Go to bottom of document
Go to: German
104-105. Elementary German. PQ: Placement test or consent of German
language coordinator. No auditors permitted. Together with German 200, this
sequence fulfills the Common Core foreign language requirement. This
sequence is an accelerated version of the German 101-102-103 sequence, building
on students' previous knowledge of German. The objectives are identical to
those of German 101-102-103. Staff. Autumn, Winter.
200. Intermediate German (Variant A). PQ: German 105. No auditors
permitted. Together with German 104 and 105, this course fulfills the Common
Core foreign language requirement. The course objectives are identical to
those of German 201. Discussion conducted largely in German. Staff. Spring.
201. Intermediate German (Variant B). PQ: German 103, 105, or
equivalent. No auditors permitted. This course fulfills the Common Core foreign
language requirement. Intensive review and practice in reading,
writing, understanding, and speaking German. Short readings acquaint students
with aspects of culture and the current situation in German-speaking countries.
Discussion conducted largely in German. Some readings are chosen according to
students' interests, with the sections geared to three tracks: humanities,
social sciences, and natural sciences. Students should register for the track
that corresponds to their interests. Staff. Autumn.
202-203. Advanced Intermediate German: Literary Prose. PQ: German 201 or
equivalent. No auditors permitted. This course aims at refinement of
reading, writing, understanding, and speaking skills and serves as an
introduction to literary analysis of readings from modern writers. Staff.
Winter, Spring.
204-205. Advanced Intermediate German: Nonfiction Readings. PQ: German
201 or equivalent. No auditors permitted. This course aims at refinement of
reading, writing, understanding, and speaking skills. The readings are
primarily of nonliterary contemporary prose, including thorough analysis and
discussion of articles from major German newspapers and magazines. Staff.
Winter, Spring.
210. German Conversation. PQ: German 203 or equivalent, or consent of
instructor. Through active and regular participation in class discussion,
dialogues, and presentations, students have an opportunity to enhance their
listening and speaking skills. Lab materials enable students to encounter
speakers from different parts of German-language countries discussing a variety
of topics. Staff. Not offered 1995-96; will be offered 1996-97.
Go to top of document
211. Sprachübungen für Fortgeschrittene. PQ: German
203, 205, or equivalent, or consent of instructor. The purpose of this
course is to further refine students' ability in speaking, writing, and
comprehending spoken German at a level higher than that of German 210.
Considerable attention is devoted to finer points of usage, but specific
problems are treated at a more basic level as they arise. Staff.
Winter.
212. German Composition. PQ: German 203, 205, 210, 211, or consent of
instructor. This course teaches the skills necessary to write correct and
clear German. Shorter assignments provide practice in rephrasing and rewriting,
and in using synonymous expressions and stylistic variations, both to enhance
students' vocabulary and to develop a sense of connotation, register, levels of
style, and usage. Grammar problems are addressed according to the needs of
individual students. Students write precise, expository essays, and descriptive
or autobiographical prose on a variety of topics. One longer piece of writing
is required each week. Classroom discussion includes the opportunity to speak
German. Staff. Spring.
220. Seminar: Kafkas kurze Prosatexte. PQ: Knowledge of German
and consent of instructor. Exploring Kafka's short prose, we read from his
short fiction, letters, diaries, and notebooks in an attempt to enter the
strange world of his texts. Emphasis is on meticulous reading and thoughtful
analysis. C. Federle. Autumn.
221. Romantic Narratives. PQ: Knowledge of German. This course
explores romantic notions of art and subjectivity through a detailed reading of
shorter narratives written between 1795 and 1830. We pay particular attention
to the way these texts depict experiences of transgression, such as madness,
crime, dreams, and sexuality. Primarily conceived as a survey on romanticism,
the course also introduces students to relevant psychoanalytical,
structuralist, and narratological criticisms. Texts by Tieck, Arnim, Hoffmann,
Freud, and Todorov. In German and English. A. Gailus. Spring.
270. Reading Eating: The Narratives of Food (=GS Hum 214, Hum 173). PQ:
Knowledge of German, French, or Italian helpful but not required. In this
course we discuss modern and contemporary texts, from film to literature, from
psychoanalysis to anthropology, dealing with the representation of eating as a
metaphor of national, cultural, and sexual identity. Feminist theory and
psychoanalytical and anthropological essays are theoretical reference points.
We examine how, in certain depictions or fantasies, the figures of "eating"
become the means to convey personal and cultural anxieties of invasion and/or
destruction. While studying the texts, we pay specific attention to whether the
discourse of eating serves to set up and define or bring down and collapse the
boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, subject and object.
C. Novero. Winter.
276. Dada Art and Literature (=ArtH 176). PQ: Knowledge of French and/or
German helpful, but not required. The group of artists and writers
who identified themselves as "Dada" first met in Zurich in the Cabaret Voltaire
in 1916. Striving to negate traditions of European culture and art that were,
in their view, complicit in the massacres of World War I, they invoked a new
creativity of opposition rooted in the unconscious, the irrational, and the
ridiculous. Using original texts and recent critical studies, this course
explores the images, provocations, and writings of Dada, and their contexts and
significance as manifested by the Dada groups in Zurich, Paris, Berlin,
Cologne, and New York. R. Heller. Spring.
