Teaching Apprenticeship in German 502 (1.5 credits)
16:470:502:01, 172 College Ave, 2nd Fl. Library
Th, 4:30-6:30
Dr. Silke Wehner-Franco
The Teaching Apprenticeship will introduce graduate students who are teaching classes in the department to the professional expectations they will encounter as they seek careers in the foreign language teaching profession. Two major topics will be addressed: practical advice f or your own classes, and an introduction to the most current methodologies of foreign language teaching in New Jersey and in the United States. Both issues will help to prepare you for your future as a foreign language educator. The practical aspects of this class will include the writing of lesson plans and thematic units for a learner-centered classroom, based on the Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century and the ACTFL proficiency guidelines, as well as the use of authentic teaching materials for meaningful activities and assessments. Assignments for this class will also include a weekly journal and an end-of-semester report, two peer observations per semester, and weekly observations regarding the classes you teach. This class is taught in German.
The Frankfurt School and Its Writers 643 (in English) (3 credits)
16:470:643:01
Cross-listed with Comparative Literature (16:195:617:02)
T 4:30 - 7:10 pm, 172 College Ave, Seminar Room
Professor Nicholas Rennie
This seminar focuses on a major interdisciplinary theoretical tradition in German writing, and its influence on selected thinkers of the last decades. Work of the Frankfurt School is among the most important 20th-century German-language contributions to such fields as sociology, political science, gender studies, film, cultural studies and comparative literature. We will read texts by such key figures of the Frankfurt School as Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer for their relevance to a number of disciplines, but we will give particular consideration to literary and aesthetic questions. To this end, we will also read texts by select authors to whom these figures responded (e.g. Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Beckett). In the second half of the course we will trace the influence of the first generation of the Frankfurt School in the work of such theorists as Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, and Axel Honneth.
Kafka 550 (in English) (3 credits)
16:470:550:01
Cross-listed with Comparative Literature (16:195:605:01)
Cross-listed with Jewish Studies (16:563:550:01)
W 4:30 - 7:10pm, 172 College Ave, Seminar Room
Professor Michael Levine
An examination of texts by Kafka including selections from his parables, short stories, novels, diaries, and correspondence. Particular attention will be paid to questions of intertextuality, the relationship between writing and the body and the gestural language of Kafka's texts. Language of instruction English; texts will be available in both German and English translation.
Topics: German Jewish Women Writers 672 (in German) (3 credits)
16:470:672:01
M 4:30 - 7:10pm, 172 College Ave, Seminar Room
Professor Barbara Hahn
How to conceive of a history determined by ruptures, breaks, and lost traditions? Texts written by German Jewish women writers challenge our notion of history, of literature, of theory. They confront us with the question of how to read these letters and essays, poems and books, written on the margins of a culture dominated by Christianity. We will start with Rahel Levin Varnhagen and end with texts in search of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, written by Hannah Arendt, Charlotte Beradt, and Ruth Klüger.
