Undergraduate Courses

The GER 100Y language course is an introductory German course divided into two sections for students with no prior knowledge of the language. Based on a communicative and task-based approach, it is designed to develop proficiency in oral and written communication skills while providing students with knowledge and understanding of the societies and cultures of German-speaking countries. Students will develop their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills through a variety of stimulating activities. Vocabulary will be presented in the context of culturally significant issues. Topics cover areas such as introducing and talking about oneself, shopping, telling time and recounting a day, family life, describing and renting an apartment, travel, health and fitness or studying abroad. Additionally, the course will provide students with a foundation in a number of basic grammatical structures and concepts. Class periods will be devoted mostly to communicative and interactive exercises. In addition to preparation at home, regular class attendance is paramount in order to participate successfully in these activities.

This language course will provide students with genuine communication experiences in order to deepen their understanding of German-speaking countries. It has been designed to further develop communicative proficiency in each of the four language skills listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The textbooks are motivating and encourage interest in culture and language through their unique approach to authentic material illustrating vocabulary in context, communicative functions of grammatical structures, and cultural highlights. All readings, videos, projects, and presentations in class explore historical, social, political, and popular topics while aspects of Germanic and North American cultures are being compared. Learning strategies and self-assessment are part of every chapter, allowing for differentiation among various types of learners. The topics cover areas such as introducing and talking about oneself, shopping, telling time and recounting a day, family life, describing and renting an apartment, health and fitness etc. Cultural and linguistic variants of all three German-speaking countries are featured. Class periods will be devoted mostly to communicative and interactive exercises. In order to participate successfully in these activities, preparation at home and regular class attendance are paramount.

This language course will provide students with genuine communication experiences in order to deepen their understanding of German-speaking countries. It has been designed to further develop communicative proficiency in each of the four language skills listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The textbooks are motivating and encourage interest in culture and language through their unique approach to authentic material illustrating vocabulary in context, communicative functions of grammatical structures, and cultural highlights. All readings, videos, projects, and presentations in class explore historical, social, political, and popular topics while aspects of Germanic and North American cultures are being compared. Learning strategies and self-assessment are part of every chapter, allowing for differentiation among various types of learners. The topics cover areas such as introducing and talking about oneself, shopping, telling time and recounting a day, family life, describing and renting an apartment, health and fitness etc. Cultural and linguistic variants of all three German-speaking countries are featured. Class periods will be devoted mostly to communicative and interactive exercises. In order to participate successfully in these activities, preparation at home and regular class attendance are paramount.

This course is aimed at students with a high level of competence in German. Building on material covered in GER 100/200/300, it offers advanced studies of German language, including text-based analysis and with a focus on improving communication skills. It includes a systematic review and expansion of grammar and stylistics, and additional emphasis lies on vocabulary building. The course is partly based on newspaper articles, literary texts, films and websites.

This course is an introduction to the Yiddish language and culture of Ashkenazic Jews. It will begin to prepare you to be able to express yourself in Yiddish, acquire strategies to learn Yiddish independently by developing your ability to understand the structure of the language and to cue in on the features of spoken and written Yiddish.

This course will build on the knowledge and skills you’ve acquired in beginner’s Yiddish. Emphasis will shift slightly towards reading, listening and speaking. We will read selections from folk tales, Glatshteyn’s Emil un karl (or another text), and finish College Yiddish. You will write compositions and summaries, acquire new vocabulary words, listen to recordings, watch films, and give presentations. We will sing and play games. We will also go on a tour of Yiddish-speaking Toronto (past and present).

This course examines German cinema against the backdrop of European film history. European films share common references points anchored in the cataclysms of two world wars, and have also negotiated analogous postwar transformations in family life, urbanization, the regional and the national, cultural identity, labour relations, post-socialist societies, and state security. A comparative approach enables examination of what binds German cinema to European cinema – shared histories and political concerns – as well as what is nationally unique and distinctive. By matching select films with readings from social theory, cultural studies, and film studies, we will compare and contrast these sociohistorical concerns while also attending to the medium specificities of film style, aesthetics, and narrative form.

Can money buy you love? Can it buy you justice? Is money a crime? Is everything for sale? What do we owe when we are in debt? Is there a philosophy of money? These are some of the questions we will be examining in this course, with the help of select works of German literature and philosophy. In a world where every aspect of life is constantly converted into money, or at least into the potential to create money – up to the point where it becomes difficult to speak of anything divorced from its financial value – these are clearly not trivial matters. This course will provide historical and cultural depth to the problem of money, exchange and debt in everyday life.

