German

Building on the grammar and communication skills acquired in Beginning German (GERM 3001), this course, conducted in German, will strengthen students’ abilities in four language skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. We will engage with authentic German texts and media, deepening the understanding of both the language and contemporary German culture. For a targeted grammar review, especially in early fall, we will revisit the beginner textbook, Neue Horizonte (8th edition), and use other online grammar materials. The main focus of the course will be on two major texts: Faith Akin’s movie, Im Juli (2000), in fall and Nora Krug’s graphic novel, Heimat (2018), in spring. Additional shorter texts and media related to German society and culture—such as online video series and language learners: Nicos Weg’s Meet the Germans, Easy German—will complement class discussions. In addition to regular class-discussion participation, students will be expected to work on vocabulary, complete multiple writing assignments throughout the semester, and deliver a 10-minute presentation on a topic related to class discussions. Conference time will be dedicated to speaking, alongside refining writing skills and preparing presentations. By the end of the year, students will be able to communicate effectively in German, using all four cases, key tenses, and complex sentence structures with greater fluency and accuracy. We will confidently express opinions, narrate events, and engage in discussions on cultural topics. This course will prepare students for travel, deeper explorations of German history and literature, and study in a global education program. Students will gain the skills to navigate real-world interactions in a German-speaking environment.

This course will take an industrial approach to the study of global film and film history, highlighting box-office hits, fans, stars, workers, and dream factories from multiple (trans)national contexts. Foregrounding questions of labor, technology, circulation, and genre, we will examine popular cinema as an industrial film form with a particular emphasis on melodrama, comedy, and the musical. This seminar is framed by some of film history’s most persistent questions: What is “popular” culture? What is a “mass” medium? Is cinema a universal language? Can art be separated from commerce? Proceeding chronologically from the 1920s through the present, we will first explore “classical Hollywood cinema” as an exportable style and mass reproducible system. Next, we will follow the rise of other “-ollywoods” around the world, contextualizing and comparing several major film industries and their popular cinemas. Ranging from Western Europe to the Soviet Union and the Global South, topics will include the studio lot as dream site, urban film cultures, vernacular modernism, colonial film production and cultural imperialism, cine-workers as global workers, divisions of voice labor in Hollywood vs. Bollywood, the transnational feminization of film handiwork, and the relationship between new film industries and new media from polyglot talkies to Nollywood video-films.

Since the Lumière brothers filmed their female employees leaving the factory in 1895, the “working girl” has become a fixture of global cinema. This lecture approaches this archetypal modern character as a foundational figure for film history and an important vernacular link for national film industries competing with Hollywood. We will begin by asking: What is a working girl? How has the category changed over the course of the 20th century as it has circulated around the globe, despite its fraught ideological construction? And how can we turn the category into a tool for intersectional feminist film history? With these questions in mind, we will launch our investigation in the United States and Europe and then move on to the Soviet Union, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Mexico, Senegal, and Cameroon. We will read classic film theory, short fiction, and local histories of film culture and gendered labor alongside films about shopgirls, dancing girls, telephone girls, factory girls, office girls, laundresses, and maids. Topics to be discussed will include working girls as moviegoers, cultural imperialism and vernacular modernism, migration and mass reproduction, sex work, workplace romance, and contradictions of capital and care. In this class, students will conduct comparative, multimedia analyses of film texts and read global film history through the globalization of modern gendered labor. 

This course is designed to help us understand and critique the meaning of violence in the modern era. Drawing on theoreticians of violence and case studies of events, we will explore a variety of types of violence and their impact on politics and society, with a particular focus on Europe and its colonies. At the center of this course will be a number of questions: Is violence modern or archaic? What are the causes and uses of violence? What are the costs of violence on both its perpetrators and its victims? What is the legacy of different kinds of violence? What can comparing different times and places tell us about the use of violence in different contexts? Topics covered will include the establishment of state control over violence, terror, terrorism, total war, The Holocaust, and attempts to come to terms with mass violence, among others.

