Past Graduate Courses

GER1000H S 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.

GER1051Y  Yiddish for German Speakers
Time: Tue 2-4
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.

GER1540H S Revolutions
Time: Wed 1-3
Instructor: Christine Lehleiter
How do we feel the suffering of others? Can we identify with this suffering? How has suffering been represented in literature (and other media)? Is it morally permissible to represent suffering, and find pleasure in its depiction? Does the representation of suffering have a cathartic effect on the audience? How have authors engaged with the psychology and aesthetics of suffering? In this course, we will examine these and related questions by discussing literary texts from the 17th to the 19th century. We will also draw on theoretical texts ranging from eighteenth-century empirical psychology to today’s studies in the cognitive sciences. While the focus of the course is on materials from around 1800, we will engage with concepts that originate in both eighteenth-century and contemporary discourses. Students are encouraged to develop their own interests within the course’s conceptual framework, and final projects that investigate materials from outside the course’s specific time frame are possible.

JGC1855H S Critical Theory
Time: Wed 3-5
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
This course examines central theoretical issues in contemporary thought with particular attention to the role that the “Frankfurt School” and its affiliates such as Benjamin, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas and others play in the context of modern German social and cultural thought. In France, thinkers like Foucault, and Derrida respond to this tradition and enrich it. The course explores in which way the continuing dialogue between these thinkers informs current critical approaches to rethinking issues and concerns such as theorizing modernity, culture, secularization, multiculturalism, and the vital role of cultural difference.

GER1750H S Colonialism and After in German Literature
(cross-listed with GER430)
Time: Mon 2-4
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.

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.

GER1050H F Methods in Yiddish
Time: Tue 12-2
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.

GER1200H F (cross listed GER426) Middle High German
Time: Mon 2-4
Instructor: Markus Stock
This course offers an introduction to the German language, literature, and culture of the Middle Ages. We will read and translate Middle High German texts, study facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, and inquire into epochal cultural concepts like courtly love and chivalry as well as courtly and clerical designs of identity. Authors discussed will include Hartmann von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide among others. The course fulfills the departmental requirement in Middle High German

GER1680H F Earth Readings
Time: Tue 1-3
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.

GER1722H F Kafka
Time: Wed 2-4
Instructor: John Zilcosky
This course examines the oeuvre of Franz Kafka, as it developed in a remarkably short period: from his 1911-12 novel, The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), and his 1912 breakthrough novella, The Metamorphosis; to his middle years, during World War I, when he wrote The Trial and the burst of stories collected in A Country Doctor; to The Castle and the final stories he penned before dying, at age forty, in 1924. We will attempt to understand why Kafka, who published so little and never completed any of his novels, left a powerful legacy on world literature and culture.

GER1820H F SLA in Theory and Practice
Time: Thu 2-4
Instructor: Stefana Gargova
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.

GER2051H F Methods in Yiddish
Time: Tue 2-4
Instructor: A. Norich
What does “desire” mean to a Yiddish writer? Desire most commonly refers to sexuality and the erotic life. The object of desire may be a person, but it can also be a thing, an idea, an art form, and more. How does our milieu affect our sense of who or what we desire? Yiddish writers have always been necessarily multicultural, multilingual, trans-continental in knowledge and perspective. They responded to an extraordinarily diverse array of political and social movements including emigration/immigration, various forms of nationalism, socialism, religious belief, rejection of religious observance. In exploring the short fiction and poetry that address these concerns, we will consider authors whose names may be familiar to some (e.g., Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Aleichem); we will certainly read authors who are largely unknown despite English translations of their work (e.g., Celia Dropkin, Lamed Shapiro, Yankev Glatshteyn, and more). Experimenting with modern literary forms and modern personal and political choices, these authors reveal the remarkable range of Yiddish writing in the twentieth century. (All works will be read in English translation, though Yiddish texts will also be made available.)

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.

GER1000H S German Studies Seminar: Culture, Theory, Text
Time: Thu 2-4, Room: OH323
Instructors: Team taught, Coordinator: John Noyes
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.

GER1480H S Goethe’s Faust
Time: Tue 1-3, Room: OH323
Instructor: John Noyes, in English
We will engage in a careful reading of Goethe’s major work – what he called “Das Hauptgeschäft – the monumental drama Faust. Faust is arguably one of the most important myths of modernity. It occupied the poet for 60 years and is one of the most complex pieces of theatre ever written, incorporating elements of classical drama, opera, even visions of mediality bordering on the cinematic. Goethe himself called it an incommensurable production. Georg Lukacs stated that the content of Faust is the fate of all humanity. Alexander Pushkin called it an Iliad of modern life. And Leo Löwenthal pointed to the importance of Goethe’s play for critical theory. Through the lens of this work, students will gain familiarity with the emerging trends of German modernity in the turbulent years between 1770 and 1832. German speakers will read the text(s) in the original. English translations are available.

GER1490H S Kanonkritik– Or how to decenter the German canon and engage with the margins
Time: Tue 1-3, Room: OH323
Instructor: Azadeh Sharifi
What is the canon of German literature? Who is part of the German canon? And who is not part of it? When for example the famous literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki published “Der Kanon” (2002), an anthology of outstanding German literature (Romane), his selection contained mainly male (white) German writers and poets. The selection (and also the following anthologies of novels, plays, essays, and stories) set off a controversial debate that has over the course of the past 20 years become more complex. It is not Reich-Ranicki selection itself but rather the actuality of the canon, what is still taught in schools and universities as outstanding German literature.

In this course, we will engage with the canon from a postcolonial and intersectional approach in order to understand the circumstances of the “center” as well as learn how to decenter it at the same time.

GER6000H S Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Fri 2-4, Room: HS100
Instructor: Viktoriya Melnykevych
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.

