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Writing about various topics in German Studies. Topics based on student interests: current politics, economics, European affairs, start-ups in Germany. Intensive focus on writing. Students may write on their experience at Stanford in Berlin or their internship. Fulfills the WIM requirement for German Studies majors.

In the age of the digital and the hypervisual, why do we still need literature? Is literature the key to a language and a culture? In this course we will reconsider literature as a medium, a cultural form, and a political tool. Engaging with different types of German-language texts from the 18th century to the present, we will ask what literature can do and where it can take us. Short stories, poetry, cinema, industrial music, comics, letters, theory, and new media: in this course we will explore literature in many (unexpected) forms. Taught in German. Prerequisite: One year of German language at Stanford or equivalent.

Responses to refugees and immigration to Germany against the backdrop of German history and in the context of domestic and European politics. Topics include: cultural difference and integration processes, gender roles, religious traditions, populism and neo-nationalism. Reading knowledge of German, another European language, or an immigrant language will be useful for research projects, but not required.

This course takes students on a trip to eight capital cities, at different moments in time: Renaissance Florence, Golden Age Madrid, Colonial Mexico City, Enlightenment and Romantic Paris, Existential and Revolutionary St. Petersburg, Roaring Berlin, Modernist Vienna, and bustling Buenos Aires. While exploring each place in a particular historical moment, we will also consider the relations between culture, power, and social life. How does the cultural life of a country intersect with the political activity of a capital? How do large cities shape our everyday experience, our aesthetic preferences, , and our sense of history? Why do some cities become cultural capitals? Primary materials for this course will consist of literary, visual, sociological, and historical documents (in translation); authors we will read include Boccaccio, Lope de Vega, Sor Juana, Montesquieu, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Irmgard Keun, Freud, and Borges.

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, with particular focus on the question of value: what, if anything, does engagement with literary works do for our lives? Issues include aesthetic self-fashioning, the paradox of tragedy, the paradox of caring, the truth-value of fiction, metaphor, authorship, irony, make-believe, expression, edification, clarification, and training. Readings are drawn from literature and film, philosophical theories of art, and stylistically interesting works of philosophy. Authors may include Sophocles, Chaucer, Dickinson, Proust, Woolf, Borges, Beckett, Kundera, Charlie Kaufman; Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas; Plato, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Taught in English.

Each student participates in a capstone interview and discussion with a panel of the German Studies faculty on topics related to German cultural and literary analysis. In prepration for the interview/discussion, students submit written answers to a set of questions based on several authentic cultural texts in German. The written answers, normally in English, should be well-formed and coherent. Within the interview/discussion, students must demonstrate a further understanding of the topic(s) posed, through cogent argument.

Repeatable for Credit. Instructor Consent Required

Do we really need a theory in order to be queer? Queer Theory emerged in response to feminist thought, and the study of the history of sexuality, building on their insights, but also uncovering their blind spots. Without Queer Theory, few of the discourses around desire, power and gender identity that we take for granted on college campuses today would exist. Yet there is also a real risk that reality has left the theory behind. In this course, we will try to answer the question: What do we need queer theory for? Do we still need it? And if so, of what kind? The course is designed to introduce students to core texts of queer theory, and to connect them to current debates, be this around trans rights, the representation of homosexuality or the fight against campus sexual assault.