All courses listed below are taught in English.
-
Literature 206: Sympathy for the Devil: Goethe's Faust
An intensive study of Goethe's drama about a man in league with the devil. The dynamics of Faust's striving for knowledge of the world and experience of life and Mephistopheles' advancement and subversion of this striving provides the basis for our analysis of the play's central themes, individuality, knowledge and transcendence, in regard to their meaning in Goethe's time and their relevance for our time. To gain a fuller appreciation of the variety, complexity, and dramatic fascination of Goethe's Faust, we will also consider Faust literature before and after Goethe and explore the integration of Faust in music, theater, and film (e.g., Marlowe’s tragedy Doctor Faustus, Arrigo Boito's opera Mefistofele, Friedrich W. Murnau's film Faust). Taught in English.Students with an advanced proficiency in German can sign up for a tutorial in German.
-
Literature 220: Madness
What are the stakes of representing madness? Can we grasp madness in a rational manner? Does a certain kind of exploration of madness offer a way of thinking about the mass appeal of nationalism or fascism? In what ways does madness pose a challenge or offer particular inspiration to artistic creativity? As we consider these and similar questions, authors whose work will spur discussion include Kafka (The Judgment and Diaries), Goethe (Faust I), Freud (The Wolf-Man), Breton (Nadja), Hölderlin (selected poems), Rimbaud (The Drunken Boat), Kleist (St. Cecilia, or the Power of Music) Foucault (History of madness), Beckett (Murphy), Celan (selected poems and prose writings), and Sebald (The Emigrants)ö films we will study include those by Visconti and Herzog. Students will become familiar with key texts from the German and also English and French traditions from around 1800 to the late 20th century, while honing their interpretive skills as readers and critics. We will consider the concept of madness from formal, philosophical, and ethical perspectives. All readings and discussions in English.
-
Literature 2194: Berlin: Capital of the 20th Century
Throughout Germany's turbulent twentieth-century history, Berlin has been not only the capital of five different German states but also the continuous capital of German culture. In this course, we shall explore the interconnections between politics, art, and social life through manifold literary texts (e.g. Döblin, Nabokov, Baudelaire, Poe), major theoretical writings (e.g. Benjamin, de Certeau, Augé, Young), as well as through films (e.g. Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Triumph of Will, Run Lola Run), architecture (Hitler's and Speer's plans for "Germania"), memorials (Holocaust memorial, Jewish Museum), and other visual art works (e.g. by Kollwitz, Grosz, street art). Our scrutiny of the significant changes in Berlin over the past century will focus on two historical thresholds: Around 1930, when the totalitarian regimes in Europe emerged, and around 1989, when this "age of the extremes" seems to come to an end, and our contemporary period with its compelling developments begins. Berlin can thus be called, in adaptation of Walter Benjamin's expression about Paris' significance for the 19th century, the capital of the 20th century.
-
Literature 2481: Theater and Politics: The Power of Imagination
This course is structured around the works of German playwrights Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler. Dorst and Ehler, two of the most distinguished contemporary European playwrights, will be writers-in-residence at Bard College in the fall of 2014. They will meet with students in this course for an extended workshop to discuss their plays, poetics, and collaborative works-in-progress.
Dorst and Ehler’s oeuvre includes Merlin, a re-writing of the King Arthur legend; Toller, a play based on the life of the Socialist revolutionary Ernst Toller; and Ice Age, a chilling one-act about the Fascist-friendly literary Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun. In each of these, Dorst and Ehler explore the fraught intersection of the imaginative and the political worlds. Alongside four plays and one prose book (This Beautiful Place) by Dorst and Ehler, we will also study their source materials, focusing our inquiry on their creative process, in preparation for our work with the artists in person.
-
Literature 2704: German Literature in Seven Dates
This course offers seven relevant access points to German literature and history between the 18th and 21st centuries. The starting points of these explorations will be dateable events, such as January 1774 when Goethe establishes his literary fame after six somnambulant weeks of writing The Sorrows of Young Werther, or November 1949 when Hannah Arendt first revisits Germany after the Second World War. A date is the temporal center around which a singular work crystallizes. The constellation of dates this course creates will also reflect on pivotal (German) traditions of conceiving history itself (Nietzsche, Benjamin). Readings further include Kant's What is Enlightenment?, Kleist's Penthesilea, Büchner's Danton’s Death, Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries, as well as Hungerangel by the German Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller. The "dated" A New History of German Literature (2004) will furnish apposite background reading.
-
Literature 270: Rebels with(out) a Cause - Great Works of German Literature
A survey of representative works of German literature from the eighteenth century to the present, from Goethe’s Weltschmerz bestseller The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774) to Mother Tongue (1990), a collection of stories by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, a Turkish-German woman writer. Other authors include: Schiller, Eichendorff, Heine, Hauptmann, Wedekind, Rilke, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Brecht, Dürrenmatt, and Jelinek. Course conducted in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in German are expected to read the works in the original.
-
Literature 387: The Ring of the Nibelung
A study of Richard Wagner’s cycle of four immense music dramas about gods, dwarves (Nibelungs), giants, and humans. The story has been read as a manifesto for socialism and as a parable about the new industrial society of Wagner’s time, among other interpretations. In this course, students are guided by the works of Heinrich Heine, the Brothers Grimm, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the anonymous author of the medieval epic, the Nibelungenlied. Musical expertise is neither expected nor provided. Taught in English. Students with an advanced proficiency in German are expected to read the libretti in the original.
-
Literature 348: Secularization and Its Discontents from Goethe, Schiller, Heine
Against the backdrop of the intellectual climate of the time between the Storm-and-Stress movement of the 1760s and the radical trends leading up to the revolution of 1848, we will accompany Germany’s greatest writers on their journey toward modernity and explore with them the tensions and contradictions of the 'Age of Secularization“as manifested in their self-conscious poetry, prose, and plays.