31 - 40 of 63 results for: GERMAN

This seminar offers a survey of medieval and early modern German literature and culture from ca.1170 to 1600. Genres include heroic epic, romance, lyric poetry, and mysticism as well as the popular literary forms characteristic of Reformation culture. We will pay special attention to the changing strategies of storytelling across time, genre, and medium. Discussion in English. All texts are available in modern German or English translation. Undergraduates enroll in 220 for 5 units, graduate students enroll in 320 for 5 or 8 units.

How the literature of the period between 1750 and 1900 gives voice to new conceptions of selfhood and articulates the emergent self understanding of modernity. Responses to unprecedented historical experiences such as the French Revolution and the ensuing wars, changes in the understanding of nature, the crisis of foundations, and the persistence of theological motifs. Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, Kleist, Heine, Buchner, Keller, and Fontane. Taught in English, readings in German. (Note: Fulfills DLCL 325 for AY 1415 for the PhD Minor in the Humanities)

Masters of German 20th- and 21st-Century literature and philosophy as they present aesthetic innovation and confront the challenges of modern technology, social alienation, manmade catastrophes, and imagine the future. Readings include Nietzsche, Freud, Rilke, Musil, Brecht, Kafka, Doeblin, Benjamin, Juenger, Arendt, Musil, Mann, Adorno, Celan, Grass, Bachmann, Bernhardt, Wolf, and Kluge. Taught in English. Undergraduates enroll in 222 for 5 units, graduate students enroll in 322 for 8 units.

A consideration of German political culture and its contradictory orientations toward alternative poles: the Russian East and the American West. How historical traditions inform current debates, such as the response to the Ukraine crisis. Conflicts between liberal and populist paradigms, enlightenment and romantic legacies. Germany and its geopolitical imagination. The German image of Russia. Texts such as Th. Mann, ¿The German Republic,¿ Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea, Wolf, Divided Heaven, and documents of contemporary popular culture.

Hegel's groundbreaking work models the mind's efforts to understand itself and tells a historically rich story of the evolution of social forms of life. The book begins with basic sensory awareness and ends with the recognition that thought is not finite and constrained by an inert reality but absolutely free, the only source of authority for modern subjects. Topics include the question of whether the human standpoint is inherently limited and fixed, the role of history, knowledge and agency, political conflict and power, rationality and religion, the ancient and the modern world.

Artistic endeavors were of crucial importance for Emperor Maximilian¿s self-conception and his notion of an emerging German nation. Up to now it has been investigated particularly by looking at literary and visual artworks commissioned by him. In the seminar musical products of the Imperial court, especially songs will be surveyed as expressions of courtiers, urban patricians and humanists in the German lands. A manuscript collection, which was prepared for the Diet in Augsburg 1518 will be at the core of the course, complemented by an early print from 1512. Besides a panegyric on Maximilian as defender of Christendom against the Turks there are standard lyrics, mostly on the theme of love and some merry topics, punctuated by a considerable amount of politically conceived texts, complaining about grievances and social evils at court. Recent approaches have tried to decipher courtly love poems of pre-conversational times as a method of launching social or political opinions in a disguised way. Thus the anthology can be checked as a vehicle of political communication. Philological aspects of source description, material, layout and handwriting will also be examined. Additionally, excursions to Early Modern High German and to musical procedures will be undertaken.

Frequently associated with the work of Richard Wagner, The Total Work of Art (or Gesamtkunstwerk) is a genre that aims to synthesize a range of artistic forms into an organic unity, a unity that both models and helps to forge an ideal state. This seminar will examine the history of the Gesamtkunstwerk from its roots in German Romanticism to the present day, focusing on the genre's relations with technology and mass culture across a wide range of media. Creations we will consider include Wagner's Festival Theatre at Bayreuth, Walter Gropius' plans for a Totaltheater, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's radio-oratorio The Lindbergh Flight, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, Walt Disney's theme parks, Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and Bill Gates' "home of the future." Taught in English.

Drawing on literature, the arts, political discourse, museums, and new media, this course asks why and how we take interest in the watershed events of the modern era; how does contemporary culture engages with modern, made-made disasters such as the World Wars or 9/11? Readings and viewings include the literature of G. Grass, W. G. Sebald, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy; the cinema of Kathryn Bigelow and Steven Spielberg; speeches by Barak Obama; and the theoretical writing of Walter Benjamin, Hayden White, Fredric Jameson, among others. Taught in English.

Arguably the most influential theatrical artist of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht continues to be a lightning rod for debates over art and politics. This course will consider Brecht as playwright, director, and theorist. Alongside reading and discussing texts such as Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage, and Galileo, students will also be expected to participate in occasional in-class performances in order better to grapple with his plays and theories. No previous theatrical experience is necessary.