Courses

(Course description and title forthcoming)

(Course description forthcoming)

(Course description forthcoming)

(Course description forthcoming.)

(Course Description Forthcoming)

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. Pending interest and enrollment, this course will also have an optional LxC section in German.

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 European 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 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? 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. Materials will include Poe, Foucault, Ginzburg, Droste-Hülshoff, Christie, Doyle, Kleist, Eco among others as well as   a selection of films. Readings and discussions in English.

Sometimes described as a dark subset of the popular crime fiction genre, Nordic noir has come to command particular attention, not least because of its strong focus on the Nordic landscape. Scandinavian crime fiction also provides a window into the welfare state, offering an unsparing critique of the social and political model. Finally, there is the strange dissonance between the violence of this genre and the mild-mannered countries from which it derives. Our reading begins with the Swedish married couple, Sjöwall and Wahlöö and The Locked Room from their police procedural “Novel of a Crime” series (1965-1975). From there we proceed to another Swede, Henning Mankell, and his first Kurt Wallander novel, Faceless Killers. Next, we take up Norwegian Jo Nesbø’s The Redbreast, the third of the Harry Hole series. Former Norwegian Justice Minister turned crime novelist Anne Holt, authored our fourth novel, 1222, a snow-bound homage to Christie’s Mousetrap. We will close with Ekman’s short and compelling Under the Snow, first published in 1962, but not translated into English until 1997.

Why did a University of Chicago undergraduate student set out in 1949 for Pacific Palisades, California, to visit the Nobel-prize-winning author Thomas Mann?
Susan Sontag, who would become one of the most celebrated writers in the United States, wanted to speak with the author of the novel that had shaped her thinking more than any other: The Magic Mountain. This course will afford you the opportunity to study that work, one of the most provocative novels of modern literature. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a window onto the entirety of modern European thought. It provides, at the same time, a telling perspective on the crisis of European culture prior to and following on World War I. In Thomas Mann’s phrase, The Magic Mountain is a time-novel: a novel about its time, but also a novel about human being in time. About life, death, reason, love, despair, and hope, against the background of European intellectual history. For anyone interested in the configuration of European intellectual life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Mann’s great (and challenging) novel is indispensable reading. Lectures will relate Mann’s novel to its great European counterparts, to the traditions of European thought from Voltaire to Georg Lukacs, from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Heidegger, from Marx to Max Weber. This is a lecture course, with discussion sections. All readings and lectures in English. (German-language discussion session available.)

In this course, we will examine a broad range of films produced under the National Socialist regime, from mass spectacles to domestic melodramas, from comedies to hagiographic bio-pics to dramatized propaganda. Throughout we will seek to explore the national, formal, and ideological particularity of these films and to trace their dramaturgical, political, and conceptual logics. What, we will ask, constitutes the National Socialist (film) aesthetic?  Readings in film history and cultural theory.  While there are no prerequisites for this class, a commitment to close readings – of films and criticism – as well as a commitment to lively, thoughtful engagement will be essential.  All course materials will be made available in English. 

Trained as an art historian with an expertise in Renaissance art, Warburg morphed into a historian of images (i.e., Bildwissenschaft) and – more broadly – into a historian of culture. We will trace Warburg’s cultural historical method as it develops primarily from philology, but also art history, anthropology, the comparative study of religions, and evolutionary biology. How does Warburg read culture? What is his methodological approach for examining a wide variety of cultural artifacts ranging from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Poliziano’s poetry, and Dürer’s etchings to postal stamps and news photographs? How can these artifacts be vehicles for cultural memory? And how does the transmission of cultural memory in artworks manifest itself in different media such as literary texts, religious processions, astrological treatises, photography, and painting? Moreover, how does Warburg’s work help us contextualize and historicize “interdisciplinarity” today? This course explores Aby Warburg in the context of other thinkers of the time including Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Alois Riegl, and others. Readings and discussions in English. Undergraduates and MAPH students welcome.

This class explores a basic tenet of Marxist, feminist and black political thought: to the extent to which we carry marks of oppression, we have knowledge of the relations under which we suffer, and to the extent to which we are unmarked oppressors, we are ignorant of the relations in which we inflict suffering. Since each of us is marked in some ways and unmarked in others, our relating to one another is made up of shifting constellations of intersecting such knowledges and ignorances. The class looks at historical as well as recent treatments of the marked-unmarked contrast from sociology, political philosophy, literature, and the arts. Key concepts include double consciousness, standpoint theory, intersectionality, phenomenology of class, race and gender. Artists and literary authors include Anne Imhof, Cassils, Jerome Ellis, Maria Chavez, Claudia Rankine, Kim de l'Horizon. Theorists include Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, Audre Lorde, Donna Haraway, Charles Mills, Wayne Brekhus, Linda Alcoff.

As a form, the novel seems ill-suited to political messaging. The very act of reading a novel stagnates political action insofar as it demands isolation and a retreat from collective life. Then there are the pitfalls of misinterpretation. Conventionally, novels include a variety of characters with differing perspectives: how to ensure that the reader understands which is the right one? Finally, how can a novel, after it has enabled its readers to withdraw into a fictional world, successfully motivate them to get up and intervene in society? Yet despite these challenges, the novel has also been the chosen genre for many writers, both reactionary and revolutionary, who aim to convince the public of their cause. In this course, we will read political novels and their theories from the twentieth century to today, paying special attention to how writers adapt narrative forms to try to control the inherent ambiguity of literary discourse. Readings will include theoretical texts by Benjamin, Lukács, Sartre, Adorno, Jameson, and Rancière; novels by Orwell, Grass, and Houellebecq, among others.

A central experimental genre of Early Romanticism, the fragment was defined by Friedrich Schlegel in Athenäums-Fragment 206 as: “entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.” This seminar will consider fragments both conceptually and as isolated texts that are, however, gathered together materially in medial collections such as encyclopedias and albums. What is the relationship of the fragment to totality or coherence? What kinds of knowledge and reading practices does the fragment presuppose? What is the relationship between the literary fragment and other kinds of fragmentary artifacts such as ruins, torsos, and cut-outs? Readings will include fragments and fragmentary works by, among others, Winckelmann, Lichtenberg, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, and Karoline von Günderrode.