSTRUCTOR: COSIMA MATTNER

GERM UN 3002.001

ADVANCED GERMAN II:

Vienna Prerequisite: GERM UN2102 or equivalent German language proficiency Corequisite: Course either taken before or after GERM UN3001 This is a content-based language course and it focuses on: Vienna Past and Present / Wien gestern und heute A course for students who want to improve their German language skills—speaking, reading, listening, writing—and immerse themselves in the culture, history and politics of Vienna from the fin de siècle to the present. Visit Viennese coffee houses and meet famous people, such as Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Alma MahlerWerfel, as well as Ingeborg Bachmann and Hundertwasser. Texts, films, video sequences, music and art will be used to enhance students’ language proficiency as well as deepen their knowledge of Viennese culture. In order to further develop writing and speaking skills in German there will be ample opportunity to practice grammar and stylistics.

In German.

(3.0 credits)

TR 4:10—5:25 PM CALL# 00136 INSTRUCTOR: IRENE MOTYL (@ Barnard)