Courses

Modern Yiddish children's literature developed during a time of enormous political and social upheaval across the Yiddish-speaking world. Writers addressed an audience of children to explain, reassure, inspire, and educate them toward identities as Jews in a complex modern world. In this course we will read children's literature in the Yiddish originals and will discuss in Yiddish. Students will be expected to produce oral presentations on a story or author, short blog-style responses in Yiddish to the texts we read together, and a collaborative creative final project. This course is designed to accommodate students of a variety of language levels - the minimum requirement is one year of Yiddish or its equivalent, determined by the instructor.

This course will primarily be a workshop for sharing, revising and refining our own translations‐in‐progress from Yiddish literature. Drawing from a corpus of Yiddish texts written in or about Chicago, we will explore and translate within a variety of genres. Each week, in addition to our continuing work on translation projects, we will study the work of translation. This will include comparing different English translations of Yiddish literary texts, as well as examining Yiddish translations of English texts, to discuss how translators make decisions and the impact these decisions have on the resulting text; reading (in English) and discussing (in Yiddish) major theoretical texts about translation studies; and examining Yiddish language texts about translation. All of this study will inform our own translations. At the end of the term, the class will create profile of polished translations of Chicago Yiddish writing, together with translators' introductions, which (with the permission of the students) may be distributed to future courses on Chicago Jewish history and culture.

The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again," announced the critic Theodor Adorno on German radio in 1966. By this he meant not only the education of children, but also the re-education of the German people. After World War II, with the Third Reich in ruins and confronted with the horrors of the Holocaust, Germans were forced to reckon with their past as they attempted to build the country anew, entering into a period of dramatic political and cultural reorientation. This course traces the history of "rebuilding" Germany after 1945, from the immediate postwar period through the East/West division to reunification to today. Drawing on a broad range of source material, including film, literature, government documents, art, and architecture, this interdisciplinary seminar studies the limits and possibilities of conceiving of Germany as a post-war Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), and its implications for German cultural production. We will pay special attention to the way that debates from the postwar era still reverberate today, for instance in racial discrimination and the rise of the German far-right. This course is required for all Germanic Studies majors and minors. Readings and discussion in English.

The political focus will allow discussions of the land/sea distinction as legal space, piracy, trade, colonialism, symbolism of ships, and environmental issues. Course will be taught in German.

Berlin, with its fractured histories, has been a crucible for artists, poets, filmmakers, and cultural critics to engage with thinking about the city. The period of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) has often been described with the metaphor of “dancing on the volcano.” What does this term, suggestive of freedom, experimentation, but also impending doom, mean?  With Berlin’s unprecedented expansion in the nineteenth- century and early twentieth centuries, distinctive new modes of perception and experience connected to the metropolis gave shape to experimental literary works. Cultural critics such as Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin examined the impact of cities on the psyches and bodies of their inhabitants. And new media such as film captured the realities of urban life in stunning detail (as in Ruttmann’s Symphony of a City), while painting attempted to depict the convulsive movements of the city.

Edgar Allan Poe, when accused of being too much under the influence of German literary sources, claimed that: “if in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul." In this course, we will read a selection of German crime fiction not only to be in a better position to judge Poe’s protestations, but more importantly, to familiarize ourselves with a selection of canonical German writers as well as with the history and the characteristics of the genre. Why is crime fiction one of the most popular literary genres today? How does the German tradition differ from well-known whodunnits such as those by Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie? What is the relationship between the genre and society? We will consider – among other questions – the figure of the detective, the history of policing, different concepts of justice and guilt, the status of clues, indices, evidence. Readings will include Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist, Schiller, Droste-Hülshoff, and others. Readings and discussions in English.

In this class, we will explore the fantasies and anxieties surrounding money in modern economic theory and literary fiction. Is it possible to buy happiness, or does money corrupt the soul? Does having, getting, losing, or wanting money fundamentally change one’s identity or ethics? Is money a thing (e.g. gold), or is it a fiction that stands in for social relations (Marx)? What would it mean to conceive of money not just as a price or value, but as a sign, a language, or even a structure of reality? We will investigate these and other questions through pairings of theoretical and literary texts that deal with specific financial issues (e.g. usury; gold, paper, and digital currencies; the ethical limits of what can be bought and sold) from the seventeenth century onward. 

Readings and discussion will be in English; where relevant, texts will also be made available in German. 

