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CHUN, DOROTHY

German 262: Applied Linguistics
Rotating topics in Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Learning and Teaching, covering theoretical foundations (e.g., role of native language, acquisition versus learning, interlanguage, individual learner differences) and practical applications (e.g., teaching methodologies, proficiency-oriented instruction, teaching of culture).

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 thoeries 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
Childhood. We've all had one, yet its earliest beginnings are hidden by a particular amnesia. Childhood is a construction, created through memory and story. Similarly, how a culture understands its children is also a construction, dependent upon the evolving domestic sphere, system of political beliefs, economy, religious institutions and representations that give expression to attitudes, desires, and anxieties of the time. In this course, we will focus upon the question of how and when the "modern" image of the child, i.e. the child of innocence, emerged in European and American culture. We will consider the diverse precursors of this image, and how this image has evolved. We will read texts of philosophy, and psychoanalysis, manuals of childrearing and pedagogy, children's literature, and novels about children from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries and we will view examples from visual art and film (The Bad Seed). Texts by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Daniel Schreber, the Grimm brothers, Charles Dickens, Sigmund Freud, J.D. Salinger, Alice Miller.

Interdisciplinary Studies 202: Embodiment (Team-taught with Kay Young)
This seminar will look at the question of embodiment from two directions: how it is that ideas are embodied and how it is that bodies act because of ideas. Our discussions will begin from reading philosophic, linguistic, psychoanalytic and neurologic essays that explore connections between mind and body. Among authors to be read are: Descartes, Lakoff, Johnson, Scarry, Damasio, Amery, Freud, Foucault, and Percy. Through a reading of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, we will also consider literary pursuits of embodiment by exploring what it means to "concretize" a narrative world. And we will address the question of how non-physical forces move bodies to act -- upon themselves, as in the somatic symptom, and upon others, as in violence perpetrated intersubjectively.

KITTLER, WOLF

German 210: The Discourse of Technology: Engineering, Philosophy, Literature, Art
The seminar will focus on what Martin Heidegger famously called "The Question of Technology." The question erases the boundaries between theory and fiction, literature and art, as well as that between the sciences and the so-called humanities. Hence, the material studied will comprise literary and philosophical texts, examples from the visual arts, and a few seminal works of twentieth-century engineering. The plan is to trace the history of technology from early twentieth-century analog media to the digital turn at the end of the century.
Texts will be provided in a reader - for reasons of convenience, in English translations, yet the study of the originals is strongly recommended. Images will be presented as slides.

Texts:
1. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909
2. Franz Kafka: The Aeroplanes of Brescia
3. Franz Kafka: In the Penal Colony
4. Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
5. Martin Heidegger: Being and Time, § 17.
6. Martin Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology
7. Antoine Artaud: To Have Finished With the Judgment of God
8. Jacques Lacan: Seminar on "The Purloined Letter"
9. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus (Excerpts)
10. Alan Mathison Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence
11. Claude E. Shannon et al.: The Philosophy of PCM
12. Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (not contained in the reader)

Images and documents about performances by:
1. Marcel Duchamp
2. Josef Beuys

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 (Comparative Literature 594) : Speaking about Language
This seminar will investigate theories about language and signification from the Baroque to the present. Theoretical and literary texts will be discussed in juxtaposition in each of the following four sections:
1) Universal Languages (Descartes, Leibniz, Wilkins -- Shakespeare, Lohenstein);
2) The Origin of Language (Rousseau, Suessmilch, Herder -- Goethe);
3) The History of Language (Jacob Grimm, Franz Bopp, Nietzsche -- Richard Wagner, Herman Melville);
4) The Structure of Language (Saussure, Benjamin, Lacan, Derrida -- Joyce, Kafka).

RICKELS, LARRY

German 226 (Comparative Literature 594) : Schiller's "Ghost Seers"
The seminar takes its title and direction from Schiller's "Ghost Seers," a work displaced to the side of the classical canon of Schiller scholarship, but which can also be seen to be on the inside of the Schiller corpus. The seminar adds to the nine or so case studies comprising my book Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts, the in-depth exploration of Schiller's haunted texts and effects.

SPIEKER, SVEN

German 210 (Art History 296B, Comparative Literature 200) : Surrealism and Psychoanalysis
Few moments in the history of 20th-century art and literature have engaged as many disciplines and discourses-from Marxism to psychoanalysis, theoretical physics, and 19th-century psychiatry-as surrealism. This seminar investigates key figures and strategies of surrealist practice at the point where they intersect with their theoretical elaborations. Readings by Freud, Breton, Aragon, Dali, Eluard, Duchamp, Bataille, Picabia, Caillois, Leiris, Bellmer.