Building on GER 205H (“German Literature I: Working Methods”), this course takes you on a journey back through time through various periods of German literature starting in the present and concluding in the era of the Weimar Classic. We analyze representative works of major writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Christa Wolf, Zafer Şenocak and Jenny Erpenbeck. We look at different genres and periods, prominent authors, and ideas/movements that have shaped German-language literature. Approaching the texts through close reading and contextualization (broader historical and cultural perspectives), students learn to read critically and to consider the literary qualities of the German language. The course aims at teaching you to critically approach and assess progressively more complex literary texts in the German language to prepare you for advanced literature courses on the 4xx-level. (Note: GER 305H is a prerequisite course for 400-level literature courses.)

As the concept of culture in today’s world becomes more and more associated with globalisation and international influences, it seems appropriate to supersede the traditional question of ‘What is German culture?’ with the more open question of ‘Where is German culture?’ This course provides an introduction to contemporary German culture and its roots from 1945 onwards, focusing particularly on them es of travel and migration. The course will examine cultural texts and objects including poetry, prose, film, songs and old and new media forms. Sessions involve class discussions, group work, readings, and occasional lectures. The course will be taught in German.

This course introduces to the rich life of the various literary movements during the Age of Goethe (1750-1830). Readings include seminal texts of early European modernity – among them Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Goethe’s Faust drama – as well as some of the great poetry by the most eminent literary figures active during the period from Enlightenment to Romanticism and the “Ende der Kunstperiode” (Heine).

Subtitle: “It Sounds Better in Yiddish: An Introduction to Jewish Humour”
What is Jewish about humour and what is humorous about Ashkenazi Jewishness? What’s so funny about Yiddish? These are the basic questions that inspire this course. To experience the richness of Jewish European humour, we will analyze a variety of humorous genres (short fiction, film, stand-up, jokes, music) using a variety of analytical perspectives (historical, psychological, ethnographic, queer, and literary). A central theme will be the ways in which humour, through translation and adaptation, accompanied Jewish migrations within Europe and beyond.

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.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales – we all know and love them. But what do we really know? Which versions are we familiar with? Most likely not the ones by the Brothers Grimm. And certainly not in German! This course is a journey into the mythical German Schwarzwald, a place of wolves and witches, the realm of the fantastic. It is not a traditional language course, as we won’t be cramming grammar. We will be reading fairy tales, their adaptations and some interpretations; we will learn to approach them critically taking into consideration their historical conditions and intertextual relations; and we will be looking at language-specific aspects. Students are required to read the tales in the original German. Classes will be held partly in English and partly in German, depending on the language level of the participants. Note: This is a FYF-Seminar open to first-year students only. Prerequisite: one year of German (or equivalent).

The GER 100Y language course is an introductory German course divided into two sections for students with no prior knowledge of the language. Based on a communicative and task-based approach, it is designed to develop proficiency in oral and written communication skills while providing students with knowledge and understanding of the societies and cultures of German-speaking countries. Students will develop their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills through a variety of stimulating activities. Vocabulary will be presented in the context of culturally significant issues. Topics cover areas such as introducing and talking about oneself, shopping, telling time and recounting a day, family life, describing and renting an apartment, travel, health and fitness or studying abroad. Additionally, the course will provide students with a foundation in a number of basic grammatical structures and concepts. Class periods will be devoted mostly to communicative and interactive exercises. In addition to preparation at home, regular class attendance is paramount in order to participate successfully in these activities.

This language course will provide students with genuine communication experiences in order to deepen their understanding of German-speaking countries. It has been designed to further develop communicative proficiency in each of the four language skills listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The textbooks are motivating and encourage interest in culture and language through their unique approach to authentic material illustrating vocabulary in context, communicative functions of grammatical structures, and cultural highlights. All readings, videos, projects, and presentations in class explore historical, social, political, and popular topics while aspects of Germanic and North American cultures are being compared. Learning strategies and self-assessment are part of every chapter, allowing for differentiation among various types of learners. The topics cover areas such as introducing and talking about oneself, shopping, telling time and recounting a day, family life, describing and renting an apartment, health and fitness etc. Cultural and linguistic variants of all three German-speaking countries are featured. Class periods will be devoted mostly to communicative and interactive exercises. In order to participate successfully in these activities, preparation at home and regular class attendance are paramount.

