Graduate Courses

In this course, we explore theatre as a site of adaptation, as intermedial constellation. We investigate the relationship between dramatic literature and its performance and performability, between textual outlines and their realization(s): between scripts and stages. Focusing on “adaptations” in their various forms, allows us to explore the history of modern German theatre (1750–present day) from a particular angle. The perspective encourages us to prioritize actors over the writers/directors, it requires us to focus on the margins of a script: paratexts—a stage direction, for example—rather than their “literary” counterparts. With this shift of focus and radical widening of the perspective, the course aims to bring forth minor voices within the canons of German drama literature and to offer a way to engage creatively and in unexpected ways with the canons of our field.

Ever since literature left its ancillary position in the service of extraneous creeds, ideologies and educational purposes or, in the eyes of some, became their substitute, it had to rethink itself. Reflections about its own raison d’être and how it relates to the world politically, philosophically, and emotionally became a primary substratum of literary modernism. This is particularly true for modernism in German language contexts where some of the major theories about literature originated and where philosophy, politics and literature had been closely intertwined for centuries. Following general reflections on the term Modernism and its variations in different linguistic and national contexts (Die Moderne, la modernité, modernismo) as well as its relation to Realism, to the Avant Garde and to Postmodernism, this course explores some of the major works of German Modernism. Among the texts to be discussed are works by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Else Lasker-Schüler, Franz Kafka as well as selected poetry and short prose by authors ranging from Expressionists to poets writing in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Special attention is given to intertextual references to the literary tradition and, in this context, to the self-reflexive dimension of the modernist writings.

Careful analysis of central texts in Benjamin’s oeuvre in the context of his philosophical, political, and literary reading.

This seminar studies transformations of European critical theory in a Latin American context. Taking one exemplary European critical theorist, Walter Benjamin, and one exemplary Latin American intellectual, cultural, and political milieu, Chile, it surveys the conjunctures among them. Critical theory names a cluster of intellectual methods and goals in early 20^th-century Germany, which sees philosophy as too theoretical and Marxism as too untheoretical, and tries to fix the one with the other and visa versa. Later in the century, critical theory travels outward, occupying other discourses, becoming occupied by other histories, contributing to political occupations in systems not forseen in the original movement. We trace two Benjaminian motifs—violence and its relation to the image and critique—as these motifs migrate out of texts by Benjamin into artworks, films, and theoretical texts by Spanish-language thinkers and makers, against the singular backdrop of 20^th-century Chilean political history. What interest us are the readings and misreadings, correspondences and responses, citations and fantastical reconstructions, turn arounds and cul de sacs of a reception and repurposing of critical theory. 

The course will be taught in English, with texts available in both Spanish and English. Some texts will be available in English translation for the very first time.

This seminar is partially funded by a Mellon Foundation program on Critical Theory in the Global South.

This seminar reviews the origins of apocalyptic thought in the three great monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and also considers the modern adaptations of apocalypticism in each tradition.

Course is multi titled with HIST574/REL546/RLST813

Instructors: Abbas Amanat, John Collins

A status report on the book as a medium in an age of cybernetic technology and virtual reality. The contentious no-man’s-land between books and contemporary systems.

Course multi titled with GMAN602

Instructor: Henry Sussman

A detailed study of Goethe’s 1795/96 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship—the first novel of the nineteenth century and the prototypical novel of education (Bildungsroman); engagement with critical and scholarly reception starting with Schiller and Schlegel; theories of the novel and transformations of modern society.

This course interrogates a persistent theme in the literature of the European Renaissance: the love for a much-desired, frequently unobtainable beloved. How and why does love—erotic yearning, sexual passion, unfulfilled desire, religious devotion—become a key subject and metaphor from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? Focusing on two main poetic genres of the Renaissance—the lyric and the epic-romance—we investigate how questions of desire, love, and gendered subjectivity become a potent means for articulating psychological, social, political, philosophic, and spiritual concerns. Engaging with normative views of gender, erotic discourse, and romantic love from a long historical perspective, this course investigates the development of modern poetry and sexuality in conjunction with each other.