GMAN 5010b, Methods of Teaching German as a World Language  Theresa Schenker

This course introduces a variety of language teaching principles and methods and discusses best practices in language teaching. Students get to know the most important second-language acquisition theories as background to our discussions on effective language teaching. We combine the principles of language teaching with observed classroom techniques as we discuss and prepare lesson plans for language-learning classrooms. 
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

GMAN 5110a / CPLT 5100a / PHIL 5100, The Mortality of the Soul: From Aristotle to Bernard Williams  Martin Hagglund

This course explores fundamental philosophical questions of the relation between matter and form, life and spirit, necessity and freedom, by proceeding from Aristotle’s analysis of the soul in De Anima and his notion of practical agency in the Nicomachean Ethics. We study Aristotle in conjunction with seminal works by contemporary neo-Aristotelian philosophers (Korsgaard, Nussbaum, Brague, and McDowell). We in turn pursue the implications of Aristotle’s notion of life by engaging with contemporary philosophical discussions of death that take their point of departure in Epicurus (Nagel, Williams, Scheffler). We conclude by analyzing Heidegger’s notion of constitutive mortality, in order to make explicit what is implicit in the form of the soul in Aristotle.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

GMAN 5480a / CPLT 5480a / HSAR 6580a, Art/Work: On Aesthetics and Labor  Kirk Wetters

Since the 1980s, so-called “postfordistic forms of labor” have increasingly replaced the production processes of industrial good manufacturing in modern information societies and service economies. These new forms of work bear a remarkable resemblance to the ways the artist and artistic processes have been understood in aesthetic discourses since the end of the eighteenth century. The course explores this relation between art and labor from two different angles. (1) It gives an historic overview over the development from ancient concepts of leisure and contemplation to a modern understanding of work as anthropologically crucial and the role art and aesthetic concepts did play in it. (2) It discusses contemporary literature and theories on “new capitalism”, forms of subjectification, and discourses of creativity with regard to their connection to aesthetics around 1800, while also addressing the question of how this development is currently being decisively changed once again by AI.
TTh 1:30pm-3:25pm

GMAN 5490a, Bildung and Class: Bildungsroman to Autosociobiography?  Kirk Wetters

The wider reception of Annie Ernaux’s texts, and especially the publication of Didier Eribon’s Return to Reims in German in 2016 (French 2009), has sparked a debate about a new genre: “autosociobiography.” The term, coined by Ernaux, expands the field of autobiography and autofiction to include social analysis. Narration and theory are situated within a larger tension between literary discourses on education since the emergence of the bildungsroman around 1800 and the sociological category of class and its associated phenomena of social mobility through education. The seminar focuses on contemporary texts such as Christian Baron’s Ein Mann seiner Klasse (A Man of His Class), Daniela Dröscher’s Zeige deine Klasse (Show Your Class), Dinçer Güçyeter’s Unser Deutschlandmärchen (Our German Fairy Tale), and Deniz Ohde’s Streulicht (Scattered Light). The seminar is conducted in German, and all texts used in the seminar are read in German. Please also note that this is an intensive seminar. The course meets twice a week and concludes in mid-October. Reading lists are provided before the start of the term. Prerequisites: advanced German reading, writing, and speaking skills.
TTh 4pm-5:55pm

GMAN 5530a / ANTH 5852a / CPLT 5530a / SOCY 7610a, Karl Marx's Capital  Paul North

A careful reading of Karl Marx's classic critique of capitalism, Capital volume 1, a work of philosophy, political economy, and critical social theory that has had a significant global readership for over 150 years. Selected readings also from Capital volumes 2 and 3.
TTh 9:25am-10:15am

GMAN 6004a / CPLT 9004a / FILM 6170a / FREN 875 / FREN 8750a / SPAN 6205a, Psychoanalysis: Key Conceptual Differences between Freud and Lacan I  Moira Fradinger