This course is conceived as a pathway to the Humanities and an introduction to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). A range of Nietzsche’s work will be considered, but the focus will be on three themes to which Nietzsche recurred throughout his writing career:
Culture: Nietzsche’s thought on the anthropological roots and the expressive forms of human meaning-making: Apollo/Dionysus; Gesture; Music; Metaphor
Critique: the vacuous character of modern culture; romanticism, decadence, nihilism.
Self-Transcendence: individual self-realization and freedom.
The selection of these themes is motivated by the fact that they may be considered as fundamental dimensions of humanistic inquiry. Students will develop a sound understanding of a writer whose intellectual influence continues to grow, but at the same time they will become acquainted with such core concepts of humanistic/interpretive inquiry as form, expression, ideology, genealogy, discourse, self-fashioning, individuality, and value.

The German Occupation of Norway, which lasted from April 9, 1940, to May 7, 1945, is indisputably the most significant event in modern Norwegian history. The aim of this course is to use literature of and about this period to characterize the Occupation experience in Norway. While our texts come primarily from Norwegians, one novel is German and two others, American. Given the context for these works, we will consider them not only as fiction, but also as history and even propaganda. Ultimately, we will address the issue of national myth-making: To what extent have Norwegians mythologized their Occupation experience and is this apparent in our texts?

In 1910, Vienna, with a population of 2 million was the 6th largest city in the world; it was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multiethnic and multilingual state. As the “cradle of modernism and fascism, liberalism and totalitarianism” (to use a phrase from The Economist), Vienna around 1900 has fundamentally altered the way we understand ourselves in the West. In this course, we will examine the cultural currents that came together in the city and have since determined our self-image as psychological, sexual, gendered, and political beings. We will explore these and other revolutions in our sense of identity through the lens of literature and art in conjunction with other historical materials. Readings and discussions in English. Undergrads and MAPH students welcome.

Kafka prohibited images of Gregor Samsa. In a 1915 letter to his publisher, he stipulated that the insect should not be drawn, not even to be seen from a distance. Why? Along with Henry James, Mallarmé, and others, Kafka seemed to fear that illustration would diminish the power of the text to “illustrate” or illuminate in its own way, as Hillis Miller has put it. The study of illustration has, however, emerged as a new interdisciplinary field in recent years, though illustration has often been neglected as an ornamental “handmaiden” to the printed word or as a commercial appendage to the book. This seminar will approach the topic with a focus on the heyday of the illustrated book, the nineteenth century, from the perspectives of book history, literary criticism, art history, word and image studies, and translation and adaptation studies.

Topics to be considered to include: paratextuality; illustration as translation and/or adaptation; extra-illustration; illustration and authorship; text-image interactions or non-interactions; illustration and mass production; photography and illustration.

From 2000-2018, the graphic novelist Jason Lutes published Berlin, a sprawling, formally inventive, & idiosyncratic account of life in the German capital city during the years just prior to National Socialism. Court Theatre, the Tony Award winning professional theater on the UChicago campus, has commissioned the playwright Mickle Maher to prepare an adaptation of Lutes’ graphic novelfor Court’s 2024-25 season; DavidLevin is the collaborating dramaturg. In this interdisciplinary team-taught seminar, Maher and Levin invite students into the process of adaptation, exploring a range of practical, conceptual & artistic challenges. The course willtake place in two locations: at Court Theatre (where we willattend initial rehearsals for the world premiere production) and in a theater lab on campus, where we will consider a range of critical and creative materials – e.g., Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home or Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 film “Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis” – to establish a dialogue between Lutes’ graphic novel, its progenitors, and the work in Court’s rehearsal room. An additional & significant component of our work will involve creative exercises. Students will prepare adaptations of their own – first, of Lutes’ novel, then of works of their own choosing. Artists from Court’s production will join us for workshop sessions throughout the quarter. The seminar aims to serve as a creative and critical forum, exploring the challenges of adaptation while generating diverse forms of practice

This seminar will focus on the work of three of the most important poets in the German language. In addition to the poems (and a few prose works), we will read various exemplary works of commentary by both philosophers and literary scholars. The poems will be available in both German and English translation.

