Teaching Apprenticeship in German (1.5 credits)
16:470:502:01
Alexander Pichugin
M2, 10:20am - 11:40am, Craig Seminar Room, Academic Building 4050
This course prepares graduate students for a successful teaching and learning experience in the foreign language classroom. The course addresses two major goals: introduce aspiring and beginning instructors to the most current methodologies of foreign language teaching and provide them with guidance and practical advice in the classroom. Special focus this semester will be on classroom interaction with its various aspects. The course includes designing lesson plans for a learner-centered classroom, stating objectives based on standards of foreign language learning and nationally accepted proficiency guidelines, finding authentic materials for teaching, developing and reviewing graded assignments, analyzing and comparing different assessment tools, observing and reflecting upon one's own teaching and the teaching by others, and discussing personal experiences and the challenges of the language classroom. This course is taught in German with some assignments and readings in English.
Psy Fi: Literature and Psychoanalysis
16:470:670:01
crosslisted with Comparative Literature, 01:195:247/ German Undergraduate 01:470:247
Michael Levine
W56, 3:50pm - 6:50pm, Craig Seminar Room, AB 4050
Taught in English. No prerequisites. Fulfills Core requirements AHo and AHp
Psychoanalysis is traditionally viewed as a theory of interpretation, as a way, for example, of deciphering the meaning of dreams. Yet, it is also and perhaps above all a unique form of human interaction, an experience, a happening. One name Freud gave to this potentially transformative experience was transference. The course will explore these different dimensions of analytic thought and practice through close readings of Freud’s own case studies and theoretical writings as well as through the study of literature, film, and television series such as In Treatment and The Sopranos.
"Post": German-Speaking Theater Then and Now
16:470:671:01
Regina Karl
TH 56, 3:50pm - 6:50pm, Craig Seminar Room, AB 4050
Discussions in German and English. Solid reading knowledge of German is required.
Praised as an unswerving source of aesthetic innovation that combines an avant-garde aesthetics with a high level of abstraction, German-speaking theater and performance art appears to contradict a respective scholarly discourse that is largely determined by the prefix “post-“: Post-structural theories of performativity and subjectivity, Hans-Thies Lehmann´s paradigm of “post-dramatic theater,” or the recent call for a post-migrant theater that relates what happens on and behind the stage are but a few examples. We will ask why a form of art that depends on the presence of bodies interacting with one another still causes a certain form of belatedness. Does the “post-“contradict or condition the theatrical paradigm of the here and now? What are the conventions that the body on stage calls for and what disruptions can theater potentially trigger?
Readings will include classic and contemporary plays and recordings of stage adaptations (William Shakespeare, Friedrich Schiller, Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, Wolfram Lotz, Olivia Wenzel, Neacti Öziri, etc.). We will cover major theories of performance art (from Lessing to recent efforts to de-colonialize performance studies). The course also includes two workshops with stage director Florian Fischer and dramaturge Rebecca Ajnwojner.
Racial Regimes in German Aesthetic Theory
16:470:672:01
Stephanie Galasso
M56, 3:50pm - 6:50pm, Craig Seminar Room, AB 4050
Taught in English.
Simon Gikandi, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and David Lloyd have argued separately that race is not only a (pseudo-) scientific invention, but also a product of core elements of aesthetic philosophy. Concepts such as beauty, autonomy, and communicability--central to the advent of aesthetics— help to form the condition of possibility for thinking the human. Taking these theorists’ broader research into race and aesthetics as a foundation, this course will pivot to question the specific role(s) that genre has played in the aesthetic construction of race.
To this end, we will read important texts in German genre theory: moving from the formalist understandings of genre put forth by Gottsched to two ground-breaking essays by Herder and Schiller. Along the way, we will ask to what extent post-formalist understandings of genre reproduce Eurocentric and racializing philosophies of history and subjectivity. We will also discuss Romantic responses to such genre theory in the works of e.g. the Schlegels, Karoline von Günderrode, Hölderlin, and Goethe.
This course aims to develop a theoretical toolkit for addressing the mutual imbrication of race and aesthetics since the Enlightenment. In doing so, it also seeks to encourage reflection on how this dynamic extends into the present moment, bringing us to more recent genre-bending works by Philipp Khabo Koepsell and Sharon Dodua Otoo. Additional theoretical readings may include works by Jacques Derrida, Sylvia Wynter, Michelle Wright, Kira Thurman, and Priscilla Layne.
