Graduate Courses

GER1530H F Theodor Fontane: Realism, Science, and Technology
Time: Thu 1-3 
Instructor: Christine Lehleiter
This course examines the work of nineteenth-century novelist Theodor Fontane with a specific focus on the work’s scientific-technological context. We investigate the author’s engagement with topics such as print media, optics, photography, chemistry, rail transportation, and telegraphic communication, and study the impact of this engagement on poetological questions. The method in the course is a combination of close reading and socio-historical contextualization.

JGC1854H S Theories of Culture
Time: Wed 3-5 
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
Theories of Culture introduces students to critically relevant theories of culture such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Ernst Cassirer, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, and Homi Bhabha. The course is meant to complement the strong offering across literature departments and the Centre for Comparative Literature with a course that looks at the larger theoretical underpinnings that frame theories of readings and interpretation of all sorts. How do concepts of culture and cultural production frame our understanding of the function of literature, reading, and interpretation, etc.

GER1771H S Phenomenology in the Visual Field
Time: Mon 5-7 / THU 9-11 
Instructor: Angelica Fenner
As a strand of philosophical thinking, phenomenology locates meaning and value in the ebb and flow of lived (human) experience. Perception and embodiment become crucial vehicles for exploring the mind-body connection and the relationship between subjective experience and objective world. Film phenomenology, by extension, approaches the experiential component of film viewing, the apparatus, and even the institution of cinema, as perceptual worldmaking; this entails exploring how film form and narrative content allow us to feel and sense, both physically and emotionally, that which transpires on screen, and further, how film as textual object focalized through the camera, engages in sense-making and can be understood as itself a form of phenomenology. To come to terms with the changing stakes across a century of phenomenological thought, we’ll familiarize ourselves with a genealogy of concepts and formulations in German and French philosophy, including that of Husserl, Heidegger, Stein, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Pontys as well as contemporary theorists Marx, Sobchak, and Solomon on vectors of difference. Weekly screenings of visual media produced across disparate historical eras and in diverse genres and modes will help us visualize the issues under investigation.