Graduate Courses

Fall 2024

GER1050H F Methods and Texts in Yiddish Studies
Time: Wed 3-5
Instructor: Anna Shternshis
This is the core course for the Field of Yiddish Studies, focusing on methods of analysis of major literary, historical, religious and sociological texts created in Yiddish language from 1500 until 2000. Conducted fully in Yiddish, the course trains the students both in advanced understanding of the Yiddish civilization as well as how Yiddish societies incorporated cultures of neighbouring communities. The texts analyzed will include Tsena Urena (1616) (Woman’s Companion to the Bible), stories by Nakhman from Bratslav (1700s), works by Alexander Abramovich, Sholem Rabinowitch, Itskhok Perets, Dovid Bergelson, Yankev Gladshtein and others.

GER2051H F Topics in Yiddish or German-Jewish Studies
Time: Thu 1-3
Instructor: Anna Shternshis
The course will examine the major trends in Russian Jewish History, culture and identity as developed during the Soviet and post-Soviet Period. Selected topics are Soviet policies towards the Jews, building of Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian culture in the 1920s, Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Jewish participation in the Soviet war effort, anti-Semitism of the 1950s, Jewish culture during the late Soviet period, collapse of the Soviet Union, post-Soviet Jewish Diaspora and its implications. We will examine a variety of primary sources, ranging from archival documents, to personal testimonies, to literary works, and folklore. A variety of disciplines will be used to examine Soviet Jewish experience. We will look into the works by political scientists, historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists. In the discussion, we will think about how a primary source can provide different data for different disciplines, and will discuss the implications for the development of Russian Jewish Studies.

GER1820H F SLA in Theory and Practice
Time: Fri 11-1
Instructor: Hang-Sun Kim
This course is designed to introduce students with little or no prior second language teaching experience to the theories and practices of second/foreign language learning and teaching in post-secondary environments. Participants will gain a critical understanding of major SLA theories, methods, and techniques with a focus on lesson planning, task design, feedback & assessment, as well as on distinctive features of online language instruction. Assignments will include lesson-planning, class observation reports, and task design. Students will apply the learned techniques through micro-teaching and peer-teaching exercises. The overall objective of this course is to provide participants with pedagogical tools and meta-linguistic awareness that will allow them to become competent, attentive, and reflective language instructors.

GER 1550H F Origins: Myths of Beginning in German Literature and Thought
Time: Tue 12-2
Instructor: Christine Lehleiter
In this course, we will examine myths of origin in German literature and thought with a specific focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The course is organized in three units: narratives about the origin of the individual (childhood and the novel of formation), narratives about the origin of man (monogenesis versus polygenesis, anthropology and race), and narratives about the origin of societies and groups (family, state, contract theory). We will read texts by Karl Philipp Moritz, Joachim Heinrich Campe, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schlegel and Sigmund Freud.

GER1000H F German Studies Seminar: Culture, Theory, Text
Time: Thu 2-4
Instructors: Team taught, Coordinator: Angelica Fenner
This team-taught course covers some of the seminal debates in theory relevant to advanced students of German. Students are introduced to key theory texts. They are confronted with processes of problem-formation in theoretical writing; they have the opportunity to weigh different kinds of theory debates against one another; they familiarize themselves with the components and structure of theoretical argument.

GER6000H F Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Fri 2-4
Instructor: Victoria Melnyk
In this course German reading knowledge is taught following the grammar-translation method designed for graduate students from the Humanities. It is an intensive course that covers German grammar with focus on acquiring essential structures of the German language to develop translation skills. The course is conducted in English, and consequently participants do not learn how to speak or write in German, but rather the course focuses exclusively on reading and translating German. Prior knowledge of German not mandatory. By the end of the course, students should be able to handle a broad variety of texts in single modern Standard German. This course is not intended for MA or PhD students in German.

Spring 2025

GER1051Y  Yiddish for German Speakers
Time: Wed 3-5
Instructor: Anna Shternshis
The course is designed as an intensive Yiddish language training. The goal is to teach German speakers to read, write and speak in Yiddish. The curriculum relies on the German language skills of the students, and focuses on differences between Yiddish and German grammar and vocabulary. Upon the completion of the course, students should be able to read Yiddish literary texts with a minimal use of dictionary.
Note: Graduate students can take the course in preparation for their Yiddish competency test.

GER1750H S Colonialism and After in German Literature
(cross-listed with GER430)
Time: Mon 3-5
Instructor: John Noyes
Beginning in the 1970’s German literature began to rethink its colonial past. Still trying to evaluate the brutality of Nazi government and the Holocaust, the relationship with the colonial past complicated the general picture of German history. Writers began to ask how to portray the colonial past. It immediately became apparent that the struggle to understand the colonial past set up interferences with the Nazi past and the cold-war present. As the present moved from the cold war to post-wall Germany and then neoliberal globalism, this struggle became even more complex. In this course we will follow literary experiments with the colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial past and present from roughly 1975 until the present. We will relate this to major moments in postcolonial and decolonial theory. Texts will include texts by Germans reconsidering colonialism, such as Uwe Timm Morenga (1978), Urs Widmer, Im Kongo (1996), Daniel Kehlmann, Die Vermessung der Welt (2005), Christian Kracht, Imperium (2012), but also writers from colonial or postcolonial backgrounds writing in German, such as May Ayim, Jean-Félix Belinga-Belinga, André Ekama, and others.

GER1661H S Modernism in Context
Time: Thu 12-2
Instructor: John Zilcosky
This course will examine the major writers of German and Austro-Hungarian modernism in the context of their age. We will pay particular attention to literary modernism’s relation – sometimes contentious, sometimes symbiotic – to philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sociology (Nietzsche, Freud, Simmel). Authors discussed include Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gottfried Benn, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka.

GER1680H S Earth Readings
Time: Wed 2-4
Instructor: Stefan Soldovieri
Environmental sciences help us understand natural process. They can tell us what is happening to the earth in the Anthropocene but are not equipped to tell us why. The Environmental Humanities seek to explain and transform the cultural and historical foundations of environmental crisis. The term Environmental Humanities has emerged as both a descriptive and aspirational designation. It describes existing aggregations across environmental philosophy, environmental history, ecocriticism, cultural geography, cultural anthropology, and political ecology, but it also seeks to integrate discourses produced in different disciplinary contexts. The Environmental Humanities have opened up new modes of interdisciplinarity both within humanistic fields and in conjunction with social and natural sciences – and enabled new engagements with public debates and policies bearing on environmental questions. This interdisciplinary work has become more and more urgent with the escalating climate crisis. The course explores cultural imaginings and interrogations of the Anthropocene across a range of media. Key readings in environmental humanities approaches including, ecocriticism, eco-feminism, energy humanities, posthumanism, animal and plant studies, cultural history and theory. Primary texts include literature, film and other cultural artifacts from the German context in particular.

GER6000H S Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Fri 2-4
Instructor: Victoria Melnyk
In this course German reading knowledge is taught following the grammar-translation method designed for graduate students from the Humanities. It is an intensive course that covers German grammar with focus on acquiring essential structures of the German language to develop translation skills. The course is conducted in English, and consequently participants do not learn how to speak or write in German, but rather the course focuses exclusively on reading and translating German. Prior knowledge of German not mandatory. By the end of the course, students should be able to handle a broad variety of texts in single modern Standard German. This course is not intended for MA or PhD students in German.