Teaching Apprenticeship in German (1.5 credits)
16:470:502:01

Alexander Pichugin
M4 1:10pm-2:30pm, Craig Seminar Room, AB West Wing 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.

 

Kafka and the Question of Interpretation
16:470:670:01
cross-listed with Comparative Literature 16:195:608:02
Michael Levine
W 4:30pm - 7:10pm , Craig Seminar Room, AB West Wing 4050

The question of interpretation is posed by Kafka not only in his famously self-referential and -critical works but also in his literary reinterpretations of others such as Homer, Ovid and Cervantes. Additionally, his works have themselves been the focus of much critical attention, drawing responses from some of the foremost philosophers, literary scholars and creative writers of the 20th- and 21st-centuries. The course will focus on a wide range of his writings including novels, short stories, parables, diary entries, and letters, examining these texts through the interpretive lens of Agamben, Benjamin, Borges, Butler, Canetti, Deleuze, Derrida, Hamacher, Menninghaus, Moses, Ronell, Scholem, Vogel, and others. Readings will be available in German and English. Discussion in English.   

 

 

Wild Women
16:470:671
cross-listed with Comparative Literature 16:195:516:01
Martha Helfer
M 4:30pm - 7:10pm, Craig Seminar Room, AB East Wing 3450

Wild women, crazy women, sexy women, women on the edge!

This course examines woman as the site of cultural and aesthetic critique in mainstream German literature and film from the Enlightenment to the 20th century, in conjunction with feminist theory. Examples will be taken from fairy tales, history, literature, mythology, and film. The course will begin with an overview of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment gender theory in a broad European context (Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, de Gouges, von Hippel). We then will analyze constructions of "woman" in German literature, film, and theory, focusing on the emergence of (and resistance to) modern gender theory. Readings and films include selections from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Sophia von La Roche, Friedrich Schlegel, Dorothea Schlegel, Karoline von Günderrode, Heinrich von Kleist, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Friedrich Hebbel, Franz Grillparzer, Christa Wolf, Michael Verhoeven, and Tom Twyker.

Course requirements: This course stresses the development of critical reading and writing skills. Course requirements include: careful preparation of assigned readings and active class participation (10%); one oral presentation (10%); one response to an oral presentation (10%); and three 5-8 page essays or one seminar paper (70%).

The course will be taught in English; all readings will be available in English translation. No knowledge of German required!

Course meets with 01:470:388:01.