Germanic Languages and Literatures
W. L. Harkness Hall, 432.0788
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Chair
Carol Jacobs (Acting)
Director of Graduate Studies
Ingeborg Glier (305 WLH, 432.0782, ingeborg.glier@yale.edu)
Professors
Ingeborg Glier, Cyrus Hamlin, Carol Jacobs, Winfried Menninghaus (Visiting), Brigitte Peucker, Henry Sussman (Visiting)
Associate Professor
Matthias Konzett
Fields of Study
Fields include medieval literature, German literature and culture from the Reformation to the twenty-first century in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; literary theory; literary sociology; film.
Special Admissions Requirement
All students must provide evidence of mastery of German upon application.
Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
Students are required to demonstrate, besides proficiency in German, a reading knowledge of two other foreign languages, one at the end of the second term, the other by the fifth term of study. Recommended are Latin and French, although other relevant languages may be substituted for these. The faculty in German considers teaching to be essential to the professional preparation of graduate students. Students in German teach in their third and fourth years, at least. Students are normally expected to teach undergraduate language courses under supervision beginning in the third year of study. An oral examination must be passed not later than the end of the sixth term of study, and a dissertation prospectus should be submitted soon thereafter, but not later than the seventh term of study. All students will be asked to defend the prospectus in an informal discussion with the faculty. The defense will take place before the prospectus is officially approved, usually in November or early December of the seventh term. Students are admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D. upon completion of all predissertation requirements, including the prospectus. After the submission of the prospectus, the student's time is devoted to the preparation of the dissertation. A dissertation committee will be set up for each student at work on the dissertation. It is expected that students will periodically pass their work along to all members of their committee, so that faculty members in addition to the dissertation adviser can make suggestions well before the disseration is submitted.
Two concentrations are available to students: Germanic Literature and German Studies.
Special Requirements for the Germanic Literature Concentration
During the first two years of study, students are required to take sixteen term courses, four of which may be taken outside the department.
Special Requirements for the German Studies Concentration
During the first two years of study, students are required to take sixteen term courses, seven of which may be taken outside the department. Students are asked to define an area of concentration upon entry, and will meet with appropriate advisers both from within and outside the department.
Joint Ph.D. Program
The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures also offers, in conjunction with the Program in Film Studies, a joint Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures and Film Studies. For further details, see Film Studies. Applicants to the joint program must indicate on their application that they are applying both to Film Studies and to Germanic Languages and Literatures. All documentation within the application should include this information.
Master's Degrees
M.Phil. See Graduate School requirements. Alternatively, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures offers, in conjunction with the Medieval Studies program, a joint M.Phil. degree. For further details, see Medieval Studies.
M.A. (en route to the Ph.D.). Students enrolled in the Ph.D. program may qualify for the M.A. degree upon completion of a minimum of eight graduate term courses and the demonstration of reading knowledge in either Latin or French.
Master's Degree Program. For the terminal master's degree students must pass eight term courses, six of which must be in the department, and demonstrate a reading knowledge of either Latin or French. A comprehensive written examination will be given at the end of the second term. For the quality requirement for the M.A. degree, see Graduate School requirements.
Program materials are available upon request to the Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Yale University, PO Box 208210, New Haven CT 06520-8210; german@yale.edu.
Courses
GMAN 529a, Literature and Culture in the Age of the Reformation. Ingeborg Glier. W 3.30–5.20
In German culture, the sixteenth century is an especially violent and seminal period of transition. The seminar explores it under a variety of aspects: the upheavals in religion and in textual transmission, the discovery of a "new" continent and new scientific approaches, the breaking and making of literary traditions. Authors to be discussed include Sebastian Brant, Erasmus von Rotterdam, Martin Luther, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Sachs, as well as the first book on Faust, the Historia von D. Johann Fausten.
GMAN 536bu, Around Kafka. Henry Sussman. W 1.30–3.20
Franz Kafka was not merely a modernist whose sensibility and formal innovations influenced Brecht, Schulz, Gombrowicz, Beckett, Pynchon, Barth, Blanchot, and Borges, to name a few. His writings comprised a major site for the radical questioning and dislocation of Western systems, institutions, and mores that transpired at the outset of the twentieth century and beyond. Kafka's written body of works is not particularly large (he died of tuberculosis at forty-one). While paying careful attention to the shorter fiction, the novels, the letters, and their strategic interrelations, we begin to trace, in a Borgesian maze of time, the fields of knowledge, ideological presumptions, and aesthetic and cultural experiments that Kafka touched, and to some degree deranged, with his writing. In addition to carefully reading Kafka's works, we explore pivotal inspirations (Kleist, Flaubert, Gogol, and Dostoevsky); assess adaptations by Welles, Svankmajer, and Borges; and survey critical interventions by Adorno, Benjamin, and Blanchot.
