Course Descriptions
for Spring 2008
2. German Language Courses
German 205-2
Focus Writing: East and West- Identities In Flux; New Transatlantic
Perspectives
Ingrid Zeller (MWF 1:00-1:50) Prerequisites: German
102-3
This grammar and composition course is designed
for students who wish to further their writing skills in German
to become independent, confident and proficient writers of
German. Emphasis will be placed on practicing the use of idiomatic
German in writing and in speaking with special attention to
the enrichment of a student’s vocabulary and structural knowledge. Literary
and non-literary texts, selected to represent a wide range
of styles and genres, provide opportunities for analysis and
discussion of content and form. This quarter, students will
learn to recognize and to work with characteristics of written
texts that define reviews of films and cultural events, reports,
argumentative essays, and interpretations of literary works.
The thematic basis for the course consists of stories from
and representations of East and West with regard to Germany
as well as the global community at large. Connections to American
Culture, especially concerning the city of Chicago, will be
explored. Course materials will include current texts from
various media, fictional works by German-speaking authors,
and videos and feature films. Highlights will include the creation
of an annotated, collaborative website through the use of wikis
for the contemporary short story by Judith Hermann Sommerhaus,
Später with its emphasis on Berlin, history, identity,
music, and architecture. We will also plan an excursion to
Chicago to explore German heritage and engage in team projects
or your choice, such as the production of music videos. Grammar
topics relevant for each unit will be reviewed thoroughly and
can be practiced via interactive electronic tools.
German 207 Current Events in German Media
John Paluch (MWF
11:00-11:50) Prerequisites: German 102-3
Using the broad range
of media now easily available on the internet, this course will
provide an opportunity to learn about current issues in Europe
as examined through German language media. Print articles,
radio broadcasts, TV news shows, and other internet sources now
allow immediate access to news sources and we will use these
sources during class discussions and activities to investigate
issues in sports, politics, education, economics and culture.
German 209 German in the Business World
Katrin Völkner (MWF 2:00-2:50) Prerequisites: One
200-Level course in German, or very strong performance in 102-3
In
this course you will acquire business-related German language skills
and gain a cross-cultural perspective of German and American business
practices. The emphasis will be on communicative situations such
as social interactions, business travel, oral and written contact
with customers, sales dialogues and business letters. This course
integrates the study of language, cross-cultural awareness, and
professional interaction and is designed to prepare you for professional
activities in and with German-speaking countries, especially with
a focus on internships. The course starts to prepare you for the
internationally recognized exam Zertifikat Deutsch für den
Beruf (ZDfB), which will be offered in conjunction with the Goethe
Institute Chicago.
German 305 Writing as Discovery: Communicating Correctly,
Clearly, and Persuasively
Franziska Lys (T/TH 12:20-2:00) Prerequisites:
High Intermediate skills in listening, reading, writing, and
speaking.
The advanced writing course has two components. First, through
a series of linguistic exercises, students are introduced
to more advanced and sophisticated structures of written
German. This happens in two stages: Most initial grammar
points to be reviewed are taken from the actual writings
of each student to insure that points are practiced that
correspond to the weaknesses of the individual student. For
the second stage, a variety of current short texts (current
texts from newspapers and magazines as well as fictional
works by German-speaking authors) serve as a basis for writing
exercises and other assignments that build on the first stage.The
second component in this class gives students a chance to work
on a longer piece of writing over the nine weeks of the quarter.
For the writing component, students are asked to find a German
speaking person on campus or in the community with an interesting
life story to tell. They then interview the person at least
once a week, carefully preparing questions for each session
and taking notes of the information they glean during the interview.
Over the course of the nine weeks, students then write up the
information by dividing it into linked chapters, thereby creating
an illustrated book of the person’s
story in German.
German 307: Current
Events and Issues in German-Language Media
Franziska Lys (T/TH 11:00-12:20) Prerequisites:
High Intermediate skills in listening, reading, writing, and
speaking.
This course is designed for students who wish
to keep informed on current political, socio-economic, and cultural
events in Germany and Europe. Topics of discussion will come
from a range of German-language media, including newspapers,
magazines, Internet sources, and daily news broadcasts. The goals
of this course are as follows:
- To help students gain a better understanding of contemporary
German-language cultures and societies and how they interact
with their European neighbors by following the German news
over an extended period of time.
