HAVERFORD COLLEGE - BRYN MAWR COLLEGE

GERMAN DEPARTMENT 

COURSE OFFERINGS 2008-2009

LANGUAGE COURSES AT HAVERFORD (H) AND BRYN MAWR (B)

FALL 2008              

H 001 Elementary German STAFF MWF 9:30-10:30 TTH 9-10

B001 Elementary German MEYER M-F 9:00-10:00

H 101 Intermediate German SCHÖNHERR MWF 10:30-11:30

B101 Intermediate German KENOSIAN MWF 11:00 AM-12:00 PM

H 201 Advanced German SCHÖNHERR M/W 12:30-2:00

This course is intended for students who wish to refine their speaking, writing, and reading skills beyond the intermediate level. Designed as a comprehensive introduction to modern German culture, we will discuss a variety of literary, political, and philosophical texts, including feature films and video materials. In addition, students have the opportunity to enrich the curriculum, by giving class reports on current events of their choice. Weekly grammar reviews will complement these activities.

B 209 Philosophical Approaches to Criticism SEYHAN W 2-4

H 215 Survey of German Literature STAFF T/Th 1:00-2:30

B 262 Travel in Post-War German and Austrian Film MEYER TTh 11:30-1

H 320 Contemporary German Fiction SCHÖNHERR T 7:30-10:00

One of the most interesting and exciting aspects of contemporary German literature is its aesthetic diversity that eludes any clear-cut literary-historical definition. Instead, we are confronted with the co-existence of multiple literary models, including documentary, feminist, meta-fictional, autobiographical, and immigrant literatures - compelling evidence that the notion of a single German literature has become totally obsolete. Focusing on exemplary texts, the seminar will closely analyze the diverging literary concepts and writing practices, characteristic of the literary scene today. Readings include prose texts by P. Weiss, Handke, Bachmann, Kluge, Bernhard, H. Müller, P. Schneider, Kirchhoff, Özdamar, Schlink, Sebald, and Schulze.

B 321 Berlin in the 1920s MEYER M 2:00-4:00

H 399 Senior Seminar SCHÖNHERR TBA

H 002 Elementary German SCHLIPPHACKE MWF 9:30-10:30 TTH 9-10

B 002 Elementary German KENOSIAN M-F 9:00-10:00

H 102 Intermediate German SCHÖNHERR MWF 10:30-11:30

B102 Intermediate German SEYHAN MWF 11:00-12:00

B 202 Introduction to German Studies KENOSIAN M/W 11:30-1

CL 200 Introduction to Comparative Literature SCHÖNHERR M/W 2:30-4

The course offers a comprehensive reconstruction of literature from the Renaissance period to the present, by focusing on a) the changing relationship between literature and religion, b) the construction of identities (class, gender, race), c) the representation of history, and d) models of literary self-referentiality. In addition, the class will introduce a variety of literary and cultural theories necessary for the analysis of (non)fictional texts.

H 223/ICP 190 Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies SCHLIPPHACKE M/W 12:30-2:00

This course would provide a historical overview of constructions of gender and sexuality in modern Europe (the Enlightenment to the present). We will read theoretical and literary works from the European Enlightenment (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, among others) in order to analyze modern conceptions of gender and sexuality through the lens of notions of complementarity, the dialectic of public and domestic life, homosociality, and the birth of conceptions of the “natural.” We will examine the tendency to classify sexual modes in the latter half of the nineteenth century through an analysis of works by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Oscar Wilde, and Otto Weininger. An examination of the contributions made by psychoanalysis to these debates will include readings by Sigmund Freud, Helene Deutsch, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, as well as critiques of psychoanalysis by writers such as Michel Foucault. Our discussions about gender and sexuality in the contemporary period will be informed by the recent writings of European and Anglo-American theorists such as Judith Butler, Thomas Lacqueur, Judith Halberstam, Sigrid Weigel, Sylvia Bovenschen, and Tim Dean, among others. Texts by these authors raise issues of gender construction and address queer, transgender, and transsexual identities. Literary and filmic works by figures such as Elfriede Jelinek, Rosa von Praunheim, Francois Ozon, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder will be analyzed in this context.

B 231 Women’s Narratives on Modern Migrancy, Exile, and Diasporas SEYHAN W 2:00-4:00

B 299 Middle Eastern Cultures in Contemporary Germany SEYHAN M 2:00-4:00

H 305 Monogamy and Polygamy in Modern German Drama SCHLIPPHACKE TTh 11:30 -1

This course will provide a selective overview of modern German drama (from the Enlightenment to the present) through a focus on representations of family and desire. German drama of the Enlightenment was imagined by figures such as G.E. Lessing and Friedrich Schiller as a “moral institution” for national values. Many dramas of this period navigate the cultural values of the burgeoning nuclear family. These plays reflect the tension between polygamous desires endemic to the extended family model and the nobility and the mandate for monogamy of the rising middle class. Plays by authors such as Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe will be read alongside writings by these and others about the role of marriage and the family in the construction of a national German identity. We will read plays in which polygamous liaisons threaten to undermine the revered model of monogamy and hence complicate constructions of national identity. Theoretical works by figures such David Hume and G.E. Hegel on marriage and polygamy will help provide a frame for our discussions, and these questions will be explored further in seminal dramas of the nineteenth- (Kleist, Hebbel, Büchner, Hauptmann), twentieth- and twenty-first centuries (Brecht, Fleißer, Jelinek). In addition to reading some of the most important German dramas of the modern period, we will screen performances of these plays in order to consider questions of interpretation, staging, and historical reception.

B 310 Decadent Munich 1890-1925 KENOSIAN Th 2:00-4:00

H 399 Senior Conference SCHÖNHERR/SCHLIPPHACKE TBA