Global Arc

This seminar explores the significance of works of art, and of practices of writing about art, for three great writers of the early 20th century: poet Rainer Maria Rilke, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. Readings include: lyric poetry, experimental prose, psychoanalytic theory, cultural analysis, and aesthetic theory. Topics include: the situation of the work of art in modernity; art and the unconscious; the work of art and the historical transmission of culture in modern Europe. Course taught in English. Readings also available in German for those who wish to work with texts in the original language.

Exemplary encounters between photography and literature in the 20th century. After providing students with a basis in the theory of photography, the course focuses on intersections between literary and photographic forms, producers, and movements. Topics will include modernism in New York (Williams, Strand, and Sheeler) and Mexico City (Lawrence, Bravo, Weston, Modotti), the New Photography and the photo essay in Germany (Benjamin, Moholy-Nagy, Renger-Patzsch, Sander), social criticism (Evans and Agee), surrealism (Breton), and the American road (Kerouac and Frank). Two 90-minute seminars.

An introduction to the history, theory, and criticism of modernism as it developed in European culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Case studies of major figures and movements (Baudelaire, Manet, Dada, Surrealism, Brecht, Benjamin) encompass a range of approaches to literary, pictorial, and theatrical production and their relation to social, political, economic, and technological aspects of modernity. Attention to aesthetic as well as ethical dimensions of the production and reception of works of art in modernity, and to how technologies of modernity have been understood to transform the work of art.

Surveillance has long provoked a wide range of social responses, from the embrace of promises of security to a rejection of a threat to civil liberties. Why can some countries impose such social control while others cannot? Does this dynamic change when the monitoring is instead trans-national, be it in the form of more systemic logics of "surveillance capitalism" or of the new global tracking imperatives provoked by the current pandemic? This team-taught seminar in comparative surveillance studies will examine the complex cultural, political and techno-historical dimensions of new forms of social control in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

"I fear God if I keep silent, I fear uncomprehending people if I write," wrote Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. 1282) on assuming the role of author, anticipating the words of Sigrid Weigel: "The language of women is [...] not simply a given, nor something to be construed, but rather a movement pursuing a constantly shifting perspective" (1987). Seminar examines the female "I" in a range of German texts. Questions to be considered: What roles have been available? How has gender enabled/constrained humans identifying as women from becoming writers? What challenges the reader of a female voice when the author identifies as a man? See sample list.

This seminar surveys major stages of the German language from Indo-European to Old High German, through Middle High and New High German, ending with Contemporary German. The history of language and language change will be examined through primary texts such as: the Lord's Prayer, the heroic lay, the courtly romance, oaths, charms, legal documents, business records, cooking recipes, mass media (pamphlets, news weeklies), and political writings. Additional readings supply methodological background and historical and cultural contexts.

This seminar explores the German aesthetic tradition from the eighteenth century to the present. Staging dialogues between classical and modern aesthetics around questions of sense perception, beauty, sublimity, and artistic autonomy, we will focus on how aesthetic theories have treated the production of forms that resist conceptual categorization and prefigure new modes of collectivity and organization. Tracing this dynamic through the centuries, we will examine the significance of aesthetics for politics, cultural critique, and for rethinking the status of literature and art in an age of increasing dematerialization.

Informed by recent German media theory on 'cultural techniques'--from the operation of doors to embodied acts of writing and image-making-- this seminar will explore the relations between performance and media, from interactions between performance practices and modern/new media to implications of performance for theorizing media in general. Topics will include shared concerns in media studies and performance studies (such as embodiment, (im)mediacy, practice, and the archive), relations/tensions between performance and text, movement and inscription, and thinking media through the lens of practice as well as practice as the basis of theory.

Mind games, thought experiments (think of Zeno's Paradox), and dream narratives are ways of expressing an imagined possibility in order to reveal something hitherto obscured by the seemingly obvious. Their epistemological value is thus as important as their aesthetic structure is intriguing. In a survey from Plato's parable of the cave to 19th century prose fiction, this course will examine the narrative and rhetorical techniques these experimental genres employ to convey a kind of knowledge that can be gained only by means of fiction and the imagination.

Seminar addresses R. M. Rilke's literary work around a central question in modernist cultural production. If the conditions of human existence in modernity have rendered the category of experience itself problematic, what possibilities remain for the production and reception of works of art? Close study of the work of artists whose practices informed Rilke's writing (Rodin, Cézanne), as well as readings in philosophy (Simmel, Heidegger) address questions concerning the phenomena of modernity and modern culture and the ways in which artists, writers, and philosophers attempted to come to terms with them in 20th-cent. Europe.