JGC1855H S Critical Theory – The French-German Connection
Time: Wed 3-5, Room: BT319
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
This course examines central theoretical issues in contemporary thought with particular attention to the role that the “Frankfurt School” and its affiliates such as Benjamin, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas and others play in the context of modern German social and cultural thought. In France, thinkers like Foucault, and Derrida respond to this tradition and enrich it. The course explores in which way the continuing dialogue between these thinkers informs current critical approaches to rethinking issues and concerns such as theorizing modernity, culture, secularization, multiculturalism, and the vital role of cultural difference.

GER1050H F Methods in Yiddish
Time: Tue 1-3, Venue: MY440
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.

GER1051 Methods and Texts in Yiddish Studies 
Time: Tue 1-3, Venue: MY440
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.

NOTE: this course takes place at the same time and in the same place as GER1050, to enable those who previously enrolled GER 1050 with another instructor to now enroll a new course.

GER1210H F Medieval German Romance
Time: Wed 2-4, Room: OH323
Instructor: Markus Stock
This course is an introduction to medieval German literature, using the greatest love romance of medieval Germany as an example: Tristan and Isolde by Gottfried von Strassburg. Part of a new wave of chivalric literature in early 13th-century Germany, this text is a key document for the establishment of a new, refined aristocratic culture following French models. It tells a story of adventure and adulterous love, but also of coming-of-age, self-realization, and the legitimacy of art in an aristocratic world. The course focuses on one of the integral texts of the medieval German literary canon. Ample room is reserved for the comparison of the German versions to related accounts in other languages (incl. French and Old Norse). Through short introductory modules on Middle High German, the course also enables students without previous exposure to medieval German to read and interpret the texts in their original language. The course fulfills the departmental requirement in Middle High German.

GER1820H F SLA in Theory and Practice
Time: Tue 10-12, Room: OH323
Instructor: Stefana Gargova
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.

GER6000H F Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Fri 2-4, Room: HS100
Instructor: Viktoriya Melnykevych
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.

GER1000H S German Studies Seminar: Culture, Theory, Text
Time: Thu 2-4, Room: EM205
Instructors: Team taught, Coordinator: John Noyes
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. Please consult syllabus here.

GER1540H S Revolution, War, and Terror: The Representation of Suffering and the Psychology of Aesthetics
Time: Tue 1-3, Room: VC211
Instructor: Christine Lehleiter
How do we feel the suffering of others? Can we identify with this suffering? How has suffering been represented in literature (and other media)? Is it morally permissible to represent suffering, and find pleasure in its depiction? Does the representation of suffering have a cathartic effect on the audience? How have authors engaged with the psychology and aesthetics of suffering? In this course, we will examine these and related questions by discussing literary texts from the 17th to the 19th century. We will also draw on theoretical texts ranging from eighteenth-century empirical psychology to today’s studies in the cognitive sciences. While the focus of the course is on materials from around 1800, the concepts with which we will engage originate in both eighteenth-century and contemporary discourses. Students are encouraged to develop their own interests within the course’s conceptual framework, and final projects that investigate materials from outside the course’s specific time frame are possible. A visit to the excellent collection of relevant materials owned by U of T’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book library is planned as part of the course program.

GER1661H S Modernism in Context
Time: Mon 12-2, Room: NF205
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 and psychoanalysis (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud). Authors discussed will likely include Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Schnitzler, and Hermann Hesse.

JGC1855H S Critical Theory – The French-German Connection
Time: Wed 2-4, Room: VC215
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
This course examines central theoretical issues in contemporary thought with particular attention to the role that the “Frankfurt School” and its affiliates such as Benjamin, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas and others play in the context of modern German social and cultural thought. In France, thinkers like Foucault, and Derrida respond to this tradition and enrich it. The course explores in which way the continuing dialogue between these thinkers informs current critical approaches to rethinking issues and concerns such as theorizing modernity, culture, secularization, multiculturalism, and the vital role of cultural difference.

GER6000H S Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Fri 2-4, Room: AH302
Instructor: Viktoriya Melnykevych
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.

GER1050H F Methods in Yiddish
Time: Tue 10-12, Room: tba
Instructor: Miriam Schulz
This is the core course for the field of Yiddish Studies, focusing on methods of analysis (from literary and gender studies to postcolonial and critical race theory etc.) of major religious, literary, and scholarly texts created in the Yiddish language from 1500 onwards. Conducted both in Yiddish (reading) and English (discussion), students are trained both in advanced understanding of Yiddish cultures as well as in how they hybridized with co-territorial communities through the ages. The texts analyzed include the Tsene-Rene, Haskole literature, works by the klasiker (classic Yiddish writer) Y.L. Perets, Dovid Bergelson, Shire Gorshman, Anna Margolin, and others. 

GER1200H F Introduction to Medieval Studies
Time: Fri 10-12, Room: UC67
Instructor: Markus Stock
This course offers an introduction to the German language, literature, and culture of the Middle Ages. We will read and translate Middle High German texts, study facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, and inquire into epochal cultural concepts like courtly love and chivalry as well as courtly and clerical designs of identity. Authors discussed will include Hartmann von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide among others. The course fulfills the departmental requirement in Middle High German.

GER1820H F The Teaching and Learning of German
Time: Tue 1-3, Room: tba
Instructor: Stefana Gargova
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. Students will gain a critical understanding of the major teaching methods and techniques used in universities today with a focus on German as a foreign language. The course is meant to equip students with the means to remain informed about the central debates taking place in the field of SLA/FL language theory and practice. Assignments will include lesson-planning, class observation reports, and the design of reading, writing, speaking, and listening exercises. Students will apply the techniques learned through micro-teaching and peer-teaching exercises. The overall objective of this course is to provide students with pedagogical tools and meta-linguistic awareness that will allow them to become successful language instructors.