Go to top of document 278. German Jewish Culture since 1780: The Discontents of Assimilation (=GS Hum
272, Hum 168). PQ: Reading knowledge of German helpful but not required.
This is a broad survey of German Jewish culture from the Enlightenment on,
with a close analysis of the entwinement of German and Jewish cultures at
particular historical moments. Themes include emancipation and assimilation,
Jewish women and Salon-culture, the rise of racial anti-Semitism, Jewish
"self-hatred" and the search for new Jewish identities, and the Holocaust and
its aftermath. Literary texts are by Heinrich Heine, Rahel Varnhagen,
Else Lasker-Schüler, Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Peter Weiss, and others.
Background readings are by David Sorkin, Hannah Arendt, Sander Gilman, and Raul
Hilberg. Class discussion in English; readings available in English and German.
K. Garloff. Autumn.
280. Freud, Herzl, and Turn-of-the-Century Culture (=GS Hum 277, HiPSS 298,
JewStd 280). PQ: Open to students of third- and fourth-year standing;
knowledge of German. A reading of a series of major texts from the turn of
the century in light of the question of racial anti-Semitism, gender, and their
relationship to fin de siècle culture and textual production.
Among the texts read are Freud and Schnitzler on hysteria, Herzl on the new
Zion, Strauss's reading of Oscar Wilde's Salome, and Lou Andreas-Salome
on Nietzsche. Taught in English with readings in English (two hours), and in
German with readings in German (one hour). S. Gilman. Winter.
298. Thesis Tutorial. PQ: Fourth-year standing. Staff. Spring.
299. Individual Reading Course in German. PQ: Consent of department.
Students must consult with an instructor by the eighth week of the preceding
quarter to determine the subject of the course and the work to be done.
Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Course Form.
Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.
310. Old English (=Eng 149/349). This course aims to provide the student
with the linguistic skills and historical and cultural perspectives necessary
for advanced work in Old English. C. von Nolcken. Autumn.
350. Horror Film and the Historicity of Monstrosity (=Eng 284/482, GS Hum
208/308). PQ: Introductory course in film theory or consent of
instructor. This course examines the horror film in an attempt to
understand how film horrifies us, how horror is produced in film, and what
might be historically specific to the various forms that horror has assumed
over the course of its filmic history. We consider the difficulty of defining
the genre in light of its polymorphous and ever-multiplying perversities.
Readings in contemporary theories of horror, cinema, the fantastic,
monstrosity, and ideology inform our discussions of the films. Film screenings
are three hours a week in addition to class time. C. Federle. Autumn.
351. Cinema and Culture of the 1930s: Germany and Europe (=ComLit 360, GS Hum
378, Hum 278). PQ: Knowledge of German helpful but not required.
This course considers the dislocations of German cinema in the 1930s (the
transition from Weimar to Nazi cinema) within a broad European context and in
relation to the coming of sound. Particular emphasis is placed on the
relationship between "commitment" and modernism; the rise of fascist and
Popular Front cinemas and their new representations of the nation state; the
impact of sound on film aesthetics and film genre, ethnographic and documentary
filmmaking; the rise of the musical; the realignment of sight and sound, the
voice and the body; surrealism and the politics of eroticism. Films studied are
by Fritz Lang, Hans Richter, Joseph von Sternberg, Douglas Sirk, Leontine
Sagan, Leni Riefenstahl, René Clair, Jean Renoir, Carl Dreyer, Luis
Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov. K.
Trumpener. Winter.
Go to top of document 358. Literature and Politics in the German Democratic Republic, 1975-1989 (=GS
Hum 291/391). PQ: Knowledge of German helpful but not required.
Readings emphasize the critical literature, as it was called, of the former
GDR. We discuss the ways books by such writers as Christa Wolf, Heiner Mueller,
Stefan Heym, Sarah Kirsch, and Christoph Hein criticized the GDR regime, but
also explore the limits of such criticism. Were these writers critical of the
Honecker regime but not of socialism itself? How did they imagine their own
work to function in GDR society? Are the current charges of complicity leveled
against some of these writers justified? Books are available in translation.
R. von Hallberg. Spring.
359. Art in Germany: Neo-Classicism to Romanticism (=ArtH 259/359). PQ:
Any 100-level ArtH or ArtDes course. "In our time, something is about to
die," said the German romantic artist Philipp Otto Runge in 1802. The era of
radical transition--artistic, political, social, cultural, scientific, and
religious--that Runge characterized, and for which he formed resolution only by
withdrawing into his own subjectivity, is the concern of this course as it
surveys the issues and problematics of art in Germany from the time of
Frederick the Great to the post-Napoleonic restoration. This artistic and
intellectual revolution, viewed in its social setting and in terms of its
contributions to an ideology of the modern, marks the focus of this course.
