Results for GERGEN

Freshman and Sophomore Preference. This course focuses on letters and diaries written by resisters to the Nazi regime, in particular, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans and Sopie Scholl, and James von Moltke. The course includes one resistance novel "Every man dies alone" by Hans Fallada.

Published in 1924, the Magic Mountain is a novel of education, tracing the intellectual growth of a budding engineer through a maze of intellectual encounters during a seven-year sojourn in a sanatorium set high in the Swiss Alps. It engages with the key themes of modernism: the relativity of time, the impact of psychoanalysis, the power of myth, and an extended dispute between an optimistic belief in progress and a pessimistic vision of human nature. Through its detailed discussion of disease (tuberculosis) this remarkable text connects the study of medicine to the humanities.

Germany's relations to the Middle East have been shaped by recent events (9/11) and a long cultural history, dating from the emergence of "Oriental" studies in the romantic era. "Orient" and "Occident" came to be understood as cultural, religious, political, and social opposites. Special focus on how these views have changed over time and how they informed German and, more broadly, European foreign policy and culture through literature, history, cinema and politics. Readings include: Herodotus, Rushdie, Wheatcroft, Said, Osterhammel, Wolfgang von Goethe, Herf, McMeekin, Boveri, etc. Taught in English, reading knowledge of German required.

Germany's relations to the Middle East after 1945 are marked by two poles: political-economic interests in the Arab world and "special relations," based on historical moral obligations, towards Israel. Emphasis on the exploration of the roots of contemporary Germany's politics in the Middle East; the concept of "moral obligation," its validity, and shifting meaning in the realm of "Realpolitik." Readings include: McMeekin, Herf, Witzthum, Buettner, Achcar, etc. Taught in English.

This seminar explores psychoanalysis at the juncture of its multiple meanings: as a therapeutic practice; as a theory of the functioning of the human mind; as a method of textual interpretation; as a cultural critique and a genealogy attempting to account for the origins of morality, religion, art, and other social institutions. In addition to Freud's major works, readings include short writings by Nietzsche, Ferenczi, Lacan, Laplanche, Kristeva, and Irigaray.

This course traces the history and culture of a country that disappeared not too long ago, but about which most of us tent to know very little. On February 27, 1947, the Allied Control Council issues it's decree no. 46, which dissolved Prussia "in the interest of maintaining world peace and security" and "the restoration of political life in Germany on a democratic basis." Prussia, the Council continued, "has since forever been a carrier of militarism and reaction in Germany." Many of the stereotypical images of Germany and German-ness, and certainly most negative images of Germany, from the spiked helmet to the iron cross, the Red Baron and the Blitzkrieg, are bound up with Prussia, its military and its ruling class. Prussia's militaristic culture not only brought on a series of increasingly brutal wars, while also often being a beacon of Enlightenment and religious tolerance; it brought together Germany's most traditional backwater with its most progressive metropolis. This course will focus on its flourishing cultural life, its novelists, painters, architects, composers, philosophers, economists, satirists, military and political theorists. In tracing the kingdom's history and its culture, we will draw on a number of texts ranging from the 1750s to the early 1920s. As this course fulfills the WRITE 2 requirement, we will also explore different ways to reflect on these texts in writing, to draw together and present information, and how to critique and revise presentations. All readings and writing will be in English. (WR-2)

Required gateway course for Philosophical and Literary Thought; crosslisted in departments sponsoring the Philosophy and Literature track: majors should register in their home department; non-majors may register in any sponsoring department. Introduction to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Issues may include authorship, selfhood, truth and fiction, the importance of literary form to philosophical works, and the ethical significance of literary works. Texts include philosophical analyses of literature, works of imaginative literature, and works of both philosophical and literary significance. Authors may include Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Borges, Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas, Pavel, and Pippin.

