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Courses : Core Graduate Courses

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These classes can serve among the five required core courses which graduate students will be required to take during their first two years of studies.

CHUN, DOROTHY

German 262: Second Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics
This course provides an overview of the basic theoretical principles of second language acquisition (SLA) as they apply to language teaching and learning. In addition, we will discuss different methodologies of foreign language teaching. In order to prepare graduate students for future employment, which in most cases involves teaching the language, and in some cases, may involve supervising language instruction, the practical applications of these theories and methodologies to the teaching of foreign languages will be addressed.

INT 223A and 223B: Learning and Teaching with Digital Media
This course is taught as a two-quarter sequence, with INT 223A being a prerequisite for INT 223B. INT 223A deals with the underlying theories of learning and teaching with new media and presents a variety of technological tools that can be used for developing instructional materials. Students read and discuss articles on theories of learning with media, as well as readings on the authoring process, instructional design, and evaluation methods. In the second quarter, in order to prepare graduate students for future careers in which knowledge of using technology for instruction is becoming increasingly essential, students design and implement an instructional module in their field.

DERWIN, SUSAN

German 249: Childhood and Pedagogy
An examination of eighteen- and nineteenth- century literature, both fictional and non fictional, on child rearing and education, including examples of the Bildungsroman (Goethe), fairy tales (Grimm brothers), treatises and practical handbooks on education and instruction (Basedow, Krueger), theories of pedagogy (Landmann, Weiller).

German 251: Post World War II German Literature Fiction and drama written in the aftermath of the war in both East and West Germany.

KITTLER, WOLF

German 267: From Movable Letters to Bits. A Media History of German Literature.
The purpose of the course is to analyze the material and technical conditions of writing as a key to the imaginary effects they produce in fiction and in theory. The material studied will include the emergence of the author from the printing press, the alienation of the author by voice recording and transmitting technologies, and the death of the author in the time of automated data processing machinery. Exemplary readings of texts by Luther, Leibniz, Fichte, Kant, Goethe, Kleist, Keller, Freud, Kafka, Arno Schmidt, Max Bense, Helmut Heissenbuettel and others.

German 268: Speaking of Language
This course traces the discourse on language and signification from the 17th century to the present with a particular focus on the German contributions. The following stages will be discussed: the quest for a universal language, the stories about the origins of language, the history of language, and the language game. Exemplary readings of texts by A. Kircher, Leibniz, Suessmilch, Herder, F. Schlegel, J. Grimm, E. Sievers, K. Buehler and L. Wittgenstein.

RICKELS, LARRY

German 242: Back to Frankfurt School
The seminar explores as a theory or therapy of couples the Frankfurt School's central agon, the proposed merger between Marxism and psychoanalysis. Texts: A. Arato and E. Beghardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader T. W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

German 227B: Gotta Read Goethe
The premise or challenge of this seminar is that we have barely begun to read Goethe. A certain reception of Germany's master author (which reaches back, for example, through Thomas Mann to Friedrich Schlegel) has rendered Goethe the mascot of middlebrow culture. To counter this monu-mental trend, we will study the primal texts in the context of their reception through Freud, Benjamin, Kittler, Hamacher, Ronell, and more.

German 248: Hegel with Shmear
The seminar skips the short shrift given Hegel and examines the long haul and repetition (Wiederholung) that drags remnants of Hegel into resonance with remnants of Freud, both parties struck up to resound together in Adorno and in Derrida. Nachtrglichkeit begins to describe the enigmatic but determining force binding together Hegel and Freud, Adorno and Derrida. The seminar is thus an exercise in reading for 'influence' in all the wrong places. What's bad for love or misrecognition, however, turns out to be good enough for thinking bent on recognition. The Main Texts: Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit; Freud, Moses and Monotheism; Adorno, Negative Dialectics; Derrida, Glas.

SPIEKER, SVEN

German 252: Literature through Politics
This seminar will examine the development and deployment of politics at the interstice of different media and their technologies. When and where does literature begin to engage the political, or politics literature? What does it mean to 'write politics', or to politicize writing? How do different media -- from writing to the mechanical printing press to the audio-visual archives of the 20th century -- organize the 'political' subject and its operating ground, the modern state? How has the relationship between ethics, politics, and religion evolved between the 18th century and the present? These are some of the questions addressed in this course. Texts by G.C. Lichtenberg, Diderot, Bayle, Montesquieu, G.E. Lessing, J. W. Goethe, F. Nietzsche, K. Marx, F. Engels, R. Musil, W. Benjamin, B. Brecht, K. Tucholsky, R. Luxemburg, W. Sombart, C. Schmitt, H. Broch, K. Krauss, and others.

German 253: Literature in the Visual Field
This seminar will explore the relationship between literature and the visual field. We will explore different approaches and attitudes to the problem of 'seeing' and/or 'being seen', the notion of perspectival vision, and the relationship between writing and visual representation from the Romantic period to 1960s 'concrete' poetry and beyond. Texts by G. E. Lessing, J. W. Goethe, Hegel, I. Kant, E.T.A. Hoffmann, S. Freud, J. Lacan, E. Panofsky, M. Foucault, and others.

German 254: Aufklaerung
The seminar investigates the German Enlightenment as a literary and philosophical formation, with a special focus on its theory of language. Texts by Leibniz, Kant, Descartes, Lessing, Lichtenberg, Hobbes, Locke.

WEBER, ELISABETH

German 214: Greek myths in German Tragedy
The tragedies of Antigone, Penthesilea, and Medea, as read by Hoelderlin, Kleist, and Grillparzer. Readings include theoretical texts on the Tragic by Lessing, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan and others.

German 243: German Judaism in Literature and Philosophy
The seminar pursues the analysis of texts on Judaism from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The exploration of the historical, philosophical and political contexts of the desire for and the resistance against a "German-Jewish symbiosis" will be the main focus of discussions. Texts include, among others, selections from M. Mendelssohn, GE Lessing, Hegel, Wagner, Nietzsche, H. Cohen, F. Rosenzweig, S. Freud. Contemporary German, French and Israeli commentators (J. Derrida, Y. Yovel) will also be discussed.

KITTLER, WOLF & WEBER, ELISABETH

German 258: Melancholia: Benjamin and the Baroque
Close reading of Baroque authors like Hallmann, Gryphius, Lohenstein and Benjamin's "Origin of the German Tragedy".

 

© 2004 UCSB Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies. gd-germ@gss.ucsb.edu