JGC1740H F Humans and Things
Time: Tue & Thu 10-12/9-11, Room: UCA101
Instructors: John Noyes, Lawrence Switzky, Jane Taylor

Whether it’s the Alexa home virtual assistant, the graphic interface on a computer game, the partially automated (not to mention the self-driving) vehicle, the robotic arm in an assembly line, or the bot assistant on an online store, we have built a world of animated things. What does it mean to be human in a world of animated things? Art, religion, and philosophy have been exploring the interface between human life and animated things for thousands of years. Can we use artistic explorations to better understand human life in a world of technologically animated things?

In this course we will examine some aspects of this exploration, focusing on puppetry as a strategy and a solution to the problems of personhood. Puppets have always served as animated things that probe the limits of the human. And as soon as we talk about limits of the human, we are talking about how we imagine dehumanized bodies. ‘The human’ has held onto its particular status in the modern era, associated with privileges and rights. But as we are increasingly aware, the limits and mode of existence of this self-described human also defined those deemed ‘not fully human’, including women, slaves and animals. Mimetic traditions across human histories and geographies have in various ways posed questions about the limits of the human. Enquiries across philosophy, theology, anthropology, and aesthetics have raised challenges through which to confront assumptions about the limits of the human; and puppetry arts have been integral both to reinforcing and to challenging the assumptions about relations of power, and conceptions of thought and agency. The questions raised are integrally about labour (and who does it); and in such terms the robot – a kind of contemporary stand-in for the puppet – has increasingly been integral to such debates.

This is an experimental course that brings graduate students at the University of Toronto into dialogue with their peers at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. It is taught by colleagues at the two universities who share an interest in practical and theoretical problems associated with puppetry and the limits of the human. Our aim is to establish a dialogue to investigate a single practical and theoretical problem from the point of view of students and researchers living and working in two very different societies.

Keywords
–Animation: physiological, filmic, theological, technological –Thinking machines and the cultural history/deep time of AI –Dehumanization in the contexts of South African apartheid and North American indigeneity –Subjectivity/subject positions and performance: When can one speak as and for another?
–Anthropomorphism and the non-human other–how and when is anthropomorphism licensed–artistically, ecologically, ethically?

GER6000H F Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Fri 2-4, Room: AH302
Instructor: Viktoriya Melnykevych
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.

GER1200H S Introduction to Medieval Studies
Time: Mon 2-4, online
Instructor: Markus Stock
This course offers an introduction to the German language, literature, and culture of the Middle Ages. We will read and translate Middle High German texts, study facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, and inquire into epochal cultural concepts like courtly love and chivalry as well as courtly and clerical designs of identity. Authors discussed will include Hartmann von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide among others. The course fulfills the departmental requirement in Middle High German.

GER1485H S Goethe’s Novels
Time: Fri 10-12, online
Instructor: John Noyes
From the moment he published his first novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werther, at the age of 24 to the appearance of Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre three years before his death, Goethe’s novels set the tone for prose writing in German. His novels are daring, bold, experimental, never satisfied with repeating formula or meeting reader-expectations. In them, he tests the limits of narrative prose, and explores the boundaries between fiction and science, psychology and fantasy. The world of Goethe’s novels raises some important questions for our own
age, as we try to discover an appropriate language for talking about truth, globalization and power. In this course we will read all of Goethe’s novels with an aim to rethinking current ideas on language and truth.

GER 1550H S Origins: Myths of Beginning in German Literature and Thought
Time: Mon 11-1, online
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.

JGC1855H S Critical Theory – The French-German Connection
Time: Wed 3-5, online
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
This course examines central theoretical issues in contemporary thought with particular attention to the role that the “Frankfurt School” and its affiliates such as Benjamin, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas and others play in the context of modern German social and cultural thought. In France, thinkers like Foucault, and Derrida respond to this tradition and enrich it. The course explores in which way the continuing dialogue between these thinkers informs current critical approaches to rethinking issues and concerns such as theorizing modernity, culture, secularization, multiculturalism, and the vital role of cultural difference.

GER6000H S Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Fri 2-4, online
Instructor: Viktoriya Melnykevych
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.

GER1000H F German Studies Seminar: Culture, Theory, Text
Time: Thu 9-11, online
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. Please consult syllabus here.

GER1050H F Methods in Yiddish
Time: Tue 10-12, online
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.

GER1771H F Visions of the Anthropocene
Time: Tue 9-11, online
Instructor: Stefan Soldovieri
The course explores cultural visions of the Anthropocene across a range of media, focusing primarily on examples from the German-speaking context. Our main concern will be to explore how producers of culture are negotiating the far-reaching anthropogenic impacts on the planet’s geology and ecosystems that have led scientists to proclaim that we have entered into a new era of geological time. Readings in ecocriticism and cultural history and theory; primary texts include film, literature, and other cultural artifacts.

GER1820H F The Teaching and Learning of German
Time: Wed 10-12, online
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. Students will gain a critical understanding of the major teaching methods and techniques used in universities today with a focus on German as a foreign language. The course is meant to equip students with the means to remain informed about the central debates taking place in the field of SLA/FL language theory and practice. Assignments will include lesson-planning, class observation reports, and the design of reading, writing, speaking, and listening exercises. Students will apply the techniques learned through micro-teaching and peer-teaching exercises.
The overall objective of this course is to provide students with pedagogical tools and meta-linguistic awareness that will allow them to become successful language instructors.

GER6000H F Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Fri 2-4, online
Instructor: Viktoriya Melnykevych
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.

GER1200H S Introduction to Medieval Studies
Time: Wed 3-5, Room: TF203
Instructor: Nicola Vohringer
This course offers an introduction to the German language, literature, and culture of the Middle Ages. We will read and translate Middle High German texts, study facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, and inquire into epochal cultural concepts like courtly love and chivalry as well as courtly and clerical designs of identity. Authors discussed will include Hartmann von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide among others. The course fulfills the departmental requirement in Middle High German.