R. Heller. Autumn.
375. Poetry of the Jews and/or Germans (=GS Hum 379, Hum 254, JewStd 275).
The course consists of a series of close readings in several subgenres of
verse drawn from the premodern as well as the modern period. Its aim is to
explore how the problematic identities of disempowered but resistant peoples
(Jews and/or Germans, as well as others similarly situated) creatively reinvent
and reinscribe themselves within that most personal and intimate of canonical
genres, lyric poetry. Following a sequence of core readings and discussions,
participants present, interpret, and discuss poems of their choice. Texts in
English and the original. A core reading list will be available by the end of
spring quarter 1995. S. Jaffe. Autumn.
381. Theory and Practice of Literary Translation (=GS Hum 381). PQ:
Knowledge of German or other European language and consent of instructor.
Although work in class is predominantly text-based, this is not a "how-to"
course. The problematics of the very concept of translation are examined in
historical and epistemological terms. Questions of linguistic register, of
historical distance (for example, the most advantageous way of rendering a
seventeenth- or eighteenth-century text in another language), and
genre-specific issues are treated with reference to sample texts. P. Jansen.
Spring.
Go to top of document 394. Freud and Nietzsche (=Fndmtl 296, GS Hum 383, Hum 279, JewStd 272).
This course pursues a comparative analysis of the genesis, structure, and
implications of Freudian and Nietzschean thought. Special attention is paid to
issues of individual and cultural identity (sexual, disciplinary, professional,
religious, and political) as they emerge from the close reading of two texts:
Freud's Moses and Monotheism and Nietzsche's On the Advantages and
Disadvantages of History for Life. Texts in German and English. S.
Jaffe. Winter.
399. Arts of Love and Books of Marriage from Sappho and Solomon to Freud and
Lou (=GS Hum 384, Hum 283, JewStd 373). This course seeks to resuscitate a
classic gender issue (love and marriage) within the textual, cultural, and
historical contexts of two `theoretical' genres that have both reflected and
helped to shape it: the ars amandi and the Ehebuch. Texts are in
English and the original language. The core reading list will be available by
the end of spring quarter 1995. S. Jaffe. Spring.
201-202-203. Second-Year Norwegian. PQ: Norweg 103 or consent of
instructor. This three-quarter sequence further develops the students'
ability to read, write, and converse authentically in Norwegian bokmaal.
Classes are conducted in Norwegian and stress frequent student participation in
conversation and role-playing. Reading and discussion topics are taken from a
wide variety of cultural sources, including Norwegian newspaper articles, radio
programs, films, and introductory literary texts (short stories, poems, plays,
and one novel). The course sequence also includes some use of nynorsk
language and texts. Not offered 1995-96; may be offered 1996-97.
201-202-203. Second-Year Swedish. PQ: Swed 103 or consent of instructor.
This course consists of a review and refinement of skills in Swedish
grammar, composition, and conversation. Selected readings of shorter works by
modern authors, newspapers, and other sources provide background for
discussions on a variety of topics, including history, traditions, current
events, and film. Not offered 1995-96; may be offered 1996-97.
Go to middle of document
Go to: Norwegian
Go to: Swedish
Germanic Studies Courses
German
101-102-103. Elementary German for Beginners. PQ: Knowledge of German
not required. No auditors permitted. The aim of the course is to teach
students how to communicate in German and to do so as accurately as possible.
It enables them to express ideas in simple sentences, to comprehend ideas
expressed through the vocabulary and the structures acquired, to understand
simple German prose on nontechnical subjects, and to write short passages about
a familiar topic without the help of a dictionary. At the same time, the course
seeks to convey knowledge about the German-speaking countries and aspects of
their everyday culture, and to familiarize the students with major issues of
contemporary life in those societies. Staff. Autumn, Winter, Spring.
Go to middle of document
Go to bottom of document
Go to bottom of document
Go to bottom of document
Go to bottom of document
Norwegian
101-102-103. First-Year Norwegian. This course sequence fulfills the
Common Core foreign language requirement. The aim of this course sequence
is to provide students with a practical foundation in reading, writing, and
speaking bokmaal, the dominant written and spoken language in Norway,
and to introduce them to present-day Norwegian and Scandinavian culture and
society. There are frequent exams, both oral and written, and students are
required to spend at least one hour per week in the language lab. D. Olson.
Autumn, Winter, Spring.
Swedish
101-102-103. First-Year Swedish. This course sequence fulfills the
Common Core foreign language requirement. Reading and writing skills and a
thorough foundation in Swedish grammar are basic aims in this introductory
course sequence. Immediate emphasis is also given to oral communication. Short
dialogues related to specific situations and based on the exchange of useful
phrases facilitate the initial grasp of spoken Swedish. In addition, students
are introduced to present-day Swedish culture and society. D. Olson. Autumn,
Winter, Spring.