GMAN 587b, Heroic Epic: Rolandslied, Nibelungenlied, Kudrun. Ingeborg Glier. W 3.30–5.20
Topics to be discussed in close analysis of the texts: a definition or description of heroic poetry in general and in the context of medieval German literature in particular: the Rolandslied as a borderline case (heroic epic, "Kreuzzugsepos," "Staatsroman"?); heroic and courtly elements in Nibelungenlied and Kudrun; the uniqueness of the Nibelungenlied in its literary/cultural context; the Nibelungenlied as a challenge to the Kudrun poet(s); the dominant role of women in German heroic poetry of the high Middle Ages.
GMAN 601b, Questioning the Enlightenment. Carol Jacobs. Th 1.30–3.20
This is not a course that systematically introduces the basic tenets of the Enlightenment. The seminar proceeds, rather, by close readings of individual works whose performances leave the concept of basic tenets uncertain. We explore a number of texts historically rooted in the period and read others that appear as commentaries, declared and undeclared, on the way in which language, knowledge, reason, and power interact in the writings of the authors we read (Hamann, Herder, Shelley, Novalis, Horkheimer and Adorno, Foucault, Plato). Also CPLT 763b.
GMAN 630bu, German Literature, Thought, and Culture in the Age of Goethe. Cyrus Hamlin. TTh 1–2.15
Interdisciplinary survey of German culture, literature, philosophy, music, and the arts during the Romantic era (1770–1830). Focus on concepts of the individual and self-consciousness, freedom and self-development, the rise of alienation, pessimism, and despair in the early nineteenth century. Among authors to be studied: Kant, Goethe (Werther and Faust), Mozart (Magic Flute), Schiller, and Hölderlin; music by Beethoven and Schubert; Romantic literary criticism and theory (the Schlegels, Novalis); painting by C. D. Friedrich and architecture by C. F. Schinkel; philosophy of Hegel and Schopenhauer. Also CPLT 630bu.
GMAN 651bu, Richard Wagner and the Theater of Modernism. Cyrus Hamlin. MW 1–2.15
Introduction to the life, thought, and work of Richard Wagner, with close study of selected musical dramas including Tannhäuser, The Ring of the Nibelung, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and Parsifal. Particular focus on his concept of theater, drama and opera (Gesamtkunstwerk) and its realization through performance, above all in the context of the Bayreuth Festival. Consideration of Wagner's European influence (especially on Nietzsche and G. B. Shaw) and the production history of his work to the present. Also CPLT 863bu.
GMAN 661au, Goethe's Faust in Its European Context. Cyrus Hamlin. MW 1–2.15
Close study of Goethe's Faust, Parts I and II. History of composition, reception, and performance of the drama, traditions of the Faust legend, philosophical theories of tragedy in German Idealism, and Romantic theories of myth and history in drama. Also CPLT 611au.
GMAN 695au, Aesthetics of Horror and Disgust. Winfried Menninghaus. T 3.30–5.20
Outline of some major theoretical models of how art can transform horror into a source of pleasure. Focus on a widely neglected topos of aesthetics: that of Ekel (disgust), which in Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Kant demarcates those border phenomena which resist any transformation into aesthetic pleasure. Readings include Dubos, Mendelssohn, Lessing, Kant, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Lovecraft, Freud, and Sartre. Also CPLT 743a.
GMAN 707a, Venus and Adonis: Beauty in Art and the Cult of the Beautiful Body. Winfried Menninghaus. M 3.30–5.20
Taking the myth of Venus and Adonis as its point of departure, the seminar offers a multifaceted approach to dealing with the power and failures of beauty. Readings include Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" and other versions of the myth by Ronsard, Friedrich Schlegel, d'Annunzio, John Cheever; philosophical accounts of beauty (Plato, Baumgarten, Burke, Kant, and Nietzsche); as well as the "theories" of beauty in evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis (Freud), and recent empirical psychology. Also CPLT 951a.
GMAN 770au, German Literature after World War II: Turning Points. Ingeborg Glier. TTh 9–10.15
Introduction to young writers intent on finding their own voices in a ruined country and in a culture of uncertain future; their attempts to come to terms with the past and to shape the present; new forms of prose, drama, and poetry; Gruppe 47. Authors include Aichinger, Bachmann, Böll, Celan, Eich, Grass, Handke, Müller, and Wolf.
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