What does it mean to ‘get cultured’? Why—and how—do we do it? Does an education in the arts and letters make us more moral, more intelligent, more resistant to authority—or perhaps more submissive? These questions are at the center of debates about the place of cultural learning in the contemporary world, but our century was not the first to think critically about the social and political functions of this form of education. This course investigates how students, educators, writers, and artists conceptualized the aims and means of becoming cultured from the 1700s forward, focusing on European history and connecting it to the concerns of the present. We will pay particularly close attention to both formal and informal means of cultural education, and to the ways in which these practices have been understood to produce social structures of class, gender, and race. Readings will draw from the fields of history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and art history. At the end of the quarter, students will be asked to design their own fantasy syllabus for “getting cultured in nine weeks.” 

Karl Marx’s account of “those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails” remains one of the most influential yet contentious theories ever committed to paper. Often invoked in times of turmoil, his name has come to mean different things to different people. Yet it is not always clear in fact just what his theory is, doubtless in part because his writings are quite challenging to read. In this course, students will engage fundamentally with Marx’s writings to gain a clear idea of his theory for themselves. We will do so by reading volume 1 of Marx’s Capital as well as selections from volumes 2 and 3 and Theories of Surplus Value. We will approach Marx own his own terms, considering context and comparison with other highlights from the history of political economy only where they are relevant. Topics which we will address include Marx’s view of “alienation”, “commodity fetishism”, and “class struggle”, but also labor, employment, money, capital, profit, and crisis.

We will be reading Paul Reiter’s new translation of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (Princeton 2024), which students must bring to every class. The course will be held in English and there are no prerequisites. But students should read Marx’s short essay, “Wage Labor and Capital”, to prepare in advance of our first meeting.

In this course, we will read the major German social and cultural theorists of the twentieth century, among them Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann. Readings will be available in both English and German, discussions will be in English.

This team-taught course explores the challenges of staging Richard Wagner’s sprawling 19th-century tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung in the 21st century. The course will offer an introduction to The Ring, including its complicated place in history (including its reception and production history), and how it has been thought about in recent musicology and critical theory. But first and foremost, we will be exploring how the piece is being staged today. To that end, we will explore four productions of the tetralogy that are currently being prepared at leading opera houses around the world – in Munich, London, Berlin, and Oslo – speaking, via Zoom, with artistic directors and the production teams about their ideas and ambitions. What are the interpretive challenges and opportunities in staging this mammoth work? How do these productions seek to engage the tetralogy’s exceedingly complicated aesthetic ambitions, political baggage, and production history? And how do specific geographical, cultural, and historical conditions affect the artistic project of each production? Our discussions will encompass a range of fields, approaches, and topics. Among the themes we plan to examine are the aspiration to aesthetic totalization, the politics of community, the relationship between canonicity and critique, the notion of distress or emergency (the German term is Not), and some astonishingly lurid fantasies of family life—mostly of family dissolution. Moreover, we will approach the question of the relevance of The Ring and of opera (including Wagner’s ambitions to create “the artwork of the future”) in our time. Insofar as Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor Adorno stand at the origins of critical Wagner studies, their work will inform ours. But we will also consider more recent work, including writings by Carolyn Abbate, Alain Badiou, Nicholas Ridout, and Slavoj Zizek. Suitable for advanced undergraduates and beginning MA & PhD students. A knowledge of German and/or music history is welcome but not required. An active interest in – and a willingness to think critically and creatively about – the practices of interpretation on stage is essential.

Friedrich Nietzsche was as much a critic (of literature, art, music, culture) as he was a philosopher, and the purpose of this seminar is to bring out the conception of criticism that unfolds across his work. Doing so will require some comparisons: with the Enlightenment (Lessing) and Romantic (esp. the Schlegel brothers) conceptions of criticism, but also with notions of criticism advanced, for example, by the New Critics, by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, and in contemporary work on aesthetics. Our main focus, however, will be on pertinent writings by Nietzsche, including the early essay on “Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense,” Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations, relevant aphorisms from Human, All Too Human, Dawn, Joyful Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and Twilight of the Idols, concluding with Case of Wagner. The topic of criticism in Nietzsche is not separable, of course, from the core themes of Nietzsche’s work and the seminar may therefore be considered as one avenue of approach to Nietzsche’s overall achievement. Major positions in the boundless secondary literature on Nietzsche will be considered.

This course is open to graduate students. Advanced undergraduate students with a special interest in the topic may be admitted after consultation with the instructor.