Teaching Apprenticeship in German (1.5 credits)
16:470:502:01
Professor Alexander Pichugin
By Arrangement
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.
Scents and Sensibility (3 credits)
16:470:670:01
Professor Michael Levine
Tuesdays 3:50pm - 6:50pm | AB West 4050
An examination of the sense of smell and its relation to alternative forms of cognition like prescience and presentiment, ways of knowing without really knowing as if one already knew. The course will study the time frames associated with this peculiar kind of foreknowledge, paying particular attention to prepositions like “pre-“ and “fore-“ while also asking how cognizing subjects may be prepositioned by what they would like to know, by “objects” they can neither simply approach nor keep away.
We will be guided in this investigation by certain turns of phrase, asking what it means, for example, to have a flair or a nose for something, noting, with Derrida that Freud had such a nose especially when it came to sniffing out the origins of law and morality. In following Freud following the scent we will be led to examine his relationship with the ENT specialist, Wilhelm Fliess, to whom he first confided his presentiment of certain discoveries, and the story of noses that defined their friendship until the very end.
Finally, as the punning title of the seminar suggests, we will ask whether there is a special connection between scent and sense, fragrance and meaning, wafting odors and linguistic ambiguities? To explore these questions, we will proceed in a necessarily indirect and interdisciplinary manner, reading psychoanalytic, philosophical, literary, and sociological texts with and through one another. Authors include Baudelaire, Corbin, Derrida, Freud, Hajdini, Kafka, Kant, Proust, Rosenbrück, and Süskind.
Taught in English.
Shame: A Cultural Technique (3 credits)
16:470:671:01
Professor Regina Karl
Mondays 3:50pm - 6:50pm | AB West 4050
This seminar conceptualizes shame as a cultural technique rather than a purely affective state. Drawing on media theory, performance studies, affect theory, and psychoanalysis, the course approaches shame as a symbolically and materially mediated practice that structures social order, regulates visibility, and produces subjectivity. Shame operates at the threshold between individual affect and collective norm, between the visible and the unspeakable.
Building on Bernhard Siegert’s notion of cultural techniques, we will explore how shame functions as a technology of subjectivation—a mechanism that generates hierarchies of class, gender, sexuality, and belonging. Particular attention will be paid to the intersection of shame and social origin, examining how classed and gendered bodies, languages, and habits are rendered “appropriate” or “embarrassing” through normative regimes of taste and decorum.
In addition to these theoretical frameworks, the seminar will engage with specific contemporary phenomena such as cringe, body-shaming, and shamelessness as exemplary sites where shame is performed, negotiated, and contested. On a more general level, we will trace shame’s origins in sexuality—from psychoanalytic understandings of libido and repression to its rearticulation in queer and feminist theory—as a foundational force shaping the boundaries of the self and the social.
Primary materials will include autofictional and performance texts, essays, and films by, among others, Lauren Berlant, Claire Denis, Daniela Dröscher, Annie Ernaux, Sigmund Freud, Jack Halberstam, Franz Kafka, Lea Schneider, and Olivia Wenzel.
Taught in English. German reading skills recommended but not required.
Significations of the Real (3 credits)
16:470:672:01
Professor Dominik Zechner
Thursdays 3:50pm - 6:50pm | AB West 4050
The signification of reality is considered a fundamental affordance of linguistic structures. But can language reflect the world without also distorting and dividing it? From Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias to de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology, this course investigates the peculiar ontology of linguistic events, tracing how every act of signification both gestures toward and averts the real. Our guiding hypothesis is that reality’s referents appear in language as a limit—that which resists symbolization yet insists within it. Readings will include Frege on the gap between sense and reference, Ricœur on metaphor and truth, Lacan on the signifier’s drift in the unconscious, and Lecercle on the violence of linguistic form. Further threads of inquiry will engage Barthes’s photographic punctum, Foucault’s shifting orders of resemblance, and Lyotard’s zigzag between discourse and figure. Ultimately, we will ask what becomes of language when it confronts what it cannot subsume. Can it bear witness to the dissolution of its referents?
Taught in English.