In 1909, Norman Angell wrote The Great Illusion, a book that went on to become a bestseller. Its premise: Industrialized countries had become so interconnected that war between them did not make sense and would not happen anymore. Five years later, Europe’s industrialized countries were at war with each other. The Great War, as it was called then, lasted from 1914 until 1918 and would change the course of the 20th century. But Angell was not entirely wrong. Precisely because European economies were so interconnected, the war and its aftermath were particularly devastating. After 1918, they were entangled through an additional layer of massive loss of life, devastation, and the resulting resentment and hostility from which Europe struggled to extricate itself until 1945. This period now is sometimes called “Europe’s civil war.” Not all of this was war, however. Beyond earnest struggles for a new peacetime order, much of what we consider modern—from entertainment to consumption but also new modes of politics—has its origins in this period. The course will investigate the cultural, social, economic, and military causes and reverberations of the conflict, from the war itself to the revolutions that followed it, the enfranchisement of women, and expansion of democratic government—but also the rise of communism and fascism and ultimately war again from 1939 to 1945. The impact of these developments was not contained within Europe alone but, rather, extended to the rest of the world—not least of which was the United States. In the course, we will on occasion look beyond the European continent’s border.

World War II led to destruction of such magnitude that the international order shifted fundamentally and new terms had to be coined to describe its violence. This course will examine the events that led to the war, the war itself, and its aftermath. It will begin with a chronological outline of the Great War, the interwar years, and the war itself and then shift to explore key themes such as The Holocaust, military life, women at war, the changing meaning of race and ethnicity, occupation, etc. This course will discuss battles and leaders, but its main focus will be on the impact of the war on culture, politics, and society. Students will be asked to think seriously about how these global events were experienced by what Stalin called “the little screws of history”—i.e., “ordinary people.” This course is really about them. Issues such as total war, genocide, occupation, the terrifying new technologies of the war, and soldier’s life in the different armies will be examined. We will also look at how, after the devastation of the war, people tried to make sense of what had happened. Politicians reacted by creating new laws and institutions, while artists painted, sculpted, and made films and authors turned to the page to understand what they had seen and done.

This course will examine aspects of European culture in the last two decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. This was the era of the Decadent and Symbolist movements; of Secessionist art and architecture; of the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and William James; and of early psychoanalysis. Though in the eyes of some Europeans, looking back at the period nostalgically across the smoking battlefields of World War I, these decades were la belle époque—the “beautiful time” of peace and security—others remembered them as “the gay apocalypse,” a hectic burst of cultural experiment against a background of political paralysis which together heralded the end of the old Europe. While the primary focus of this course will be on creative figures active in Vienna and other parts of the Habsburg monarchy, we will also consider writers, artists, and thinkers from Russia, Scandinavia, Germany, France, and the English-speaking world. These figures will include August Strindberg, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan Zweig, Andrei Bely, Gustav Klimt, and Edvard Munch. We will also look at the Nietzsche cult, “life-philosophy,” and Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

This course will read Romanticism as a precursor to our own era of postmodernism. The starting point will be the French Deconstructionist reading of Friedrich Schlegel and his short-lived journal, Athenaeum (1798-1800). As Maurice Blanchot argues, among the many contradictions “out of which romanticism unfolds—contradictions that contribute to making literature no longer a response but a question,” perhaps most significant is that “romantic art, which concentrates creative truth in the freedom of the subject, also formulates the ambition of a total book, a sort of perpetually growing Bible that will not represent but, rather, replace the real.” We will take Blanchot’s insight as our guide in reading an otherwise disparate collection of texts ranging across Romantic time and space. From Germany, besides Schlegel’s aphorisms, we will read Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816) and The Golden Pot (1814); from Great Britain, Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Byron’s Don Juan (1819), and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); from Poland, Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1814); from Russia, Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (1836) and Eugene Onegin (1833), Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1841), and Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842); and from the United States, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Along the way, we will periodically depart from the 19th century to emphasize the ways that Romanticism underpins what we take to be our own postmodernist thought. As a response to Don Juan, we will read Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia. Together with Frankenstein, we will read Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story; and will end on a ship-faring note, as we juxtapose Moby Dick with Maggie Nelson’s gender- and genre-bending The Argonauts (2015).