Sample Syllabi & Courses

Graduate:

The German Ecological Imagination

It is common to read in the paper about the coming climate crisis, framed as a matter of saving the environment or planet. Less often invoked, however, is an older, more metaphysical notion of ‘nature naturing’ actively (natura naturans). When (if ever) did the concept of the ‘environment’ replace that of nature? What are the exact differences between the terms we use to refer to the planet as our shared home, whether ‘nature,’ ‘(e/E)arth,’ ‘world,’ ‘environment,’ ‘planet,’ or ‘globe’? And what ramifications might the semantic shifts between these six terms have for current environmental debates?

This interdisciplinary course asks these questions by examining three phases in the history of the idea of nature as instigated by key German scientists, literary authors, and visual artists (three per historical period or ‘phase’). Beginning with the period around 1800, we will reconstruct the tensions animating Romanticism’s holistic conception of nature by reading works by Kant, Goethe, Schelling, and Alexander von Humboldt, while the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich will furnish our artistic case study. Turning to the first half of the twentieth century, we will encounter the first use of the German term Umwelt (‘environment’) in its modern sense in the work of theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll, who was friends with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. We will reconstruct Martin Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and compare and contrast his conception of the artwork’s ties to ‘earth’ and ‘world’ vis-à-vis comparison to Schelling’s theory of the artwork’s relation to nature. Our exemplary artist for this second phase is Paul Klee, who grounded his aesthetic vision in nature’s formative processes. Approaching our contemporary moment, we will read literary works by W.G. Selbald while attending to the political and communicative vicissitudes of coming to societal awareness of a transhistorical phenomenon such as climate change. Joseph Beuys’s politico-aesthetic agitations and the first photos of the Earth taken from outer space provide our last artistic case studies.

Deceit, Desire, & Bildung: Goethe’s Novels

This seminar will be centered on a close reading of the very first Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795/96) , with glimpses at select excerpts from the sequel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821/29). We will also take the opportunity of this engagement with two very different narratives to review the fundamental principles of narratological analysis. Some attention will be paid to the centrality of these works (especially the Lehrjahre) in the modern theory of the novel from Moritz and Fr. Schlegel to Lukacs and Blumenberg. Paradigmatic contributions to the scholarship produced during the past four decades (e.g., psychoanalysis, discourse analysis, rhetorical-deconstructive readings) will be discussed in each session. In this regard, the seminar offers a compact introduction to recent theoretical trends.

Goethe as Interdisciplinary Thinker

"He seems to see out of every pore of his skin." What could Emerson have meant when he made this perplexing claim about Goethe? Goethe's life was one of relentless observation and 'interdisciplinary' inquiry at an historical moment before the institutionalization of distinct disciplinary borderlines. Without committing to a coherent 'theory' or worldview, Goethe's anti-systematic approach to the observation of nature, art, and society rested on the premise that "alles Faktische ist schon Theorie." This course provides an overview of Goethe's work across literary genres and disciplinary discourses with a particular focus on reconstructing Goethe's art of natural-scientific observation in his morphological writings. A recurrent theme will be the afterlife of Goethean morphological thought in modernity in the work of modern thinkers, which might include Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Vladimir Propp.

For the six sessions, we will start by reading key literary works of Goethe’s across different genres (poetry, a novel, a drama, and an epic) in order to interrogate how the literary imagination might productively inform – and also interfere with –nascent disciplinary logics (e.g., the logic of the psychological case study and Werther’s own pathologies). We will then turn in the remaining seven sessions to a study of Goethe’s natural-scientific, aesthetic, and ethnographic essays, devoting particular attention to how they prefigure or directly influenced later modern cultural theorists.

Undergraduate:

Freedom: A Transatlantic Affair

The brilliantly witty German physicist and satirical author Georg Christoph Lichtenberg once remarked that “The American who first discovered Columbus made a horrible discovery” (“Der Amerikaner, der den Kolumbus zuerst entdeckte, machte eine böse Entdeckung.”). Taking inspiration from the insightfully eccentric perspectives that another culture might have on our own (and our own on it), this course interrogates the dynamics of transnational cultural transfer by examining case studies of bidirectional German-American intellectual exchange with an eye in particular to how the concept of freedom migrates across literature, philosophy, and political thought. Such cases span a broad historical range, from Alexander von Humboldt’s exploration of the New World and Hegel or Kleist’s fascination with the Haitian revolution to the origins of Transcendentalism in New England and the writings of wartime German-Jewish émigrés in Californian exile. Throughout this series of exemplary cases, we will continually return to the question of how the practice of quotation refigures conceptions of freedom, actualizing otherwise unrealized potentials of meaning by situating source texts in new contexts. What does it mean, for example, for Margaret Fuller, in arguably the first American essay on women’s rights, or for W.E.B. Du Bois, who studied Hegel in Germany, to quote Schiller (in German) at key moments in their arguments? After examining key moments in this history of transatlantic exchange, students will develop a case of their own devising for their final research projects.

Metamorphoses of Life: Mythic, Artistic, Scientific (Freshman Seminar)

If trees could speak, what would they say? How does that annoying fly buzzing around perceive the room you both inhabit – perceive you? And what kind of traumatic shock could transform you into a mute tree? Or lead you to wake up and discover you have become an insect?

In this seminar, we will explore how living things undergo metamorphosis in mythic narratives, poetry, and visual art. How does the Western mythic tradition from Ovid to Kafka imagine such jarring, even violent, self-transformations? In what ways do organisms already metamorphose in remarkable ways that defy observation? Do the environments of different species appear radically different to each? And how might we make sense of this interplay between radical transformation and obstinate persistence in natural and cultural ‘environments’ alike?

German Literature, Thought, & Critique

Introductory survey course on German literary history for undergraduates in English; can fulfill General Education requirement.

Other Syllabi/Courses:

The Art of Listening: Poetry & Psychoanalysis

The Hunger for Wholeness: The German Conservative Revolution, 1918-1933

German for Reading Knowledge.

University of Chicago:

Kurzprosa aus dem 20. Jahrhundert: Fallgeschichten. ‘Bridge’ course. Self-designed. In German.

Deutscher Film: Subjekte der Überschreitung. ‘Bridge’ course. Self-designed. In German.

Deutsche Märchen. First course in second-year language sequence. In German.       

Elementary German for Beginners. Yearlong introductory course.