Independent study is available to those students who wish to continue their learning in an area after completing the regularly offered courses in that area.

Independent study is available to those students who wish to continue their learning in an area after completing the regularly offered courses in that area.

Synthesis of various aspects of literary studies. Since content changes, this course may be repeated for credit.

From the very beginning of its history, photography has served as a device to reflect on and about representation. In this seminar students explore the many interrelations between literature and photography specifically in the German context as they are represented in genres of fiction, illustrated texts, autobiography, photo books, and others. Students will read and discuss selected texts, photo narratives, and combinations of photos and texts, as well as the supposed affinities and analogies between story-telling and photographic images.

This seminar seeks to interrogate assumptions about contemporary German and American culture and examine how one can better define what German and ’Germanness’ means today (if at all possible) from the perspective of the outsider, the foreigner, and the other. What do the words ’Heimat’ and ’Nation’ mean to Germans today and why have these notions remained so fluid - even undefinable - in the German context? In this course, students engage with various literary texts, film, news items, and other media from Germany after reunification (1989/90).

Students read a selection of works by German, Austrian, Swiss, and Romanian Nobel-prize-winning authors, including Gerhart Hauptmann, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Nelly Sachs, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek, and Herta Müller.

This course exposes students to representative German-language dramatic works, with the intention of staging a public performance at the end of the semester. Additional shorter texts on dramatic theory and visual and/or videos will supplement course materials. As a practical component to the course, we will also conduct technical acting exercises and in-class readings of the dramatic texts. Emphasis will be on closely reading texts, on discussing them in German, and providing opportunities to systematically advance and improve articulation of spoken German.

The history, theory, and development of the literary genre Novella, featuring some of the more bizarre and fascinating works of the greatest German authors. Emphasis upon the function and limits of genre in literary analysis.

As a response to the horrors and destruction throughout Europe after World War II, the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno posited in 1949 that to write poetry after Auschwitz is "barbaric." In the decades that followed this now infamous and often misinterpreted dictum, it was a common belief that the systematic discrimination and mass extermination of European Jews and "undesirables" could not be represented, rationalized, or imagined. Despite this, there has been a steady stream of cinematic representations of the Holocaust extending through today.

This course offers an introduction to basic grammatical concepts, terminology, and linguistics of Germanics with emphasis on the relationship between German and English. The course provides an overview of IPA transcription, phonology, morphology, etymology, syntax, and a linguistic approach to the history of Germanic languages and peoples in Northern and Central Europe through social contact and migration. Languages covered may include Old, Middle, and New High German; Old and Middle English; Frisian; Dutch and Afrikaans; Old Saxon; Old Norse (modern Icelandic); and Yiddish.