| source Northwestern (X) |
level |
department GERMAN German (X) |
This is the first quarter of the three-quarter Elementary Yiddish sequence: an introduction to Yiddish language and culture. Comprehension, speaking, reading and writing will be stressed to insure that students acquire a basic command of Yiddish. The course will be introduced by placing the Yiddish language in its cultural and historical context. Learning will be facilitated by the addition of songs and proverbs to the curriculum.
Score: 12.732181 Details | Listing | Web page
This is the first quarter of the Intermediate Yiddish sequence: an introduction to Yiddish literature. All four language skillsÂspeaking, listening comprehension, reading and writingÂare used to interpret Yiddish short stories, newspaper articles, poems, songs, films and proverbs. We will continue to explore topics in Yiddish grammar to facilitate the comprehension of literature. The class is taught completely in Yiddish except when explanations of grammar require the use of English.
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The magical and supernatural tales of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood are popular stories for children and adults in both the U.S. and Germany. The most well known versions of these stories in the U.S. however, almost never contain the dark and terrifying images of the original texts. We will read various versions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen collected by the brothers Grimm, adaptations by later authors and a small selection from Ludwick Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, J.W. von Goethe and Wilhelm Hauff. We will use these texts to investigate the culture and values of the period and will also examine the historical framework which led to the collection of these tales and a development of the genre. A small selection of secondary literature will be used to acquire an acquaintance with major interpretative frameworks.
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For almost 200 years, much of European history pivoted around a constellation of issues known as Âthe German Problem. A mix of questions concerning the terms on which German-speakers would live with each other and with other European nationalities, this Problem gave rise to intense internal and external conflict. This course will survey the development of German national identity, economic power, and political ambition in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and then the increasing integration of Germany into a new European and international framework in the period following the Second World War.
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In collective memory the shtetl (small Jewish town) has become enshrined as the symbolic space par excellence of close-knit, Jewish community in Eastern Europe; it is against the backdrop of this idealized shtetl that the international blockbuster Fiddler on the Roof is enacted. The shtetl is the central locus and focus of Modern Yiddish Literature; Fiddler on the Roof itself was based on a Sholem Aleichem story. In this seminar we shall explore the spectrum of representations of the shtetl in Yiddish literature from the nineteenth century to the post-Holocaust period. We shall also focus on artistic and photographic depictions of the shtetl. The seminar will include a screening of Fiddler on the Roof followed by a discussion of this film based upon a comparison with the text upon which it is based, Tevye the Milkman.
Score: 12.732181 Details | Listing | Web page
The seminar will pursue the modernist turn to the (verbal) image, Bildung as imaging, from Nietzsche to Walter Benjamin, as a turn against bildung/'education' based on the institution of literature (representation, narrative and metaphor). This development reconnects with the Romantic emphasis on music and the dream but radicalizes a critique of modern subjectivity by valorizing the moment (Augenblick) of ecstasy, ek-stasis, and intoxication as a window to comprehensive experience. A close reading of key modernist treatises on the work of art will allows us to trace an inherent dialectic from the verbal image in the medium of literature to the visual image in the medium of film as theorized by Walter Benjamin. For their presentation and seminar paper, students are asked to choose one of the major readings listed below and relate it to a paradigmatic text, for example, by an author like Franz Kafka, a Dadaist like Hans/Jean Arp or Tristan Tzara, a Surrealist like Breton or Aragon, to film ( Expressionism, Eisenstein, experimental film), or other major representative of European modernism.