This language course will provide students with genuine communication experiences in order to deepen their understanding of German-speaking countries. It has been designed to further develop communicative proficiency in each of the four language skills listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The textbooks are motivating and encourage interest in culture and language through their unique approach to authentic material illustrating vocabulary in context, communicative functions of grammatical structures, and cultural highlights. All readings, videos, projects, and presentations in class explore historical, social, political, and popular topics while aspects of Germanic and North American cultures are being compared. Learning strategies and self-assessment are part of every chapter, allowing for differentiation among various types of learners. The topics cover areas such as introducing and talking about oneself, shopping, telling time and recounting a day, family life, describing and renting an apartment, health and fitness etc. Cultural and linguistic variants of all three German-speaking countries are featured. Class periods will be devoted mostly to communicative and interactive exercises. In order to participate successfully in these activities, preparation at home and regular class attendance are paramount.

This course is aimed at students with a high level of competence in German. Building on material covered in GER 100/200/300, it offers advanced studies of German language, including text-based analysis and with a focus on improving communication skills. It includes a systematic review and expansion of grammar and stylistics, and additional emphasis lies on vocabulary building. The course is partly based on newspaper articles, literary texts, films and websites.

Advanced reading, writing, vocabulary and conversation. Study of poetry, short fiction and memoir literature by Zeitlin, Bergelson, Gladshteyn, Sholem Aleichem and I.B. Singer. Selected advanced grammatical topics presented in conjunction with the study of texts. (Conducted entirely in Yiddish.)

This prerequisite course offers an introduction to work methods and skills pertaining to the study of German literature. As such, the course is meant to provide a transition from language to topic courses. Students will receive training in how to give a successful presentation, how to read and analyze texts, how to find secondary literature and how to write short papers. The course is required for majors and specialists and a pre-requisite course for most of the other topic courses. It should be taken as early as possible.

This course covers a time period of roughly 200 years dealing with the nightmares of the Romantic psyche with its witches & vampires all the way to the evil offspring of the postmodern era. Reading tales by J.W. Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, A. v. Droste-Hülshoff, Th. Storm and P. Süskind, among other, we investigate instances of the grotesque and the macabre, the mysterious and the uncanny, the monstrous and the sublime. Our guiding questions are: In what ways do the works discussed mirror modern life experience? How do these monsters of the imagination interrelate to German culture & society? And what do they ultimately tell us about ourselves?

This course introduces students to basic concepts and vocabulary necessary for the German business context. All the language skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) will be practiced in appropriate business contexts.

When in 1899 an anonymous writer sent the New Year’s card displayed above, he could look back at a century that had brought enormous changes for the territory that today is Germany. Fighting against Napoleon, Germany’s national feelings had been strengthened and a German state had emerged from a conglomerate of small duchies governed by absolutist rulers. Political revolts had challenged these absolutistic forms of government and had started to replace it with a democratic state of classes. The composition of German society had changed dramatically as a result of the industrial revolution which had replaced traditional manufacturing with mass production by machines and with private capital. The human suffering and social challenges triggered by the industrial revolution had led to new political movements like communism and socialism. Despite these challenges, however, the century had been shaped by the belief in progress and the optimism that new scientific discoveries would lead to a better life for Germany and mankind. In this course, we will study how German authors reflected on these changes in literary, political and philosophical texts. Our work in class will be shaped by class discussions, group work, and occasional lectures. Assignments and discussions will be in German.

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This course looks at the 50+ year cultural history of Germany?s largest ethnic minority. Starting in the 1960s, Turks first came as labour migrants (?guest workers?) and later, in the 1980s, as asylum seekers; there were always artists among them. With them new impulses and perspectives reached German culture. First in Turkish, but soon also in German the migrants reacted to and interacted with their new surroundings. Over the years a vibrant Turkish-German cultural scene developed. Comparable to the political realm, their cultural integration was filled with challenges and obstacles. Nonetheless artists of Turkish origin have since become such an integral part of Germany?s cultural landscape that the scholar Leslie Adelson talks about a Turkish turn of German literature. This development is not restricted to literature, but also encompasses film, political cabaret, stand-up comedy, rap and hip-hop, etc.

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.

In this course we read some of the most enjoyable plots and stories in German Literature and examine how the pleasure of reading sets readers free to re-imagine themselves and the world released from everyday pressures and the repressive weight of the status quo. Readings are all in English translation and include texts by Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Keller, Heine and Kafka. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.