Teaching Apprenticeship in German (1.5 credits)
16:470:502:01
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.
Romantic Realisms
16:470:670:01
Professor Martha Helfer
This seminar will analyze German Romanticism and its afterlives in poetic Realism, focusing on the poetics of death. Why does death, a seemingly morbid topic, prove surprisingly productive for the development of Romantic and Realist aesthetics? Why does Romanticism refuse to die? Readings include selections from tremendously creative works by Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff, Heinrich Heine, Georg Büchner, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Adalbert Stifter, Jeremias Gotthelf, and Theodor Storm. Taught in English; all readings will be available in German and English.
Parergal Zones: Politics of Space
16:470:671:01
Nicola Behrmann
This combined seminar-and-lecture series investigates the politics of space, of what envelopes and frames it, and how our perception of space remains bound to mechanisms that do not come into effect or make an appearance in our established cartographies. Derrida’s concept of the parergon – that which “touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside” (Derrida) – can help us understand how political dynamics of infringement, exile, public humiliation, upheaval, security measures, cultural anxieties, and spectral returns of the repressed are connected. Drawing on landscape architecture, literature, music, and visual arts, we will investigate how “parergal zones” and spaces of exception are bound to the dynamics of bio-political governance. We are interested in the topographic blind spots or wander lines that cannot be mapped or represented “properly” and ask how administrative and colonial grids come into appearance as an a-social that frames and distorts the perception of collective or communal space.
Readings in the plenary sessions will feature works by Nicholas Abraham/Maria Torok, Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Georg Büchner, Fernand Deligny, Amitav Ghosh, J.W. Goethe, Esther Kinsky, Alfred Kubin/Johannes Schaaf, Henri Lefebvre, Jean-François Lyotard, Achille Mbembe, Stanisława Przybyszewska, Yvonne Rainer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and Adalbert Stifter. Several distinguished guest interlocutors will engage a wide range of disciplines with regards to the politics of space.
20th Century German Thought: Heidegger
16:470:672:01
Dominik Zechner
Martin Heidegger counts among the most influential but also the most problematic thinkers of the 20th century. His 1927 magnum opus Being and Time revolutionized the history of philosophy and became a foundational text for existentialism, phenomenology, deconstruction, object-oriented ontology, and other philosophical movements. Heidegger’s innovative ideas and terminology, the way in which his thinking attunes itself to language, and his critique of modern technology have been widely influential. At the same time, the philosopher from the Black Forest pledged allegiance to Hitler’s regime as early as 1933 and remained a member of the Nazi party until 1945. In his private notebooks from that period, we can find anti-Semitic remarks and suppositions. Heidegger’s case thus forces us to confront how we should approach the archive of a politically discredited author. The course will introduce students to Heidegger’s ideas and their aftermath, relevant moments in his biography, and the ethical and political discussions surrounding them. This course is taught in English.