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In this course, we shall read four classic German love stories, which have stood the test of time and profoundly influenced not only German, but world literature and culture. Beginning with a narrative poem of the Middle Ages, we shall encounter the realm of courtly love in Gottfried von StrassburgÂs Tristan. By the latter eighteenth century, GermanyÂs greatest writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had penned his path breaking saga of unrequited love, The Sorrows of Young Werther and generated a cult following. The preoccupations of the late nineteenth-century Prussian aristocracy and bourgeoise with rank, propriety, and adultery haunt the pages of Theodore FontaneÂs best novel Effi Briest (1891). Obsession with youth and beauty are masterfully realized in Thomas MannÂs immortal novella, Death in Venice (1912). In addition to the literary works, we shall screen and discuss excerpts from two operas, WagnerÂs Tristan und Isolde and MassenetÂs Werther as well as two films, FassbinderÂs ÂEffi Briest and ViscontiÂs ÂDeath in Venice to assess the manner in which these classic love stories are enshrined in the literary canon and popular culture.
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Yiddish 3 will continue working with the College Yiddish text by Uriel Weinreich. We will be going through chapters 12 through 18. The grammar of the text will be supplemented by songs, proverbs, films and CDs. The emphasis will be on communication, specifically through conversation and writing.
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 German films are now more than ever engaged in representing the German past, particularly the Second World War and the Holocaust. This course investigates how todayÂs German cinema screens its confrontations with issues of history and memory. It analyzes how contemporary German film negotiates questions of German responsibility and the violence that the Third Reich enacted on those around it. How do twenty-first century German films such as Denis GanselÂs Before the Fall and Volker SchlöndorffÂs The Ninth Day address a past of perpetration? How do box-office friendly Âthrillers engage with the past, either directly or indirectly? How do recent German films, about those who were persecuted for religious reasons, address or elide contemporary German empathies with Jewish victims of the Holocaust? This course examines these questions in light of both German history and film history.
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This course is designed for students with an interest in German language as well as in formal film analysis. Twenty-first century German films that deal with the Second World War, the division of Germany, and with issues in contemporary German culture are used as a springboard for discussions, for written work, and for the development of students written and spoken language skills.
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This seminar begins by analyzing KantÂs proposal for a critique of Gewalt (Âviolence, ÂforceÂ) in his Zum ewigen Frieden (ÂToward eternal or perpetual peaceÂ) and then again in his Rechtslehre (ÂDoctrine of RightÂ). It then examines Friedrich SchegelÂs response to Zum ewigen Frieden, to which, as we will see, Kant himself responds in the second section of his Streit der Fakultäten (ÂConcept of the FacultiesÂ). The seminar thereafter turns to a series of attempts in literary form to identify a criterion through which Gewalt can become the subject of a critique, including SchillerÂs Wallenstein, KleistÂs Prinz Friedrich von Homburg and Die Hermannschlacht as well as HölderlinÂs ÂFriedensfeier (ÂCelebration of PeaceÂ). Students with little German are welcome. For the first class, everyone is expected to have read KantÂs Zum ewigen Frieden in some language.
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This seminar will study three theories of the Uncanny (in German: das Unheimliche), as articulated by Freud, Heidegger and Derrida. Through a reading of texts by these three authors, as well as the literary texts to which they refer, a certain number of questions will be explored. These will include: 1. The relation of the Uncanny to history 2. Its relation to language 3. Its relation to literature.
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In collective memory the shtetl (small Jewish town) has become enshrined as the symbolic space par excellence of close-knit, Jewish community in Eastern Europe; it is within this idealized shtetl that the international blockbuster Fiddler on the Roof is enacted. Our image of the shtetl derives from Yiddish literature; Fiddler on the Roof itself was based on a Sholem Aleichem story. In this seminar we shall analyze the varying depictions of the shtetl in Yiddish literature from the nineteenth century to the post-Holocaust period. We shall also focus on artistic and photographic representations of the shtetl. The seminar will include a screening of Fiddler on the Roof followed by a discussion of this film based upon a comparison with the text upon which it is based, Tevye the Milkman.
