Global Arc

The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as an important progenitor of the European modernist culture that arose in the period of urban capitalist modernity, roughly 1870-1930. Particular emphasis will be placed on a series of textual encounters between Nietzsche and such authors as Gide, Mann, Lawrence, Rilke, Yeats, Musil, and Malraux; their readings and rewritings of Nietzsche lent decisive impulses to the formal and thematic concerns of modernism. Two 90-minute seminars.

This seminar explores narratives of love, both divine and profane, and its rewards and punishments. Texts range from early medieval to the Baroque, and include such genres as romance, hagiography, travel narrative, divine revelations, and legal documents. The readings focus on male oppression of women, mortification of the self, and the persecution and eventual validation of visionaries. Students will consider such questions as: What is the role of gender in these narratives? What, if any, is their legacy for us today? Readings and discussion in English.

Only the romantics believe that love simply happens. But, as literary historians know, love only really materializes after reading the right books. This seminar will focus on the discourse of love in both canonical and non-canonical works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With texts such as Gellert's [Schwedische Gräfin], Goethe's [Werther], and Friedrich Schlegel's [Lucinde], students will explore love as a mode of literary self-expression as well as its relation to the rise of the novel in the context of European Romanticism.

Taking up the master trope of dystopian futurity articulated in Orwell's [1984], this seminar in media theory will track the paranoid logics of surveillance across a wide range of literary, philosophical, technological (photographic, cinematic, digital) and architectual manifestations. Using a comparative, historical and interdisciplinary approach we will consider surveillance as a political tactic, a narrative strategy, a theory of the subject, a spatial configuration, a mode of spectatorship, and as a key dynamic of both old and new media.

An examination of the work of the Frankfurt School of critical social theory on questions of modern culture. The course will focus on the textual debates among Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Siegfried Kracauer on the complex relationship of aesthetics and politics. These often polemical socio-philosophical texts attempt to map a contemporary cultural landscape reconfigured by the "culture industry," transformations in perception, the emergence of the mass, and new technologies of reproduction such as radio, cinema, and television. One three-hour seminar.

From the Reformation to the late Baroque, religion, the sciences, and the arts are entwined in an intricate yet volatile bond. Standard historical accounts tell the story of the sciences' and the arts' growing emancipation from religion. At the same time, religion itself is involved in far-reaching transformations of its own. This course aims at shedding new light on these developments while providing an introduction to the main trends of the period. We will explore the controversial endorsement of scientific learning; Luther and the historical study of the bible; More's Utopia; the case of Galileo; Leibniz' influence on the arts.

The major works of the classical period in German literature. Texts by Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, and Kleist in relation to European historical, social, and philosophical change. Two 90-minute seminars.

An introduction to the poetry, drama, and prose of postwar Germany in the East and West. Emphasis on the political and social context of the major literary works from the '50s to the present. Two 90-minute seminars.

The visual arts in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Works of art, cinema, and literature in historical context. Topics include: modernism and modernity; Expressionism, Dada, New Objectivity in painting, photography, cinema, and literature; historical conditions of bodily experience and visual perception; emergence of new artistic and technological media; expansion of mass culture; place of politics in art; experience and representation of metropolitan life; changes in the conceptualization and representation of individuality, collectivity, embodiment, race, class, gender, sexuality. Two 90-minute seminars, one film screening.

The production and reception of art in the Federal Republic of Germany from c. 1960 to now, situating episodes in the history of painting, sculpture, and photography in relation to developments in literature and cinema. Topics include the problem of coming to terms with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung); the West German economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) and the functions and meanings of art in consumer society; violence, politics, and representation; abstraction and figuration in painting, sculpture, and photography; history, memory, and artistic tradition; art as a vehicle of socio-political critique. Two 90-minute classes.