- To become aware of journalistic differences in print and
electronic media by examining newspapers, magazines, Internet
sources, and daily news broadcasts with regard to language
use, choice of topics, choice of images, and gender and cultural
stereotyping.
- To practice speaking and writing about current events with
greater fluency and nuance by reflecting on a variety of
topics from written and spoken sources.
Students are expected to read, watch, or listen to the news
from multiple sources several times a week. Many of the
daily television news, news features and broadcasts are now
available as downloads to an iTunes library. Students
will receive for the duration of the class their own iPod Touch
to make it conducive for them to listen to and reflect on German
news regularly in and outside of class. Students will also
have a chance to work on their own video project in and outside
of class (alone or in small groups). No technical skills are
required. Student projects will be distributed to other students
in the class through iTunes for discussion.
3. German Courses in Culture and Literature
German 221-1-20: Introduction to Literature: 1800
- 1900
Jorg Kreienbrock Prerequisite in German:
One 200 level course in German.(Distro Area VI)
TBA
German 321-3 Recoveries and Transitions:
Böll to Now
Stefanie
Harris (TTH 12:30-1:50) Prerequisite in German: High Intermediate
skills in speaking, advanced skills in reading and writing.
Distribution Area IV,VI
From the end of the war to the end of
the wall, German literature of the past half-century has been
engaged in a complicated relationship with the socio-political
sphere. Through a study of select literary texts, non-fiction
essays, and films, we will explore how the author engages with
(or, alternatively, rejects engagement with) the socio-cultural
environment through the counter-discourse of literature. Topics
of particular focus will include: representation of the National
Socialist past; inter-generational conflict in German society;
the ‘terrorist’ movement
of the 1970s; the politicized climate of the women's movement;
the response of the writer in East Germany; the role of historical
memory in contemporary Germany; and the politics of national
unification and citizenship.
German 327-0-20: Expressionism: Modernity, Madness;
Eros and Revolutio
Rainer Rumold (TTH 12:30-1:50) Prerequisite
in German: High Intermediate skills in speaking, advanced skills
in reading and writing. Distribution Area VI
This course will focus on some of the most extreme literary
and artistic reactions to the impact of modernity, war, revolution
(political and cultural, including liberation of sexuality
from gender norms) on the individual and collective experience
in Berlin, Munich, and Dresden from 1910 through the 1920s.
German Expressionism is the cultural movement in literature
and the arts that confronts those issues head-on.
Some of the
significant questions raised in this course are, for example:
How do writers and artists respond to the rapid changes of
the technological urban environment (from mass transportation
to film, and advertising) which challenge habitual modes of
perception (vision, hearing, etc.), thus traditional ways of
writing? - How do writers cope with the growing awareness of
the limits of rational understanding vis-à-vis the unconscious:
e.g. the experience of the anonymity of the modern masses in
the city, insanity, raw violence and sexuality? - In what ways
define artists and writers the entry into 2oth-century modernity
as a crisis experiences on the threshold between the modern
and primitive which puts into question the ideals of religion
and art, of reason and the Judeo-Christian values of love and
compassion.
German 398 Undergraduate Seminar: The Global City
- Chicago, Berlin, Paris.
Peter Hayes (TTH 2:00-3:20)
Prerequisite in German: High Intermediate skills in speaking,
advanced skills in reading and writing. *Please
contact instructor for permission to enroll.
The twenty-first
century is one of cities as much, perhaps more, than it is
one of nations. This course examines the major city as site
of cultural and social change, its history, its desire and
power to “plan” its future, its problems
as site of encounter of contrasting and sometimes mutually
hostile populations, its sustainability as economic and political
society. The examination proceeds by comparison between three
major cities, Chicago, Berlin, and Paris. Students in five
French and German universities will be conducting this comparison
simultaneously, and will come to Evanston in May to meet with
Northwestern students taking this class in a student conference
in order to exchange ideas, research, and experiences.
4. Courses in English on Literature, Culture, History
and Politics
German 104-6 20 Freshman Seminar: Secret Life
of the Fetish
Jörg Kreienbrock (MWF 12:00-12:50)
Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous characterization of German
19th century art and science as a crass fetish-being introduces
the notion of the fetish into the vocabulary of cultural analysis.