An examination of conservative critiques of modernity in the early 20th century, including topics such as German nationalism, the war experience, responses to democracy, anti-liberalism, cultural pessimism in the decline of the West, crises of authority, technology, geopolitics, existentialism, and tradition. Readings from authors such as Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rudolf Borchardt. Consideration of conservative exile authors such as Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt. Readings in either English or German.

Preference to freshmen. The art of memory as one of the main characteristics of modernity. The relationship between memory and modernism through major narrative texts: Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigger; James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and Marcel Proust's Combray.. How memory is represented in the novels, and its role in the perception of external reality. How memory helps to constitute personal identity. The metaphors used to define memory. Readings include theoretical and critical essays, and primary texts.

Some of the most haunting literary voices of the 20th century emerged from the Jewish communities of Eastern and Central Europe. The Jewishness of the modernists is thematized, asking whether it contributed to shared attitudes toward text, history, or identity. Their works are situated in specific linguistic traditions: Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, or German. Primary readings from Ansky, Bialik, Mandelstam, Babel, Schulz, Kafka, Celan; secondary readings in history, E. European literature, and theory, including Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and Arendt.

This seminar explores psychoanalysis at the juncture of its multiple meanings: as a therapeutic practice; as a theory of the functioning of the human mind; as a method of textual interpretation; as a cultural critique and a genealogy attempting to account for the origins of morality, religion, art, and other social institutions. In addition to Freud's major works, readings include short writings by Nietzsche, Ferenczi, Lacan, Laplanche, Kristeva, and Irigaray.

This course will consider G.W.F. Hegel's voluminous "Aesthetics" in its totality, while placing the work into the wider context of Hegel's mature system. Part of the course will be devoted to considering Hegel's legacy in nineteenth and twentieth century aesthetics, both within the Hegelian tradition and outside of it. All readings and class discussions in English

European culture long relied on a narrative of inexorable human progress. Starting in the 19th century, this triumphalist narrative was shadowed by another tradition that rejected such trust in progress. The pessimistic tradition in Europe in literature, philosophy, the study of history, anthropology, and psychology; the distinction between pessimism in the fields of morality, culture, and intellectual life. Authors include Giacomo Leopardi, Arthur Schopenhauer, Lautréamont, T. S. Eliot, and Sigmund Freud.

History of German cinema in the Weimar Republic, Nazi era, and the immediate aftermath of WWII. German thought, political valences, and social potential as portrayed in film.

The afterlives of mythological themes from the operas and music dramas of Richard Wagner (The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Ring Cycle, Parsifal) in literature, modernist aesthetics, fascist politics, film, philosophy, and contemporary media.

Experience viewed as a source of orientation irreducible to discursive knowledge in the 19th century. The encounter with art as the paradigm of experience; lived vs. cumulative experience; the modern crisis of experience; experiential openness and the authority conferred by experience. If it is neither pleasure nor knowledge sought in art, could it be experience? Role of Goethe in the cult of experience (Faust I, Elective Affinities). Montaigne, Hegel, Emerson, Rilke, Benjamin, Koselleck, and Gadamer.

History of German cinema in the Weimar Republic, Nazi era, and the immediate aftermath of WWII. German thought, political valences, and social potential as portrayed in film.

The political culture of much of interwar Europe, especially in Germany, Austria and Italy, was permeated by political violence. In its different forms - political murder, street battles, political purges and state terror - it fed on the imagination of an ongoing bloody civil war which fundamentally challenged liberal assumptions about compromise politics. By looking at these acts of violence in detail, their symbolic function and practical voluntarism, performance politics will be analysed as a political code for fascism in power - and more generally for modern fundamentalism.

German history in the 20th Century seems to be a succession of political generations, generated by the experience of war and political upheaval. The first "war youth generation" was saddled with defeat, the second with disillusionment, the 45ers compete with the 68ers over their respective roles in democratizing West Germany, while the 89ers in the GDR seem to have missed their chance to achieve full generational status. When analysing these different forms of generation building it seems, however, that shared experience only serves as a trigger for hegemonic struggles over memory cultures, and generation-talk as a peculiarly German way to settle biographical accounts.