German (GERM-GA)

This not-for-credit course develops the reading skills for graduate students who wish to acquire competence in the German language for research and reading purposes. “German for Reading Knowledge” is an intensive course designed for students interested in accelerating their German reading skills exclusively in order to conduct research in German. The course does not require any previous knowledge of German. Students will acquire a reading vocabulary and understanding of German grammar through analytical discussion, grammar exercises, and extensive reading of selected texts. Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to read German texts of at least medium difficulty, understand their main ideas and translate them with the help of a dictionary. **The course will be conducted in English.** **Please note that the learning objectives of this course do not include oral or written skills. The course is therefore not suited for students who wish to develop communicative abilities (listening comprehension, speaking, and writing in German).** Prerequisites: None

Past topics have included ?Kant?s third critique and Arendt?s lectures? and ?theories of history.?

A systematic introduction to German intellectual history with special emphasis on the role of art. Authors include Baumgarten, Herder, Kant, Schiller, Schlegel, Schelling, and Hegel.

A continuation of GERM.1115, this course presents Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Derrida, de Man, and Luhmann.

Focuses on the role of visuality in modernist thought, with an emphasis on the German tradition. Examines how epistemological models are oriented to a subject defined as a viewer and producer of images. Readings in critical theory, art history, and theories of film and photography.

In this seminar we will explore temporality as the backbone of history, but not in the traditional, chronological way. Instead, we will examine the possibilities of a temporality that is not linear but moves in different directions, starting from the present. During the four weeks we will closely read selected chapters from three novels, in view of their potential for transmediation into visual, or audio-visual texts: -Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary 1856 -Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote (part 1) 1605 -Domnica Radulescu, Train to Trieste 2008 Each novel lends itself to reading with a contemporary slant that we will take as primary in view of making a “pre-posterous” connection between present and past. Each has been or will be audio-visualized: the first one into a feature film, alternatively shown with photographs as installations; the second consists of installations only, and the third will be a feature film only. For the latter we will be able to read the script based on the novel, written by someone else (not connected to my own projects). The question of time will be studied in view of order (sequence, chronology, preposterousness); duration; and rhythm. This 2-credit course will be conducted in English.

This seminar explores the philosophical and psychic dimensions of negativity as the force that shapes both thought and life. Beginning with Hegel’s dialectical notion of negation as the motor of becoming, we will trace how this concept transforms in Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and in Bergson’s philosophy of duration and creative evolution. The course examines how negativity moves from logical contradiction to psychic repression to temporal differentiation — from the structure of Spirit to the work of mourning to the élan vital. We will ask whether negativity is destructive or productive, reactive or generative, and whether contemporary thought can still think transformation without the negative. By reading Phenomenology of Spirit (selected sections), Freud’s “Negation” and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Bergson’s Creative Evolution, we will test the hypothesis that the unconscious is not merely the site of repression, but a plastic power of differentiation, where negation becomes the very form of life.

Taught annually in conjunction with the Departments of German, English, and Comparative Literature. Ronell. 4 points. Recent themes include ?forgiveness and violence,? ?sovereignty,? ?trauma.?

Open to advanced students with permission of the director of graduate studies and chair of the department.