GER1540H S Literature and Science
Time: Mon 12-2, Room: OH323
Instructor: Christine Lehleiter
In recent decades, much work has been undertaken in disciplines such as the history of science and literary studies with the goal to develop a clearer picture of the relationship between science and literature and of its historical development. We will study this work with a particular focus on literature and science around 1800. Among the authors that we will discuss are Moritz, Goethe, Humboldt, Novalis, and Dilthey.

GER1722H S Kafka
Time: Tue 2-4, Room: OH323
Instructor: John Zilcosky
This course examines the oeuvre of Franz Kafka, as it developed in a remarkably short period: from his 1912 “breakthrough” with “The Judgment,” to his middle years and The Trial, to the 1916-17 burst of writing around “A Country Doctor,” to The Castle and Kafka’s final stories before his death in 1924. Alongside these primary texts, we will consider some classic readings of Kafka by critics such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Elias Canetti, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze / Félix Guattari.

GER6000H S Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Fri 3-5, Room: CR106
Instructor: Viktoriya Melnykevych
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.

GER1000H F German Studies Seminar: Culture, Theory, Text
Time: Thu 2-4, Room: OH323
Instructors: Team taught, Coordinator: tba
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. Please consult syllabus here.

GER1050H F Methods in Yiddish
Time: Tue 1-3, Room: JH235
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.

GER1780H F The Countercinema of the Berlin School and Beyond
Thu 10-12 (Seminar), IN313 & Thu 6-8 (Screening), Media Commons Theatre, in English
Instructor: Angelica Fenner
The moniker ‘Berlin School’ references a heterogenous body of German films whose directors first gained sustained attention for their subtle approach to tracking dramatic social changes in the new “Berlin Republic,” following transfer of the governmental seat of power from Bonn to its pre-World War II location. Resisting the temptation to deliver escapist narratives to a public struggling with the erosion of the social welfare state under the pressures of globalization, these directors have instead pursued an uncompromising realism focusing in exacting and uncanny detail upon the forms of subjectivity, both ordinary and extraordinary, produced among different social groups and classes. We’ll engage methodologies from phenomenology, performance studies, theories of affect, practices of the everyday, post-Bergsonian/Deleuzian philosophies of temporality and duration, feminist film theory, genre theory, and the aesthetics of cinematic realism. These readings accompany our exploration of the proposition that this movement, taken as a whole, constitutes a counter cinema, one whose auteurist ambitions accord with concurrent transnational art cinema practices and retraces its lineage to the Nouvelle Vague and the New German Cinema. Directors covered include M. Ade, T. Arslan, V. Grisebach, B. Heisenberg, C. Hochhäusler, U. Köhler, C. Petzold, A. Schanelec, and M. Speth, with occasional screenings of intertextually pertinent global art films. All films are subtitled and class discussions (including course readings) conducted in English.

GER1820H F The Teaching and Learning of German
Time: Tue 2-4, Room: OH323
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. Students will gain a critical understanding of the major teaching methods and techniques used in universities today with a focus on German as a foreign language. The course is meant to equip students with the means to remain informed about the central debates taking place in the field of SLA/FL language theory and practice. Assignments will include lesson-planning, class observation reports, and the design of reading, writing, speaking, and listening exercises. Students will apply the techniques learned through micro-teaching and peer-teaching exercises.
The overall objective of this course is to provide students with pedagogical tools and meta-linguistic awareness that will allow them to become successful language instructors.

JGC1855H F Critical Theory – The French-German Connection
Time: Wed 3-5, Room: Seminar Room 319, 3rd floor, Centre for Comparative Literature
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
This course examines central theoretical issues in contemporary thought with particular attention to the role that the “Frankfurt School” and its affiliates such as Benjamin, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas and others play in the context of modern German social and cultural thought. In France, thinkers like Levinas, Foucault, and Derrida respond to this tradition and enrich it. The course explores in which way the continuing dialogue between these thinkers informs current critical approaches to rethinking issues and concerns such as theorizing modernity, culture, secularization, multiculturalism, and the vital role of cultural difference.

GER6000H F Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Fri 3-5, Room: CR106
Instructor: Viktoriya Melnykevych
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.

GER1000H S German Studies Seminar: Culture, Theory, Text
Time: Thu 2-4, Room: OH323
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. Please consult syllabus here.

GER1051Y  Yiddish for German Speakers
Time: Mon, Wed, Fri 2-3, Room: OH323
Instructor: Alexandra Hoffman
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.

GER 1880H S Gottfried Keller: Poetic Realism in a Minor Key
Time: Thu 12-2, Room: OH323
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
This course addresses a glaring absence in the Department’s course offering of a dedicated 19th century literature course and one of the central aspects of German 19th century literary programs, poetic realism. The course examines the particular styles and forms of poetic realism in Gottfried Keller’s writing. Keller is one of the most subtle authors of poetic realism. Questions to be examined will be Keller’s literary politics to voice difference, dissent, and critique. Targets of Keller’s critical engagement are the emerging Zurich bourgeoisie, colonial fantasies and the problematic way the traces of colonialism shape Swiss society, but also literary canons and canonicity amid the marginalization of German language texts by Swiss writers in the face of German nationalism.

GER6000H S Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Tue 2-4, Room: TF203
Instructor: Viktoriya Melnykevych
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. Please consult syllabus here.

GER1210H F Medieval German Romance
Time: Mon 2-4, Room: OH323
Instructor: Markus Stock
This course is an introduction to medieval German literature, using the greatest love romance of medieval Germany as an example: Tristan and Isolde by Gottfried von Strassburg. Part of a new wave of chivalric literature in early 13th-century Germany, this text is a key document for the establishment of a new, refined aristocratic culture following French models. It tells a story of adventure and adulterous love, but also of coming-of-age, self-realization, and the legitimacy of art in an aristocratic world. The course focuses on one of the integral texts of the medieval German literary canon. Ample room is reserved for the comparison of the German versions to related accounts in other languages (incl. French and Old Norse). Through short introductory modules on Middle High German, the course also enables students without previous exposure to medieval German to read and interpret the texts in their original language. The course fulfills the departmental requirement in Middle High German.

