Teaching Apprenticeship in German (1.5 credits)
16:470:502:01
Alexander Pichugin
T 5, 5:00pm - 6:20pm, online

In Fall 2021, this course will meet synchronously online. 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.

 

Love, Labor, Capital (Poetics of Poverty)
16:470:670:01
Nicola Behrmann
Crosslisted with Comparative Literature 16:195:516:01
F 12, 9:00am - 12:00pm, online

Taught in English.

In Fall 2021, this course will meet online with synchronous and asynchronous components, recorded lectures and biweekly meetings.

Poverty, the result of exploitation, is not easy to measure. In its unhinged temporality and its resistance to productive discourse the poor text, a form of non-production and a failed oeuvre, emerges from the crisis of the signifier. As exhausted, exhilarated, or outspent the miser, the madman, the simpleton, the unconditional lover, or the social loser may appear: they resist and undercut capitalism’s demand of incessant productivity, enrichment, and the pursuit of happiness.

This course investigates the link between labor and poverty, the drives of accumulation and enjoyment, the logic of production and fantasy, unconscious investment and “negative private property” in literature and film. Drawing on theories of economic and libidinal self-expenditure (Marx, Freud, Lacan), we will take frequent recourse to psychoanalysis as the practice of working through: in dream work, fantasy production, and in various other appearances of non-productive work and unconscious labor.

READINGS INCLUDE Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, Gustave Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart,” Franz Grillparzer’s “The Poor Musician,” Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist, Robert Walser’s The Robber, Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, and Hubert Fichte’s The Black City. Alexander Kluge’s documentary on Sergei Eisenstein’s failed attempt to film The Capital, early slapstick cinema by The Marx Brothers and Karl Valentin, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s TV miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz will move our attention to film. Sustainable theories will be provided by Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Simone Weil.

 

The ... Unconscious
16:470:671:01
Michael Levine
Crosslisted with Comparative Literature 16:195:608:01
Th 45, 3:00pm - 6:00pm, in person
Craig Seminar Room, AB 4050

Taught in English.

In Fall 2021, this course will meet face to face. The ellipses in the title mark the wide range of texts that have expanded and revised the Freudian notion of the unconscious, taking it in surprising and fruitful new directions. These include Walter Benjamin and Rosalind Krauss on the optical unconscious, Frederic Jameson on the political unconscious, Robert Ryder on the acoustic unconscious, Jason Groves on the geological unconscious, and Neil Lazarus on the postcolonial unconscious, to name but a few. Readings of psychoanalytic texts from Freud to Lacan and beyond will be combined with the study of Surrealist art and film, realist landscapes, modernist and postcolonial narratives.

 

Gegenwartsliteraturen
16:470:672:01
Regina Karl
T 23, 11:00am - 2:00pm, with additional content delivered asynchronously online.

Taught in German.

This course provides an introduction to contemporary German-speaking literature. Focusing on prose narratives as well as poetry, we will discuss styles and tendencies of fictional works since the start of the millennium. Special attention will be given to how these works reflect upon the notion of crisis in the European Union from 2008 to the present. A variety of young and/or post-migrant voices will help us discuss the nexus between the German past and present in light of critical race and gender studies. In addition we will make an effort to compare current trends of the German-speaking book market to the French and American one. The importance of the anecdote as well as the influence of the digital turn on contemporary storytelling will guide our close readings of texts by Olivia Wenzel, Saša Stanišić, Özlem Özgül Dündar, Ann Cotten, Christian Kracht, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Leif Randt, Jakob Nolte, Yoko Tawada, Dorothee Elmiger, Uljana Wolf, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Jan Wagner, Max Czollek, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ocean Vuong, Édouard Louis, and Alison Bechdel. The course will include a series of guest sessions with writers and publishers.

Online, mixed asynchronous and synchronous