Graduate Courses 2009/10

"a" = courses tought in the fall semester
"b" = courses tought in the spring semester
"u" = courses also open to undergraduates

GMAN 536au/CPLT 536au
Around Kafka
Henry Sussman
T 3:30-5:20

A course treating Kafka as a distinctive and indispensable Imaginary as well as a particular author, mutating stunningly into a plethora of adaptations, whether by Beckett, Bernhard, Welles, Murakami, or Pamuk, and into the graphic novel as well.

GMAN 561bu/CPLT 535b
Literary Ethics: Dinesen and Sebald
Carol Jacobs
M 1:30-3.20

We concentrate on the prose works of Isak Dinesen and W.G. Sebald. In reading these singularly popular writers, we think through how literature and ethics redefine one another, the way in which the performance of the work of art and, specifically, reflections on the nature of language and representability, demand a rethinking of conscience and moral gesture.

GMAN 562bu
Theories of Time
Paul North
TH 3:30-5:20

In this class we read texts that consciously try to regain time as a concept, category, or intuition after the European enlightenment. Following a singular development, starting from a theorization of the transcendental subject of experience by means of time in Kant, we move toward the pointed dismantling of this configuration in Heidegger, interestingly enough, also by means of time. Bookending the course—but not merely that—the first and last volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time help explain the urgency that seems to characterize the gesture toward time in what has been called "modernity."

GMN 625a/GMST 294aU
Confidence Games
Kirk Wetters
M 1:30-3:30

Starting from Orson Welles’ "F for Fake," which will articulate the main questions of the course, we will examine some of Welles’ immediate sources of inspiration: Clifford Irving (including the recent film about his forged biography of Howard Hughes,” The Hoax”) and the art forger Elmyr d’Hory. From here we will look back at the literary tradition of the con artist: 18th Century German texts (particularly Goethe and Schiller) inspired by the figure of Cagliostro, Herman Melvilles’s "The Confidence Man," Thomas Mann’s "Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man" and André Gide’s "The Counterfeiters." To conclude the seminar, the class will choose an additional contemporary con (perhaps James Frey’s "A Million Litlle Pieces") to investigate in detail. The final meeting of the course will be devoted to the Grand Inquisitor scene from Dostoyevsky’s "Brothers Karamazov" and Ben Stiller’s "Tropic Thunder."

GMAN 636bu/CPLT 902b/FILM 718bu
Theatricality in Film
Brigitte Peucker
T 3:30-5:20, screening M 7

This course examines the multiple implications of theatricality in and for the cinema: theatricality as excess; the appropriation of theatrical modes for film; theatricality as modernist self-reflexivity; performance and the relation of theatricality to subjectivity (performing the self); ritual and re-enactment in film; theatricality and the real; the material image. Readings by Arnheim, Bazin, Bateson, Barthes, Bell, Butler, Cavell, Egginton, Fried, Mitry, and others. Films by von Sternberg, Bergman, Hitchcock, Fassbinder, Haneke, Pabst, Wilder, Greenaway, von Trier, Kiarostami, Kubrick.

GMAN 647au/CPLT 784a/PHIL 605a
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
Rainer Nägele
TH 1:30-3:20

Close reading of Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie. Reading knowledge of German required.

GMAN 652au/CPLT 840a/ FILM 840a/RUSS 712a
Moscow/Berlin: Leftist Avantgardes and Interwar Modernism
Katerina Clark, Katie Trumpener
W 1:30-3:30

From 1918 to the mid-1930s, Moscow and Berlin were both central gathering points for left-wing modernists. Each city developed its own modes of modernism, yet in sustained dialogue, given massive Russian emigration to Berlin after 1918, the Weimar obsession with early Soviet aesthetics (and cinema), intellectuals traveling in both directions, and the large-scale emigration of German leftists to the Soviet Union after 1933. The final week or two of the course end by considering the shaping influence of Soviet intellectuals (and German emigrants returning from Moscow) on East Berlin "late modernism" of the 1940s and ‘50s. Centered on literature and film, the course also considers a wide array of art forms (including painting, photography, architecture, music, and aesthetic theory). Works by modernists such as Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov, Kosinzev, Trauberg, Shklovsky, El Lissitsky, Rodchenko, Malevich, Shostakovich, Tretiakov, Babel, Lukacs, Moholy-Nagy, Benjamin, Brecht, Richter, Beckmann, Schwitters, Grosz, Heartfield, Döblin, Ruttmann, van der Rohe, Eisler, Busch.Texts are available in English translation; knowledge of Russian and/or German very helpful. At the first meeting, students help shape the final syllabus.

GMAN 660au/CPLT 783a
Transformations of the Classical Elegy by Goethe, Hölderlin, and Rilke
Rainer Nägele
W 3:30-5:20

Concentrating on the elegies of Goethe, Hölderlin, and Rilke, the seminar analyzes the transformation of the classical Greek elegy form in modern times. Reading knowledge of German is required.

GMAN 672bu
Austrian Novels after Musil
Kirk Wetters
M 3:30-5:20

This seminar explores a constellation of major Austrian novels in the decades and generations following the titanic modernist novels of figures such as Musil, Canetti, and Broch. We concentrate, to begin with, on three works: Heimito von Doderer’s Die Strudelhofstiege, Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, and Thomas Bernhard’s Auslöschung. (Interested students are encouraged to start reading these novels over the summer.) If time allows, we consider works of additional authors, for example Albert Paris Gütersloh, Hans Lebert, Marlen Haushofer, Dorothea Zeeman, Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, and Robert Menasse.

GMAN 673bu/CPLT 625b
Advocates and Representatives
Rüdiger Campe
W 3:30-5:20

In contradistinction to our familiar thinking on communication as two parties speaking about the world, the course develops a triangular scene in which one person speaks on behalf of another person before a third party. This is the model of communication in law (in the idea of advocacy), religions (in the idea of intercession), and politics (in the idea of representation). Readings are taken from ancient rhetoric (Aristotle, Quintilian), Jewish and religious texts (on the “paraclete” or helper), as well as modern social and literary theory (Parsons, Derrida). We also examine selected scenes from ancient and modern drama as well as paradigmatic works by Kafka, Canetti, and Celan.

GMAN 674b
Designing German Classicism
Rüdiger Campe
T 1:30-3:20

The course explores the development of Weimar classicism in Germany in the era of European Romanticism and the French Revolution. Schiller’s and Goethe’s theoretical and poetic works between 1790 and 1805 unfold a new thinking of form in aesthetics, epistemology, and political theory. Works to be read closely will include Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Mankind, The Bride of Messina, and poetry around “The Gods of Greece,” and Goethe’s Conversations of German Refugees and sonnets.

GMAN 676au
Narrating Risk and Contingency
Rüdiger Campe
TH 3:30-5:20

In this course we focus on narrative works from the era of classical probabilistic philosophies. Beginning with Defoe and Wieland, we read narrative texts by Defoe, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, E.T.A. Hofmann, Poe, and others. In the background of our readings we look at the history of probabilistic thinking and contemporary debates on risk and risk taking. Contingency as a basic element of narration is discussed throughout.

GMAN 677au
Passions, 1600-1800
Rüdiger Campe
T 1:30-3:20

The course explores theories of passion from Descartes and Hobbes to Baumgarten, Burke, and Kant, and the relationship between literary representation from Shakespeare and Racine to Richardson and Goethe. Theoretical questions concern psychology and epistemology, aesthetics and anthropology. The theatrical performance of passion (seventeenth century) is at issue, as is its narrative representation (eighteenth century).