JGC1740 F Humans and Things (in English)
Time: Mon 4-6, Room: OH323
Instructor: John Noyes
The proposed course investigates how the limits of the human are explored in relation to objects. This will be a trans-disciplinary inquiry focused on representations of the limits of the human. Texts will include literary and theoretical attempts to navigate the limits of the human in relation to the object world. Thoughts about the object arise across several disciplines with distinct yet intertwined intellectual lineages in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries. These include, for example, anthropology, Marxist theory, psychoanalysis, and others. Alongside the investigations of objects within these disciplines and discourses, there has been a rich history of attempts to develop trans-disciplinary models of the human in relation to the object world. The proposed course will examine this history. In particular, we are interested in what we call emotional prosthetics: object structures onto which human affect can be projected in performance. Our prime example is the use of puppets in performance, but we are also interested in other attempts to conceptualize the human/non-human boundary. In the proposed course, we will analyze select written and performed texts in which emotional prosthetics play a role. This will allow us to investigate the limits of the human as a key conceptual problem in modernity, from the meditations on mechanical man in Enlightenment Europe to the contemporary employment of artificial beings to mimic humans.

GER1050H F Methods in Yiddish
Time: Tue 11-1, Room: JH235
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.

GER1771H F Remaking the Movies
Time: Tue 2-6, Room: OH323
Instructor: Stefan Soldovieri
Frequently rejected out of hand by scholars, the remake has been a quintessentially ‘bad object’ of film criticism. Yet the remake is as old as the cinematic medium itself. In many ways film is ‘repetition’ – the recycling of other films and literature. Films are forms of repetition in series, different cuts or versions (as the result of censorship, synchronization, restoration, etc). In fact the very first film by the Lumière brothers, La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon’ (1895), exists simultaneously in three variations. And films are structured by repetitions in the form of intertextual associations, processes of cultural flow and exchange, visual and aural quotes, homages, etc. The course will explore the remake phenomenon in its historical, industrial, transnational and theoretical dimensions with a focus on films that intersect with German contexts – from remakes of Weimar classics, to Hollywood reprises of German films, to self-conscious meditations on the nature of the remake itself. *class includes screening time*

JGC1855H F Critical Theory – The French-German Connection
Time: Wed 2-4, Room: Seminar Room 319, 3rd floor, Centre for Comparative Literature
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
This course examines central theoretical issues in contemporary thought with particular attention to the role that the “Frankfurt School” and its affiliates such as Benjamin, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas and others play in the context of modern German social and cultural thought. In France, thinkers like Levinas, Foucault, and Derrida respond to this tradition and enrich it. The course explores in which way the continuing dialogue between these thinkers informs current critical approaches to rethinking issues and concerns such as theorizing modernity, culture, secularization, multiculturalism, and the vital role of cultural difference. Click here for syllabus

GER6000H F Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Mon 2-4, Room: TF102
Instructor: Erol Boran
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.

GER1661H F Modernism in Context (in English)
Time: Wed 4-6, Room: OH323
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 and psychoanalysis (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud). Authors discussed could include Gerhart Hauptmann, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Schnitzler, Hermann Hesse, etc.

GER1820H F The Teaching and Learning of German
Time: Thu 2-4, Room: OH323
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. Students will gain a critical understanding of the major teaching methods and techniques used in universities today with a focus on German as a foreign language. The course is meant to equip students with the means to remain informed about the central debates taking place in the field of SLA/FL language theory and practice. Assignments will include lesson-planning, class observation reports, and the design of reading, writing, speaking, and listening exercises. Students will apply the techniques learned through micro-teaching and peer-teaching exercises.
The overall objective of this course is to provide students with pedagogical tools and meta-linguistic awareness that will allow them to become successful language instructors.

GER1051Y  Yiddish for German Speakers
Time: Fri 12-2, Room: OH323
Instructor: Alexandra Hoffman
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.

GER1480H S Goethe’s Faust
Time: Wed 3-5, Room: OH323
Instructor: John Noyes, in English
We will engage in a careful reading of Goethe’s major work – what he called “Das Hauptgeschäft – the monumental drama “Faust.” Faust is arguably one of the most important myths of modernity. It occupied the poet for 60 years, and is one of the most complex pieces of theatre ever written, incorporating elements of classical drama, opera, even visions of mediality bordering on the cinematic. Through the lens of this work, students will gain familiarity with the emerging trends of German modernity in the turbulent years between 1770 and 1832.

GER 1550H S Origins: Myths of Beginning in German Literature and Thought
Time: Thu 12-2, Room: OH323, texts are provided in German
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.

GER 1780H S Topics in German Film History: Women’s Film Authorship in Neoliberal Times
Time: Mon 3-7, Room: IN223, in English
Instructor: Angelica Fenner
Maren Ade’s recently acclaimed Toni Erdmann (2016) has brought renewed attention to women’s film authorship in Germany and a growing cadre of women directors making films that are engaging, intelligent, and deeply thought-provoking without being didactic. Their work accords with counter cinematic practices sometimes loosely identified under the ‘Berlin School’ moniker, which have emerged in response to the changing social and economic landscape following unification. Rejecting the mode of production and ideology underlying German blockbusters such as Downfall or The Lives of Others, some filmmakers have instead embraced realist aesthetics to explore everyday life worlds and subjectivities against the backdrop of eroded social democratic structures and post-Fordist labour policies.
Via readings in feminist film theory, new materialism, animal studies, gender and queer theory, and cultural studies, we will place these compelling contemporary productions into conversation with those of pioneers the feminist film movement of the 1970s, such as Helke Sander and Ulrike Ottinger. Echoes of that movement are, for example, evidenced in the way Maren Ade has leveraged her success to draw public attention to imbalances within the German film industry and called for gender parity in the distribution of subsidies. With an eye towards both continuities and divergencies in aesthetics, mode of production, and culture, we will investigate to what extent recent German and Austrian directors, e.g. Barbara Albert, Angela Schanelec, Valeska Grisebach, Tanja Turanskyj, and others share among themselves and/or with an earlier generation a common focus on disparate experiences of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and precarity. How does their work accord with such labels as ‘oppositional,’ ‘subversive, or ‘resistant’, and in what ways does it enact intersectional alliances with feminist, queer, anti-heteronormative and anti-racist projects?

