Teaching Apprenticeship in German (1.5 credits)
16:470:502:01
Professor Alexander Pichugin
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.
Nietzsche & Memory
16:470:671:01
Professor Nicholas Rennie
In this seminar we will be examining the multiple and consequential ways in which the problems of memory and historical consciousness play a role in Nietzsche’s thought. Topics to include: Nietzsche’s historical investigations (e.g. The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, The Genealogy of Morality) and anthropological theories (in the Genealogy as well as in the early writings) as exercises in constructing a specific past in order to reflect polemically on contemporary culture; his theory of the social formation of all truth, and of historical truths in particular (e.g. in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” and On the Use and Abuse of History for Life); the suggestion in the latter text that engaging with our own history is analogous to engaging with a foreign culture; the notion of the dangers posed by a surfeit of memory, and of forgetting as a prerequisite for action; Nietzsche’s diagnosis of contemporary culture as shaped – and crippled – by the weight of guilt; and his complex attempts to imagine forms of engagement with and liberation from the weight of memory in the sciences (The Gay Science); in the European cultures of his time more generally (Beyond Good and Evil, the Genealogy); and in the self-overcoming of the exceptional individual and the psychological challenges posed by the thoughts of the “death of God” and of the “eternal recurrence of all things” (The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra). We will accompany our study of these texts and ideas with both briefer and more substantial readings from J.J. Winckelmann, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, E.M. Butler, Max Horkheimer, Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and (pending availability of the necessary translation) Aleida Assmann. Discussion and readings in English; graduate students in the German program will be expected to read and, in their work, cite German-language editions of Nietzsche’s texts.
Destitution, Desistance
16:470:672:01
Professor Nicola Behrmann
Desistance, the place where resignation and force intertwine, belongs to those preconditions under which downward spirals can be turned into political action. In this seminar, we will carve out desistance as a space before the law that eschews control, at the edge of stifling and screaming, repetition and resurrection, abandonment and sovereignty. Destitution brings forth desistance in a variety of forms: as serenity, stubbornness, ignorance, waywardness, self-forgetfulness, and neglect. The destitution of nature (Meister Eckhart/Schürmann), the law (Benjamin, Derrida), the community (Bataille, Nancy), or language itself (Kofman) lead to motions, passions, and deviancies that engender desistance as a political force. Further relevant literature, film & theory will be provided by Martin Heidegger, Werner Herzog, Elfriede Jelinek, Franz Kafka, Gertrud Kolmar, Jacques Lacan, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Barbara Loden, Andrey Platonov, Rainer Maria Rilke, MacKenzie Wark, and Peter Weiss.