This is the first section of a year-long seminar (second section: CPLT 914) designed to introduce the discipline of psychoanalysis through primary sources, mainly from the Freudian and Lacanian corpuses but including late twentieth-century commentators and contemporary interdisciplinary conversations. We rigorously examine key psychoanalytic concepts that students have heard about but never had the chance to study. Students gain proficiency in what has been called “the language of psychoanalysis,” as well as tools for critical practice in disciplines such as literary criticism, political theory, film studies, gender studies, theory of ideology, psychology medical humanities, etc. We study concepts such as the unconscious, identification, the drive, repetition, the imaginary, fantasy, the symbolic, the real, and jouissance. A central goal of the seminar is to disambiguate Freud's corpus from Lacan's reinvention of it. We do not come to the “rescue” of Freud. We revisit essays that are relevant for contemporary conversations within the international psychoanalytic community. We include only a handful of materials from the Anglophone schools of psychoanalysis developed in England and the US. This section pays special attention to Freud's “three” (the ego, superego, and id) in comparison to Lacan's “three” (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real). CPLT 914 devotes, depending on the interests expressed by the group, the last six weeks to special psychoanalytic topics such as sexuation, perversion, psychosis, anti-asylum movements, conversations between psychoanalysis and neurosciences and artificial intelligence, the current pharmacological model of mental health, and/or to specific uses of psychoanalysis in disciplines such as film theory, political philosophy, and the critique of ideology. Apart from Freud and Lacan, we will read work by Georges Canguilhem, Roman Jakobson, Victor Tausk, Émile Benveniste, Valentin Volosinov, Guy Le Gaufey, Jean Laplanche, Étienne Balibar, Roberto Esposito, Wilfred Bion, Félix Guattari, Markos Zafiropoulos, Franco Bifo Berardi, Barbara Cassin, Renata Salecl, Maurice Godelier, Alenka Zupančič, Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, Eric Kandel, and Lera Boroditsky among others. No previous knowledge of psychoanalysis is needed. Starting out from basic questions, we study how psychoanalysis, arguably, changed the way we think of human subjectivity. Graduate students from all departments and schools on campus are welcome. The final assignment is due by the end of the spring term and need not necessarily take the form of a twenty-page paper. Taught in English. Materials can be provided to cover the linguistic range of the group.
T 4pm-5:55pm

GMAN 6046a / CPLT 6046a / EMST 5460a / ENGL 5746a, Rise of the European Novel  Katie Trumpener and Rudiger Campe

In the eighteenth century, the novel became a popular literary form in many parts of Europe. Yet now-standard narratives of its “rise” often offer a temporally and linguistically foreshortened view. This seminar examines key early modern novels in a range of European languages, centered on the dialogue between highly influential eighteenth-century British and French novels (Montesquieu, Defoe, Sterne, Diderot, Laclos, Edgeworth). We begin by considering a sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque life history (Lazarillo de Tormes) and Madame de Lafayette’s seventeenth-century secret history of French court intrigue; contemplate a key sentimental Goethe novella; and end with Romantic fiction (an Austen novel, a Kleist novella, Pushkin’s historical novel fragment). These works raise important issues about cultural identity and historical experience, the status of women (including as readers and writers), the nature of society, the vicissitudes of knowledge—and novelistic form. We also examine several major literary-historical accounts of the novel’s generic evolution, audiences, timing, and social function, and historiographical debates about the novel’s rise (contrasting English-language accounts stressing the novel’s putatively British genesis, and alternative accounts sketching a larger European perspective). The course gives special emphasis to the improvisatory, experimental character of early modern novels, as they work to reground fiction in the details and reality of contemporary life. Many epistolary, philosophical, sentimental, and Gothic novels present themselves as collections of “documents”—letters, diaries, travelogues, confessions—carefully assembled, impartially edited, and only incidentally conveying stories as well as information. The seminar explores these novels’ documentary ambitions; their attempt to touch, challenge, and change their readers; and their paradoxical influence on “realist” conventions (from the emergence of omniscient, impersonal narrators to techniques for describing time and place).
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

GMAN 6300a / FILM 6330a, Voice Imitators: Reading Thomas Bernhard with AI  Fatima Naqvi

This course seeks to situate Thomas Bernhard’s prose miniatures collected in The Voice Imitator (Der Stimmenimitator, 1978) in relations to questions generated by artificial intelligence. We come together to write about and discuss the microstories collected in this volume in light of Bernhard’s other writings, important literary works by other authors, radio programs, films, and contemporary writing on AI. We experiment with various AI models to see what kinds of readings advanced language models might generate. We measure our own multidisciplinary, theoretically nuanced interpretations against those of the “machine”—and see where this “dialogue” with AI might take us. Bernhard’s microstories, which reflect profoundly on contingency, mimesis, imitation, performativity, averageness, and speech acts, offer a rich starting point for such analyses.
F 11:45am-1:40pm

GMAN 7720a / FILM 7720a, Landscape, Film, Architecture  Fatima Naqvi

Movement through post-1945 landscapes and cityscapes as a key to understanding them. The use of cameras and other visual-verbal means as a way to expand historical, aesthetic, and sociological inquiries into how these places are inhabited and experienced. Exploration of both real and imaginary spaces in works by filmmakers (Wenders, Herzog, Ottinger, Geyrhalter, Seidl, Ade, Grisebach), architects and sculptors (e.g. Rudofsky, Neutra, Abraham, Hollein, Pichler, Smithson, Wurm, Kienast), photographers (Sander, B. and H. Becher, Gursky, Höfer), and writers (Bachmann, Handke, Bernhard, Jelinek). Additional readings by Certeau, Freytag, J.B. Jackson, L. Burckhardt.
F 9:25am-11:20am, W 7pm-10pm