Since its origin in the ethnographic writings of the enlightenment
in the 17th and 18th century, the fetish appears in many different
incarnations in such heterogeneous discourses as theology,
Marxism, sociology, psychoanalysis, the clinical psychiatry
of sexual deviance, modernist aesthetics, popular culture,
and anthropology. This class will give a historical survey
of these transformations by focusing on crucial representations
of the fetish, fetishism and the fetishist in literature, philosophy,
and film.
German 104-6-21Freshman Seminar: Staging Revolution
Robert Ryder (MWF 2:00-2:50)
Politics, playwriting, and performance have often made their
grand entrance together on the German stage. In this seminar,
we will ask why the German theater has been repeatedly used
to stage political revolutions. At the turn of the nineteenth
century, Friedrich Schiller consciously set about creating
a “radical” theater, one which would lead audiences
to perceive universal ideas and conflictual ideologies behind
sensuous theatrical metaphors. In “Danton’s Death” (1835),
the young dramatist Georg Büchner reshaped the very form
of the play to fit his radical views of character, politics
and history. Finally, Bertold Brecht’s “Threepenny
Opera” (1928) revolutionized musical theatre with its
socialist critique of capitalist society. This course will
examine these and similar texts from the 19th and 20th centuries
and observe how aesthetic and political concerns interact on
the German stage to produce demands for social change.
German 240 Berlin: Weimar Culture
Rainer Rumold (TTH 11:00-12:20) Distribution
Credit VI
We will deal with the literature, visual arts,
film and society of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933),
the first German experiment with democracy. Here the 20th
century writer's and artist's rebellion against bourgeois
ideology and conventions reached a pinnacle of creativity
in the so-called "Golden Twenties" with
the metropolis of Berlin at the centre. There were the
theatre of the Expressionists (e.g., the Gas trilogy) and
Bertolt Brecht (Threepenny Opera), the films of Fritz Lang
(Metropolis), and Pabst; the architectural program of the Bauhaus (from
Weimar to Berlin: Gropius, Klee, Mies van der Rohe) which
called for a new style in architecture and the arts in
the age of the masses. The satire of the painter George
Grosz and the fervor of the Dadaists shocked the bourgeoisie
unmasking humanism as an ideology, often from the view
point of a Marxist dialectic. In the midst of this upheaval,
the literature and political essays of Thomas Mann appealed
to the tradition of reason, while a great Expressionist
poet like Gottfried Benn ultimately fell for the Hitler
movement. All these variegated tendencies, in the extreme
representing the deadly struggle of the Left with the Right,
are part of a culture in creative fermentation. “Weimar culture” was
inspired by an exuberant belief in change, a curious spirit
of experimentation, and motivated by a critical disposition
against the forces of the old: nationalism, monopoly capitalism,
and militarism (e.g. Ernst Jünger’s Storms of Steel).
Thus the artistic dynamics of the Weimar Republic can be understood
as the expression of a society in search of a new identity.
However, the socio-political situation since the world economic
crisis in 1929 brought about a definitive confrontation, out
of which National Socialism emerged in totalitarian triumph
of militarism and racism.
German 330 Intro to Yiddish Literature
in Translation
Marcus Moseley (TTH 2:00-3:20) Distribution
Credit VI
Beginning with the sixteenth-century translation
to Yiddish of the Pentateuch with associated readings and rabbinic
commentaries, this course provides an overview of the history
of Yiddish language and literature until the latter half of
the twentieth century. A literature forged from its inception
by cultural disruption and geographical dislocation, special
emphasis is laid upon the continuities and discontinuities
this canon of writings presents. Thus, for example, we trace
the extraordinary hold exercised upon the modern Jewish literary
imagination (including that of Franz Kafka!) of the tales of
the Hasidic master, Nahman of Bratslav (1772-1810). The course
provides samplings--all in English translation--of pre-modern
Yiddish literature, the Yiddish literature of the Jewish Enlightenment
(Haskole), the flowering of Yiddish literary modernism, concluding
with Yiddish literary responses to the Holocaust (Khurbm, in
Yiddish usage). Special attention is paid to three “classic” writers
of Yiddish literature: Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sh. Y. Abramovitsh
1836-1917); Yiskhok Leyb Peretz (1890-1915); Sholem Aleichem
(S. Rabinovitsh 1859-1916).
