Global Arc

A study of major German philosophers and religious and social thinkers from the Reformation to the present. Selected works of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, or German-Jewish thinkers will be read together with contemporary interpretations. Two 90-minute seminars.

Exploration of key moments in German culture in light of its history and institutions. Topics may range from Marxist aesthetics to theories of fascism to German women writers. Readings and discussion in German.

What is film? Is it a language? Can one speak of cinematic literacy? Does film transform perception? Is there filmic thinking? This seminar on the theory and poetics of cinema will examine the varieties of ways -- semiotic, psychoanalytic, narratological - that filmmakers, philosophers and critics have analyzed film form, the cinematic experience, the construction of cinematic subjectivity, questions of aesthetic politics and notions of medium specificity.

An interdisciplinary examination of continuity and change in the culture and the cultural politics of Germany between 1919 and 1933. Topics include expressionism in the visual arts and literature; Berlin Dada; the Conservative Revolution; abstract versus representational art (Thomas Mann, Neue Sachlichkeit); the Bauhaus and mass housing; montage in film and literature (Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin); the political theater (Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator), and the optics of the modern metropolis (Walter Ruttmann, Alfred Döblin). Two 90-minute seminars.

While Germany is hardly alone in seeking origins in an imagined past, the realities of its fragmente political history resist unified narratives. In what ways has the question "was ist deutsch?" been shaped by medievalist and antiquarian impulses? How did those historical frameworks inform expressions of Germanness in politics, society, and culture? What ruptures and continuities in these approaches can be located on either side of 1945? This course, taught in German, examines medievalist and antiquarian literary motifs, developments in history and linguistics, artworks, and other materials from the perspectives of identity and culture.

This seminar focuses on German culture between the wars, a moment of keen anxiety, but also exhilaration, about the fine line between law and anarchy, morality and vice, in the unstable new republic. We will consider literature, film, theater, and visual art of the period, integrating into our itinerary the local resources of Munich through various excursions around town. Topics include: the response to WWI, the changing conditions of perception in the metropolis, the new gender norms, consumer culture's challenge to high art, and the rise of fascism.

Can people who speak German be funny? Can art be funny? This course explores the aggressively comic sensibility that arises in post-World War II art from a young generation of German, Austrian, and Swiss artists -- some of whom are well known, others still waiting to be discovered. We will see how these artists employ a whole range of media to reflect upon political issues of the time: NS, the Holocaust, German-US foreign policy, advanced capitalism, gender, environmental destruction. Because we are fortunate enough to be in Munich, we will visit museums, movie theaters, etc. to experience the city's rich comical history and its geniuses.

This seminar examines progressive and conservative trends in literature and visual art during the early decades of the twentieth century. By focusing on controversial ideas and forms, we shall seek to understand the internal complexity of modernist phase. Particular attention will be paid to the interlacement of aesthetics and politics, especially in Munich itself, which stood at the center of the most adventuresome as well as the bleakest projects in twentieth-century German cultural history.

What defines life? And where do we locate the boundary between its proper and improper instances, between the natural and the monstrous? First emerging in the early 19th century, the prospects of artificial life continue to provoke both exhilaration and anxiety today. By examining works of philosophy, literature and film over a historical period ranging from early Romanticism to contemporary nanoculture, this seminar explores humanity's desire to become like the gods, fashioning species, companions, and slaves at will, even as these creations menace us through their intractability and threaten to take on an uncanny life of their own.

Study of literary and non-literary models of style, development of advanced proficiency in expository writing and skill in oral presentation and argumentation, pronunciation work as needed, brief survey of literary styles from the 17th through the 20th centuries.