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Culture and the Arts

German 100. Introduction to German Literature and Thought

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Day/Time

TBA

Instructor

Carranza

A survey course on major works in German literature, philosophy, and critique from the mid-eighteenth century to the twentieth century. Close reading of representative texts opens onto broader ramifications in cultural and intellectual history with further consideration of societal and political tensions. Periods and themes covered include the Enlightenment and the rise of the Bourgeoisie, Romanticism, Idealism, and the Problem of Identity, Realism and Nationhood, Language and Political crises, and the guilt...

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German 137: Effi Briest and Madame Bovary

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Instructor

Vinken

Date/Time

W 3:45 - 5:45 pm

 

During the 19th century, marriage and family were promoted as the new religion; a woman’s fulfillment was that of a wife and a mother. With Madame Bovary, Flaubert created the icon of the adulteress. The novel was denounced as morally offensive: a paean to adultery. Madame Bovary influenced Effi Briest, Fontane’s most successful novel, as well as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Even today, we continue to write, dance, and film this tragic story, in works by Rainer Werner Fassbinder,...

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German 145. German and Austrian Modernism: Architecture, Art, Literature

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Day/Time

MW 10:30AM - 11:45AM

Instructor

Burgard

Explores the radical break with traditions of thinking, building, seeing, and representing that occurred at the end of the 19th-century in Germany and Austria, and the new forms of architecture, painting, and literature to which this break led over the following 40 years (1890–1930). Topics include, among others, the loss or destruction of coherence in general, more specifically the loss of a sense of a unified self, alienation in the industrial and urban world, the rejection of unified forms...

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German 219. German Poetry

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Day/Time

M 3:00 pm - 5:45 pm

Instructor

Burgard

Close readings of 24 poems representing the best of modern German poetry. Readings in German, discussions in English. All of the poems are short, allowing us to achieve both breadth and depth and allowing those students who can read two pages of sophisticated German carefully each week, but maybe not a drama or a novel, to practice their close reading in German and improve their scholarly German. The chronological progression provides a history of modern...

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German 223: Kleist’s Die Herrmannschlacht

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Instuctor

Vinken

Date/Time

Th 9:00 - 11:00 am

 

Herrmann, chieftain of the Germanic Cherusci tribe, had for ages been seen as the incarnation of the heroic liberator from Roman Imperial colonialism and the arch-founder of an authentic German nation. Heinrich von Kleist’s drama Die Herrmannschlacht (The Battle of Hermann), depicts the battle between the Romans and Germanic tribes that took place in the Teutoburg forest in 9 CE. The play, poorly received at first, was later seen as a rallying cry for the nation’s liberation...

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Scandinavian 150. The Vikings and the Nordic Heroic Tradition

Semester: 

N/A

Offered: 

2022

Day/Time

TR 1:30–2:45pm

Instructor

Mitchell

Examines the historical events in Europe A.D. 800 to A.D. 1100, and the resulting heroic legacy in medieval Icelandic sagas. The course focuses on Viking Age figures as warriors, kings, poets, outlaws and adventurers; pre-Christian religion and mythology, the Viking raids, and the Norse experience in "Vinland" carefully considered. All readings and discussions in English.