Teaching Apprenticeship in German (1.5 credits)
16:470:502:01
Alexander Pichugin
M1 8:30am - 9:30am, Craig Seminar Room, AB 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.
Exploring 1968
16:470:670
cross listed with Comparative Literature (16:195:609:02)
Bernhard Dotzler
M 4:30pm - 7:10pm , Craig Seminar Room, AB 4050
In line with Jean Starobinski's seminal 1789: Les Emblèmes de la Raison as well as Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht's In 1926, Michael North's Reading 1922, and the New History of German Literature (ed. David Wellbery et al.), this seminar aims to explore art and literature by focusing on certain ›events‹ and/or ›phenomena‹ of what has been called the protests of 1968, or just: 1968. With hindsight, this date has become notorious as a turning point of the Post-war/Cold War period in Europe as well as in the US. Politics as well as people's attitude to life dramatically changed. Earlier, »Kommune 1« was created in January of 1967 (dissolved in November 1969) and the state visit of the Shah of Iran had happened in Germany. In the US, nothing less than »Woodstock« (that is to say the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in August 1969: »An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music«) resulted from the protests of 1968, or the 1968 movement. Investigating significant texts, films, and other cultural events related to 1968 the participants of the course will learn about how things changed then--and, maybe (as hope springs eternal), how they still are in flux. Taught in English.
Readings, hearings, and screenings include David Wellbery et al. (eds.), A New History of German Literature, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press 2004 (»Introduction«, and »1968, August 21: Utopian Hopes and Traces of the Past«); Michel Foucault, »Nietzsche, Freud, Marx« (1967) and »Nietzsche, Genealogy, History« (1971); Siegfried Lenz, The German Lesson (1968, English edition: 1986, New Directions Publishing); Peter O. Chotjewitz, »Was heißt ›experimentelle‹ Literatur«, in: Akzente #15, 1968; Sprache im technischen Zeitalter #28, 1968: Flugblätter, Gutachten, Epiloge oder Wie weit sind Stilprobleme – Stilprobleme?; Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, New York: Vintage Books 2004 – The Doors, Waiting for the Sun (Elektra Records, 1968); Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is The Massage (record, Columbia, CS 9501, 1968) – Je t’aime, je t’aime (dir. Alain Resnais, 1968); Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos (dir. Alexander Kluge, 1968); The Rain People (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1968); Easy Rider (dir. Dennis Hopper, 1969); Brandstifter (dir. Klaus Lemke, 1969); Medium Cool (dir. Haskell Wexler, 1969); Woodstock – 3 Days of Peace & Music (dir. Michael Wadleigh, 1970); Zabriskie Point (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970); Deutschstunde (dir. Peter Beauvais, 1971); Die innere Sicherheit (dir. Christian Petzold, 2000).
What Woman Wants: Gender in Literature, Film, and Theory
16:470:671
Nicola Behrmann
T 4:30pm - 7:10pm, Craig Seminar Room, AB 4050
Taking its starting point from Freud’s famous question: “What does a Woman Want?,” and following his assertion that woman herself would not able to give an answer, this seminar explores the contested sites of the female gaze, the language of woman, the relation between writing and motherhood, and between woman and animal, the allegory of/as woman, the female sacrifice. We will investigate Antigone’s claim, Medusa’s laughter, Penthesilea’s literality, Joan of Arc’s sacrifice, Käthchen’s innocence, and Gradiva’s imprint, as they appear in the works of writers, artists and filmmakers throughout two centuries. Special attention will be paid to double-bind figures such as mother and prostitute, virgin and seductress, amazon and martyr, the anorectic and the hysteric, and to woman’s relation to animal.
Theoretical back-up will be coming from Judith Butler, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, Sigmund Freud, Barbara Johnson, Sarah Kofman, Bettine Menke, Laura Mulvey, Friedrich Nietzsche, Laurence Rickels, and Susan Rubin Suleiman.
Readings: Heinrich von Kleist’s Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (1807) and Penthesilea (1808); Robert Walser’s “Snow White” (1900); Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva (1902); Franz Kafka’s “Josephine, the Mice Singer” (1924); Else Lasker-Schüler’s I and I (1945); Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall (1963); Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1971); Grete Weil’s “My Sister, Antigone” (1980); and Elfriede Jelinek’s Princess Plays (2002).
Films: Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928); Josef von Sternberg’s Marokko (1931); Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972); and Ulrike Ottinger’s Madame X (1981).
Taught in English.
Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same
16:470:672
cross-listed with Comparative Literature (16:195:609:01)
Michael Levine
W 4:30pm - 7:10pm, Craig Seminar Room, AB 4050
Much work has been done in recent years to document Heidegger’s involvement in National Socialism. As for his possible resistance to it, Heidegger himself maintained that it is audible in the series of lectures on Nietzsche he gave between 1936 and 1940. “Everyone who had ears to hear,” he told the Spiegel in 1966, “was able to hear in these lectures a confrontation with National Socialism.” It is against this background that we will study his two-volume Nietzsche originally published in German in 1961, reading it in the excellent English translation by David Farrell Krell that appeared in 1991. In order to trace what transpires between Heidegger and Nietzsche, we will examine a number of key texts by the latter – most notably, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Will to Power – in addition to lectures and essays by the former. Topics include: the will to power as art; the eternal recurrence of the same; the figure of Zarathustra; the will to power as knowledge; Nietzsche’s metaphysics; and European nihilism. While no German is required, a reading knowledge of it is desirable.
Taught in English.
