Courses

In this seminar, we will read stories by one of the most prominent representatives of Romanticism, the German writer, composer, and painter E.T.A. Hoffmann who wrote “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” on which Tchaikovsky would later base his ballet. His stories of bizarre yet psychologically compelling characters will introduce us to the “dark side” of Romanticism as well as to its fantastical aspects. Students will read Hoffmann’s extraordinary stories, develop skills of literary analysis, and engage in historical inquiry by tracing the way in which Hoffmann’s texts engage with the context of their time, in particular with the history of medicine (mesmerism, early psychiatry), alchemy, and law (Hoffmann worked as a legal official). Readings and discussions in English. (Original texts will be made available for those who read German). 

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.

In this course, we will embark on a journey through German cultural history from the point of view of the sea. We will engage with what recent Blue Humanities scholarship has termed “maritime world pictures” and the “poetic history of the ocean” (Søren Frank). Our discussions will focus on the political significance of imagined and real maritime spaces. The sea will emerge as a site of intersecting themes in modern social and natural life—including natural beauty and catastrophe, global trade and colonial subjugation, adventure and law, environmental habitats and media representation. We will examine how humans demarcate their habitats from aquatic worlds, imagine open waters as threatening or sociable spaces, and develop new ways of representing the sea in eras of nautical industrialization and environmental crisis. Our journey will encompass a broad range of cultural artifacts from the seventeenth century to the present, such as translations of scripture, canonical narratives of natural disaster, pirate stories, legal texts, paintings, video art, and documentaries. Readings and discussions will be conducted 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.

This class explores the fictions, fantasies, and anxieties surrounding money in modern economic theory, literary fiction, and film from early capitalism to the present. Bringing economic and monetary theory into conversation with literature and film, we will examine how money is more than just a price or value for commodities, but in fact acts as a primary mediator for human desires and social relations, indeed becoming a structure of reality as such. If money truly “makes the world go round,” as the common saying goes, then it is not just a subject of fiction, but itself a key social fiction (as Marx already suggests). Throughout the class, we will therefore explore fictions of money from two interrelated perspectives: 1) How is money represented in fiction? (e.g. Is it a source of social cohesion or disruption, even decay? Is it tied to specific objects, human practices, or desires? Who has access to money and why?); and 2) How is money tied to other sorts of social fictions, e.g. fictions about class, gender, race, and religion? Moreover, how is money tied to fiction as an aesthetic category? Readings will span the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, covering theory from Smith and Marx to Simmel, and creative texts from Tieck, Hauff, Schnitzler, Dürrenmatt, Fassbinder, and Mambéty, among others.

Readings/viewing 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.

Decadence was probably the most daring and most panned movement in European art and culture around 1900. Synonymous with hedonism, excess, transgression, eroticism, and cultural decline, decadent art and literature were often stigmatized as amoral and "unhealthy." Yet Decadence has continued to be a source of inspiration and fascination. Recent English language examples like the films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Sean Baker, or fiction by Ottessa Moshfegh and Hanya Yanagihara can be traced back to this movement and show the genre’s endurance. This course seeks to introduce students to the most important decadent motifs, themes and characters via intense intellectual engagement with decadent literature, visual art and film. Readings will include both historical and more contemporary examples by Arthur Schnitzler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Jünger, Richard Strauss, R.W. Fassbinder, and Ulrike Ottinger among others. Readings and discussion in German.

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?

Along with Don Quixote and Don Juan, Faust is one of the major “mythic” figures of modernity. His story – centered on his pact with the devil – has been taken up by major and minor writers. Faust is also a figure of image, comics, music, and film. His omnipresence in culture qualifies his tale as a “modern myth.” Unquestionably, the most ambitious and significant rendering of the Faust myth is achieved in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s two-part drama: Faust, the genesis of which extends across Goethe’s entire creative life. This seminar is devoted to that work. We will study the entirety of Faust I and selected parts of Faust II. The aim of the seminar is to provide sound knowledge of a literary masterpiece that is deeply relevant to our present historical moment. Our primary focus will be on understanding the structure and meaning of the work with respect to this question: What is the vision of modernity (that is, our world) that comes to the fore in Goethe’s tragedy? In particular, we will highlight issues bearing on: a) modernity and knowledge; b) modernity and love/passion; c) the possibility of tragedy in modernity; c) modernity with respect to politics, colonization, and nature. Science, magic, and myth will concern us throughout. The class will be conducted as a seminar and will be based on an English translation. Competence in German is not required, although of course welcome. Participation is limited to 15 students. (College students only.) Students are required to purchase the edition: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I and II, edited and translated by Stuart Atkins, with a new introduction by David E. Wellbery (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014 (Princeton Classics edition).

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.

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.

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.

The concept of “modernism” embraces a number of artistic trends and movements that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe (and beyond) and continued well into the twentieth century. The task of the seminar is to exfoliate core features of that concept by examining works of literature and visual art that are understood as “modernist” as well as works of criticism and philosophical contributions devoted to understanding what modernism is. As the seminar title indicates, the work of Rainer Maria Rilke will be an important point of reference. We will study his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as well as selected poems and essays. Since Paris is the locus of (much of) Rilke’s novel, we will look back to Baudelaire, especially his essay The Painter of Modern Life, while considering his much-discussed poem À une passante (To a passerby) along with relevant commentaries. Moreover, the fact that Rilke worked on the novel during a period when he was also deeply engaged with Cezanne’s painting affords an opportunity to consider certain paintings by Cézanne. Here we will be guided by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay Cezanne’s Doubt, Robert Pippin’s study After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (2014), and T.J. Clark’s recent book If these Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present (2022). The course is conceived as a participatory (discussion-intensive) seminar, conducted at a graduate level. English translations will be provided for works in French and German, but seminar discussions will be dotted by references to the original works. Participation by interested undergraduates who have done advanced work in the arts and/or philosophy is possible but requires permission from the instructor