GER6000H S Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Tue 3-5, Room: VC212
Instructor: Viktoriya Melnykevych
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.

GER1000H F German Studies Seminar: Culture, Theory, Text
Time: Thu 2-4, Room: OH323
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.

GER1050H F Methods and Texts in Yiddish Studies
Time: Mon 1-3, Room: JH235
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.

GER1200H F Introduction to Medieval Studies
Time: Fri 2-4, Room: AH302
Instructor: Markus Stock
This course offers an introduction to the German language, literature, and culture of the Middle Ages. We will read and translate Middle High German texts, study facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, and inquire into epochal cultural concepts like courtly love and chivalry as well as courtly and clerical designs of identity. Authors discussed will include Hartmann von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide among others. The course fulfills the departmental requirement in Middle High German.

GER1771H F Topics in German Cinema Studies: Visions of the Anthropocene
Time: Tue 2-6, Room: OH323
Instructor: Stefan Soldovieri
The course explores cultural visions of the Anthropocene across a range of media, focusing primarily on examples from the German-speaking context. Our main concern will be to explore how producers of culture are negotiating the far-reaching anthropogenic impacts on the planet’s geology and ecosystems that have led scientists to proclaim that we have entered into a new era of geological time. Readings in ecocriticism and cultural history and theory; primary texts include film, literature, and other cultural artifacts.

GER1820H F The Teaching and Learning of German
Time: Thu 10-12, Room: OH323
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. Students will gain a critical understanding of the major teaching methods and techniques used in universities today with a focus on German as a foreign language. The course is meant to equip students with the means to remain informed about the central debates taking place in the field of SLA/FL language theory and practice. Assignments will include lesson-planning, class observation reports, and the design of reading, writing, speaking, and listening exercises. Students will apply the techniques learned through micro-teaching and peer-teaching exercises.
The overall objective of this course is to provide students with pedagogical tools and meta-linguistic awareness that will allow them to become successful language instructors.

GER6000H F Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Tue 3-5, Room: CR403
Instructor: Erol Boran
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.

GER1540H Literature and Science
Time: Tue 3-5, Room: OH323
Instructor: Christine Lehleiter
In recent decades, much work has been undertaken in disciplines such as the history of science and literary studies with the goal to develop a clearer picture of the relationship between science and literature and of its historical development. We will study this work with a particular focus on literature and science around 1800. Among the authors that we will discuss are Moritz, Goethe, Humboldt, Novalis, and Dilthey.

JGF1773H S Autobiographical Documentary: History, Memory, and Performativity
Time: Mon 4-8 (incl. screening), Room: IN223
Instructor: Angelica Fenner
It was arguably the international avant-garde of the 1950s that first inspired wider exploration of the camera’s potential as a technology of the performative self. Since then, first-person filmmaking has gained ground, dovetailing with disparate social trends across the decades, including those of the New Wave, and more recently, resulting in feature-length autobiographical documentaries that circulate at festivals and garner commercial appeal. Using the German cultural context as case study within a comparative framework, this interdisciplinary seminar draws on diverse theories of subjectivity, including recent scholarship in performance studies (Goffman, Butler, Phelan), Lacanian psychoanalysis, documentary theory (Gaines, Nichols, Odin, Renov), phenomenology (Sobchak), post-structuralism (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault), and theories of cultural memory (Assmann, Halbwachs, Nora) and of transgenerational trauma (Caruth, Felman, Laub). We will explore how the subjective stance navigates a line between exhibitionistic display and introspective narcissism and, in the process, also blurs the lines between public event and private experience, between national historiography and subjective memory, between families of origin and the bounded self. Consideration will be given to both socio-historical context and continuing innovations in narrative form (confession, diary, testimonial), including the nesting of different technologies (photography, Super 8, home video, archival newsreel, cell phone). Our chronology will include avant-garde and feminist filmmaking of the 1970s, but focus primarily on productions of the past 15 years, including: investigative family films by (grand)children of both Holocaust survivors and Nazi perpetrators, experimental queer cinema, reconstructed family historiographies of immigration to Germany, and mainstream features.

JGC1855H S Critical Theory in Context: The French-German Connection
Time: Wed 3-5, Room: Seminar Room, Centre for Comparative Literature
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
This course examines central theoretical issues in contemporary thought with particular attention to the role that the “Frankfurt School” and its affiliates such as Benjamin, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas and others play in the context of modern German social and cultural thought. In France, thinkers like Levinas, Foucault, and Derrida respond to this tradition and enrich it. The course explores in which way the continuing dialogue between these thinkers informs current critical approaches to rethinking issues and concerns such as theorizing modernity, culture, secularization, multiculturalism, and the vital role of cultural difference.

GER6000H S Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Tue 3-5, Room: CR403
Instructor: Viktoriya Melnykevych
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.

GER1000H F German Studies Seminar: Culture, Theory, Text
Time: Thu 2-4, Room: OH323
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.

GER1661H F Modernism in Context
Time: Mon 3-5, Room: OH323
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 and psychoanalysis (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud). Authors discussed will likely include Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Schnitzler, and Hermann Hesse.