German 210 (Art History 296A, Comp Lit 200): The Big Archive (Theories of the Modern)
The seminar investigates various theories of remembering, storage, and archivization (psychoanalysis, deconstruction) and the relations they maintain with post/modernist art. From Duchamp to Beuys and Kabakov, different techniques of archivization have engaged aesthetic theory and practice intensely over the last four decades. The seminar investigates the representation of the archive, but also the archivization of representation that it seems, at times, to imply. Readings by Derrida, Lacan, Freud, Benjamin, Deleuze, Foucault, Duchamp, and many others.

German 210 (Art History 296A, Comp Lit 200): Crash: Trauma, Rupture, Art: (Theories of the Modern)
The seminar explores the intersection between neo-avant-gardist artistic practice and philosophy at a point where both of them reach their limit. Trauma marks the point at which experience is no longer subject to recording, the point where the programs that allow for such experience literally "crash". To view postwar art, literature, and philosophy from the point of view of this crash is to view art as rupture, and language as radically discontinuous. Apart from philosophical texts by Sigmund Freud, Soshana Felman, Jacques Derrida, Antonin Artaud, Jacques Lacan, T. Adorno, we will examine works by Anselm Kiefer, Piero Manzoni, Andy Warhol, Viennese Actionism, Dan Graham, Gerhard Richter, Samuel Beckett, Michel Butor, and others.

German 270 (Art History 296A, Arts 2622): LA/Moscow: Repetition/Innovation
The class investigates "repetition" and the way in which this complex operation affects, shapes, or programs the relationship between the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-gardes of the late 1950s and 60s. Postwar art and philosophy during that time--from Foucault to Derrida and Lacan--seem to be re-playing the historical avant-garde, from constructivism to Dada and surrealism. Art from Los Angeles during the 1950s and 60s, too, "replays"--at various speeds and with various degrees of intensity and background noise--Russian constructivism of the 1920s, creating an unlikely axis between Central Russia and Southern California. Meanwhile Moscow artists of the 1960s, oddly, seem to be engaged in a rerun both of the Russian Avant-garde (TRACK 1) and of its Southern Californian remix (TRACK 2). The class will investigate the different modes and motivations of this complex East/West re(p)lay, and the way it relates to innovation and difference. Readings by W. Benjamin; S. Freud; J. Derrida; T. Adorno, G. Deleuze, and others.

WEBER, ELISABETH

German 210: Trauma in 20th Century Continental Thought: Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida
"Trauma-theory" is a quickly expanding field of research at the intersection of the humanities on the one hand, and psychoanalysis and psychiatry on the other. Whereas the psychoanalytic element in the genealogy of trauma-theory has been thoroughly documented, its philosophical antecedents are often overlooked. The class's exploration will begin with Martin Heidegger, who formulated conceptual predecessors of "trauma"; next we will study the first philosopher who used "trauma" as a seminal concept for his philosophical oeuvre, Emmanuel Levinas. Lastly we will read texts by Jacques Derrida, in whose thought the traumatic element is pervasive, but rarely recognized. We will also discuss concurrent texts by Maurice Blanchot, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Lacan. Two readers will be available: One with the texts in the original languages, one with English translations. Class discussions will be in English.

German 210: Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin: Speech-Thinking / Sprach-Denken
The seminar proposes a close study of selected texts by Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin on language and translation. The relation of language and translation to notions central to the Jewish tradition, such as "creation" and "redemption," will be addressed in particular. We will also discuss both thinkers' critical reflections on "religion" and the ideology of "progress." In addition to texts by Rosenzweig and Benjamin, readings will include contemporary scholarship (among others, essays by E. Levinas, S. Moses, R. Gibbs, Leora Batnitzky, Dana Hollander, E. Santner, R. Nagele).
Readings in German (for students of German) or English (for students from other departments), discussion in English.

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, G.E. Lessing, Hegel, Wagner, Nietzsche, H. Cohen, F. Rosenzweig, S. Freud. Contemporary German, French and Israeli commentators (J. Derrida, Y. Yovel) will also be discussed.

German 244: Ethics and Psychoanalysis
What is the ethical meaning of a theory at whose heart is the notion of an unknowable unconscious constituting the "core of our being"? What are its political implications? According to Jacques Lacan, psychoanalysis concerns a law that announces an "ethics, converted to silence, through the avenue not of terror, but of desire". The course explores the concepts of "the law", "desire", and others related to them, through a close reading of Lacan's seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Texts by Kant, de Sade, Freud and Heidegger, that are important for Lacan's thought, will also be discussed.

German 247: Heidegger on Poetry
Martin Heidegger was one of the greatest and most influential thinkers on language and poetry of the 20th Century. The class examines some of Heidegger's texts on language as well as some of his writings on poems by Trakl, George, and Hlderlin. Equally included are essays by one of Heidegger's strongest critics: Adorno's studies on poetry and parts of his Jargon of Authenticity.