Teaching Apprenticeship in German (1.5 credits)
16:470:502:01
Alexander Pichugin
T4, 2:00pm - 3:20pm, 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.
Reading, in Theory
16:470:670:01
crosslisted with Comparative Literature, 16:195:516:01
Dominik Zechner
Th56, 3:50pm - 6:50pm, Craig Seminar Room, AB 4050
Taught in English.
As literary scholars we tend to take our ability to read for granted. This course will put some pressure on this assumption and invite us to read ourselves reading. Rather than a simple cultural technique of which we can make instrumental use, reading might turn out to constitute a process that withdraws from all attempts at mastery – an act that exhilarates but also undoes the subject. The history and theory of reading offers us a sense of the complexities and open-endedness of textual encounters, which will be demonstrated through discussions of texts by Paul de Man, Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Eve Sedgwick, Barbara Johnson, and others. Modes and forms of reading to be explored include paranoid and reparative reading, the hermeneutics of suspicion, the anxiety of influence, close and distant reading, critical and post-critical reading, and, of course, the pleasure of the text.
Kafka's Extremities
16:470:671:01
crosslisted with Comparative Literature, 16:195:608:01
Michael Levine
M 56, 3:50pm - 6:50pm, Craig Seminar Room, AB 4050
Taught in English
The course focuses at once on the extremes of human experience and on those parts of the body that play such an integral role in perceiving, registering and articulating them. Such experiences can be traumatically painful or overwhelmingly pleasurable or, as is often the case in Kafka, both at once. They include – but are not limited to – ecstatic musical events such as those recounted in “Researches of a Dog” and “The Metamorphosis;” those moments when punishing machines of inscription and half-dead fathers come uncannily to life, or those turning points when bodily organs are transformed in order to make new forms of perception and articulation possible.
The seminar will focus in particular on Kafka’s body language – not just the extensive repertoire of gestures he invents but the role played in his stories by pricked up ears, toothy gears and overflowing tears. We will ask: What remains on the tip of the tongue – neither spoken nor silenced but otherwise said? What is so fascinating -- to the point of holding one indefinitely in place -- about the hair-enveloped protuberance of a sharp, pointy nose? What hangs suspended – neither heard nor inaudible – in the cochlea of the inner ear? What speaks to us from those convoluted passageways or from the related labyrinthine tunnels of a molelike creature’s underground burrow? How does the tick-tock of a wagging finger spread throughout the body, causing it to rock back and forth and introducing an altogether different notion of time?
While students will read classic essays such Benjamin’s “On the Tenth Anniversary of Kafka’s Death,” we will focus primarily on Kafka’s own writings ranging from his diaries, letters, short stories, narrative fragments and incomplete novels to graphic novel adaptations of his work.
The Sentence
16:470:672:01
Distinguished Craig Visiting Professor Jan Mieszkowski
crosslisted with Comparative Literature, 16:195:617:01
W56, 3:50pm - 6:50pm, Craig Seminar Room, AB 4050
Taught in English
What is a sentence? Although every schoolchild is expected to know the answer, the question is rarely posed in modern literary scholarship, where the privileged models of language by and large marginalize or ignore the concept. Close readers and semioticians focus on signification at the level of the trope, word, or letter, whereas narratologists attempt to move beyond grammatical structures to delineate the more abstract dynamics organizing texts. When the sentence is scrutinized in its own terms, it is almost exclusively in discussions of style. In this seminar, we will consider what is at stake aesthetically and politically in thinking—or not thinking—about the sentence. The focus will be on authors who have implicitly or explicitly tried to delineate the powers and limits of sentential forces, including Friedrich Schlegel, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, Paul Celan, Maurice Blanchot, J. L. Austin, Theodor W. Adorno, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Stanley Fish, and Jorie Graham. The course will be taught in English, and all readings will be available in English.