GER1785H F Remaking the Movies in German Cinemas
Time: Wed 1-5 (incl. screening), Room: OH323
Instructor: Stefan Soldovieri
Frequently rejected out of hand by critics, the remake has been a quintessentially ‘bad object’ of film criticism. Yet the remake is as old as the cinematic medium itself. In many ways film is ‘repetition’ – the recycling of other films and literature. Films are forms of repetition in series, different cuts or versions (as the result of censorship, synchronization, restoration, etc). In fact the very first film by the Lumière brothers, La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon’ (1895), exists simultaneously in three variations. And films are structured by repetitions in the form of intertextual associations, processes of cultural flow and exchange, visual and aural quotes, homages, etc. The course will explore the remake phenomenon in its historical, industrial, transnational and theoretical dimensions with a focus on films that intersect with German contexts – from remakes of Weimar classics, such as M and Nosferatu, to Hollywood reprises of German films, such as City of Angels, to self-conscious meditations on the nature of the remake itself, as in Wim Wenders’ The State of Things.

GER1820H F The Teaching and Learning of German
Time: Thu 10-12, Room: OH323
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. Students will gain a critical understanding of the major teaching methods and techniques used in universities today with a focus on German as a foreign language. The course is meant to equip students with the means to remain informed about the central debates taking place in the field of SLA/FL language theory and practice. Assignments will include lesson-planning, class observation reports, and the design of reading, writing, speaking, and listening exercises. Students will apply the techniques learned through micro-teaching and peer-teaching exercises.
The overall objective of this course is to provide students with pedagogical tools and meta-linguistic awareness that will allow them to become successful language instructors.

GER6000H F Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Tue 3-5, Room: CR403
Instructor: Josh Dittrich
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.

GER1051Y Yiddish for German Speakers
Time: Tue 12-2, Thu 12-1, Room: JH235
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.

GER 1550H S Origins: Myths of Beginning in German Literature and Thought
Time: Tue 2-4, Room: OH323
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.

GER 1722H S Kafka
Time: Mon 3-5, Room: OH323
Instructor: John Zilcosky
This course examines the oeuvre of Franz Kafka, as it developed in a remarkably short period: from his 1912 “breakthrough” with “The Judgment,” to his middle years and The Trial, to the 1916-17 burst of writing around “A Country Doctor,” to The Castle and Kafka’s final stories before his death in 1924. Alongside these primary texts, we will consider some classic readings of Kafka by critics such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Elias Canetti, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze / Félix Guattari.

GER 1775H S Cinemas of Migration: Mobility and the Moving Image
Time: Tue 4-6, Thu 12-2, Room: IN312 (Tuesdays), IN223 (Thursdays)
Instructor: Angelica Fenner
Drawing on recent exemplars of world cinema whose stories take place against the backdrop of contemporary Germany and neighbouring countries, this seminar examines mobility – and it’s antithesis, immobility — as an increasingly complex cipher. Domestic and transnational productions alike advance diegetic stories that focus on the transience, itinerancy, and flux that have come to characterize contemporary life for widespread numbers of people across the continent and beyond. Readings from social and cultural theory offer a lens through which to excavate uneven modernities, revealing archaic residues of earlier life worlds that haunt protagonists pressured into motion (or alternately, trapped in stasis) by neoliberalism’s tectonic shifts in economy, infrastructure, and social welfare. Recent writings on aesthetics, realism, genre, and affect will also inform our engagement with the ‘realist turn’ in film style that often mediates this contemporary preoccupation with territorial dislocation.

JGC 1855H S Critical Theory – The French-German Connection
Time: Wed 1-3, Room: Seminar Room, Centre for Comparative Literature
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
This course examines central theoretical issues in contemporary thought with particular attention to the role that the “Frankfurt School” and its affiliates such as Benjamin, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas and others play in the context of modern German social and cultural thought. In France, thinkers like Levinas, Foucault, and Derrida respond to this tradition and enrich it. The course explores in which way the continuing dialogue between these thinkers informs current critical approaches to rethinking issues and concerns such as theorizing modernity, culture, secularization, multiculturalism, and the vital role of cultural difference.

GER6000H S Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Tue 3-5, Room: CR405
Instructor: Viktoriya Melnykevych
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.

GER1000H F German Studies Seminar: Culture, Theory, Text
Time: Thu 10-12 (*2-4 PM on Oct.1st*), Room: OH323
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.
You may access the readings here.

GER1051Y Yiddish for German Speakers
Time: Tue 12-2, Thu 12-1, Room: JH235
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.

GER 1220H F Medieval Arthurian Romance
Time: Wed 2-4, Room: OH323
Instructor: Markus Stock
This course is an introduction to medieval German literature, using medieval German romances on King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table as examples. Representing a new wave of chivalric literature in early 13th-century Germany, these texts are key documents for the establishment of a new, refined aristocratic culture following French models. They tell stories of adventure and love, but also of coming-of-age, self-realization and the legitimization of aristocratic power. The course focuses on two of the most widely-read and influential German Arthurian romances, Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein and Wirnt von Grafenberg’s Wigalois – both integral texts of the medieval German literary canon. Ample room will be reserved for the comparison of the German versions to related accounts in other languages (incl. French and Yiddish). Through short introductory modules on Middle High German, the course also enables students without previous exposure to medieval German to read and interpret the texts in their original language. The course fulfills the departmental requirement in Middle High German.

GER 1771H F Locations of East German Cinema
Time: Tue 2-6 (incl. screening), Room: OH323
Instructor: Stefan Soldovieri
The course offers an overview of the history of East German cinema at key junctures and explores the complexities involved in conceptualizing film culture in the context of state socialism in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The film screenings will provide the basis for considering issues of entertainment and politics, censorship, GDR cinema’s links to transnational cultural flows – and dialogue with the West German film industry in particular – as well as GDR film’s afterlife in a unified Germany post 1989. Readings in film history and cultural, film, and social theory. The screened films span all genres – from science fiction to historical epics and musicals.