Score: 12.732181 Details | Listing | Web page
The winter quarter will continue where the fall quarter left off. We will delve a bit deeper into Yiddish grammar and learn the past and future tenses. As before, the text (College Yiddish) will be supplemented with proverbs, songs and stories. Comprehension, speaking, reading and writing will be stressed to insure that students acquire a basic command of Yiddish. The course will be introduced by placing the Yiddish language in its cultural and historical context.
Score: 12.732181 Details | Listing | Web page
This course is designed for students who wish to further their writing skills in German to become creative, independent, confident and proficient writers of German. Emphasis is placed on a contextualized review and expansion of students knowledge of grammar and vocabulary. The thematic basis for the course consists of representations of East and West in the changing German, European and global community. Course materials will include current texts from various media, fictional works by German-speaking authors, and videos and feature films. Students will explore and produce reviews of films and cultural events, reports, argumentative essays, and interpretations of literary works, and discuss topics such as national and individual identity, history, current events, music, architecture, and connections to American Culture. An excursion to explore cultural dimensions in Chicago will be included.
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This course analyzes the major new tendencies in German cinema since the turn of the millennium. It studies the cutting edge of German film from the perspectives of form and content, and also considers whether todays tendencies build upon or break from traditional German cinema. The course will concern itself with how recent German films address national history; how German cinema deals with the question of social integration of immigrants in an increasingly multicultural Germany; and, how German cinema looks at the process of reunification of East and West since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Key stylistic trends will be evaluated alongside the question of how these films represent the new Europe. Can the influence of Hollywood filmmaking on contemporary German cinema still be felt? How have Germanys new directors begun to collaborate in new and interesting ways?
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Freud, Wittgenstein, Schnitzler, Musil, Schönberg, Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele are just some of the great names in fin-de-siecle Vienna that identify it as a major mindscape of modernist culture. Vienna culture was Janus-faced at the portal of the 19th and 20th century, of beginnings and endings. Its official portrait bore the halo of the traditions of military power of the Habsburg dynasty and supreme cultural achievements in music (from Mozart to Johann Strauss). Tradition provided the gloriole for a seemingly timeless ritual of national identity that was irrevocably shattered by the explosive force of WWI resulting in the end of the vast multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Yet, already before, the progressive decline and disintegration of the polyglot empire was a function of chauvinism, inter-ethnic conflict, and anti-Semitism. Clearly, fin-de-siècle Viennese culture was a culture of crisis, revealing the self as no longer master in its house, (Ernst Mach to Freud) threatened by the forces of aggression and sexuality (thanatos and eros) and there was the concomitant crisis of pictorial and linguistic representation (von Hofmannsthal, Wittgenstein). For a few decades Vienna was the principal rival of Paris as the cultural capital of Europe with a considerable impact on the modern consciousness up to our time. This course will be conducted entirely in English.Distribution Credit in Area VI.
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It has often been said that in poetry a national culture expresses itself most clearly and intimately. At the same time, the major poetic forms are shared by most European traditions. In this course we will follow both trajectories: we will try to find commonalities in the themes to which German poetry returns throughout the centuries, and we will learn about the generic aspects of such poetic forms as the ballad, the ode, the song, and the sonnet. We will also discuss such questions as the relation of poem to song (with examples), and the status of poetry in the history of German culture.
Score: 12.732181 Details | Listing | Web page
This course, designed for majors and non-majors, proposes to study the texts of leading writers in German through a discussion of the criticism these texts have evoked. Students will thereby be given the opportunity to reflect on the relationship between literary texts and their historical and critical interpretation. The writer to be examined in the winter quarter 2009 will be Friedrich Hölderlin. Both poetical and critical texts of Hölderlin will be read, as well as critical interpretations of his work by Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Theodor W. Adorno, Peter Szondi, Paul de Man and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. The course will be conducted in English and is open both to majors and non-majors, as well as graduate students. Texts will be read in both German and in English translations, and the question of translation will be one of issues to be discussed. The general problem that I propose to use as a focal point in examining Hölderlin and his critics is that of singularity and its relation to history and to language.
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