GER1820H F The Teaching of German
Time: Mon 2-4, Room: OH323
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. Students will gain a critical understanding of the major teaching methods and techniques used in universities today with a focus on German as a foreign language. The course is meant to equip students with the means to remain informed about the central debates taking place in the field of SLA/FL language theory and practice. Assignments will include lesson-planning, class observation reports, and the design of reading, writing, speaking, and listening exercises. Students will apply the techniques learned through micro-teaching and peer-teaching exercises.
The overall objective of this course is to provide students with pedagogical tools and meta-linguistic awareness that will allow them to become successful language instructors.

GER6000H F Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Tue 3-5, Room: TF101
Instructor: Josh Dittrich
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.

GER1000H S German Studies Seminar: Culture, Theory, Text
Time: Thu 2-4, Room: OH323
Instructors: Team taught, Coordinator: Stefan Soldovieri
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.

GER1200H S Middle High German
Time: Mon 5-8, Room: VC304
Instructor: Markus Stock
This course offers an introduction to the German language, literature, and culture of the Middle Ages. We will read and translate Middle High German texts, study facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, and inquire into epochal cultural concepts like courtly love and chivalry as well as courtly and clerical designs of identity. Authors discussed will include Hartmann von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide among others. The course fulfills the departmental requirement in Middle High German.

GER1485H S Goethe’s Novels
Time: Tue 3-5, Room: AH103
Instructor: John Noyes
From the moment he published his first novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werther, at the age of 24 to the appearance of Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre three years before his death, Goethe’s novels set the tone for prose writing in German. His novels are daring, bold, experimental, never satisfied with repeating formula or meeting reader-expectations. In this course we will read all of Goethe’s novels.

GER1771H S Topics in German Cinema Studies: The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School
Time: Mon 6-8 (screening)/Tue 6-8 (class), Room: IN223
Instructor: Angelica Fenner Angelica Fenner
The ‘Berlin School’ is a shorthand moniker that emerged among critics and curators around the millennial turn as a means to reference an otherwise heterogenous group of German directors whose work was gaining visibility and sustained attention. Their emergence parallels the installation of the so-called Berlin Republic, when the German government transferred its official seat of power from Bonn to its pre-World War II location. The politics and aesthetics of these filmmakers can be situated in the same lineage with the Nouvelle Vague and the New German Cinema. Their films emphatically resist the temptation to deliver escapist narratives to a public struggling with the erosion of the social welfare state under the pressures of globalization; instead, they continue to pursue an uncompromising realism focusing in exacting and uncanny detail upon the forms of subjectivity, both ordinary and extraordinary, produced among different social groups and classes. We will review the films of contemporary directors such as Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Ulrich Köhler, Benjamin Heisenberg, and others, with consideration for theories of affect, duration, and the everyday, together with contemporary social and aesthetic theory.

GER1820H S The Teaching of German
Time: Mon 2-4, Room: OH323
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. Students will gain a critical understanding of the major teaching methods and techniques used in universities today with a focus on German as a foreign language. The course is meant to equip students with the means to remain informed about the central debates taking place in the field of SLA/FL language theory and practice. Assignments will include lesson-planning, class observation reports, and the design of reading, writing, speaking, and listening exercises. Students will apply the techniques learned through micro-teaching and peer-teaching exercises.
The overall objective of this course is to provide students with pedagogical tools and meta-linguistic awareness that will allow them to become successful language instructors.

GER6000H S Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Tue 6-8, Room: CR405
Instructor: Josh Dittrich
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.

GER1735H F Transnational Literatures
Time: Wed 2-4, Room: NF235
Instructor: Angelica Fenner
Our understanding of the defining parameters of German cultural production has dramatically transformed in the course of the latter 20th-century and beyond. Both literary and filmic output are now defined by an unprecedented heterogeneity in form, thematics, and language. This is attributable not only to the dramatic changes in national self-understanding to which Germany has been subject since 1945 through the respective founding of the Federal and Democratic Republics, the ensuing construction of the Wall, and its demise 50 years later amidst unification. The recruitment of foreign labour to both Germanies beginning in the 1950s also infused new cultural perspectives; today, authors of extraordinarily diverse background – both recent arrivals to Germany and those of the second and third generation – continue to vitalize the parameters of what constitutes German cultural production. This seminar takes stock of a cross-section of literary, and to a limited extent, also filmic texts that provoke us to rethink the linguistic and cultural bounds of German culture. The thematics of crossing boundaries, or indeed, of their dissolution will surface across a swath of texts now identified as transnational in scope and thrust.

GER1785H F Double Visions: Remaking the Movies in German Cinemas
Time: Thu 12-4 (incl. screening), Room: IN313
Instructor: Stefan Soldovieri
Frequently rejected out of hand by critics, the remake has been a quintessentially ‘bad object’ of film criticism. Yet the remake is as old as the cinematic medium itself. In many ways film is ‘repetition’ – the recycling of other films and literature. Films are forms of repetition in series, different cuts or versions (as the result of censorship, synchronization, restoration, etc). In fact the very first film by the Lumière brothers, La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon’ (1895), exists simultaneously in three variations. And films are structured by repetitions in the form of intertextual associations, processes of cultural flow and exchange, visual and aural quotes, homages, etc. The course will explore the remake phenomenon in its historical, industrial, transnational and theoretical dimensions with a focus on films that intersect with German contexts – from remakes of Weimar classics, such as M and Nosferatu, to Hollywood reprises of German films, such as City of Angels, to self-conscious meditations on the nature of the remake itself, as in Wim Wenders’ The State of Things.

GER6000H F Reading German for Graduate Students
Time: Tue 6-8, Room: CR405
Instructor: Viktoriya Melnykevych
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.