Class Schedules

Introduction to German language and culture. Emphasis on comprehension of oral and written contemporary German as well as developing elementary oral proficiency. The course emphasizes vocabulary recognition and acquisition within a variety of concrete contexts. Students develop facility with German within highly structured contexts. Contemporary culture in German-speaking countries provides the content of the course. For beginning students with no previous German language instruction. Students with any previous training in German must take the German placement exam. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Introduction to German language and culture. Emphasis on comprehension of oral and written contemporary German as well as developing elementary oral proficiency. The course emphasizes vocabulary recognition and acquisition within a variety of concrete contexts. Students develop facility with German within highly structured contexts. Contemporary culture in German-speaking countries provides the content of the course. For beginning students with no previous German language instruction. Students with any previous training in German must take the German placement exam. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Introduction to German language and culture. Emphasis on comprehension of oral and written contemporary German as well as developing elementary oral proficiency. The course emphasizes vocabulary recognition and acquisition within a variety of concrete contexts. Students develop facility with German within highly structured contexts. Contemporary culture in German-speaking countries provides the content of the course. For beginning students with no previous German language instruction. Students with any previous training in German must take the German placement exam. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Introduction to German language and culture. Emphasis on comprehension of oral and written contemporary German as well as developing elementary oral proficiency. The course emphasizes vocabulary recognition and acquisition within a variety of concrete contexts. Students develop facility with German within highly structured contexts. Contemporary culture in German-speaking countries provides the content of the course. For beginning students with no previous German language instruction. Students with any previous training in German must take the German placement exam. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An five-credit accelerated course which covers material and proficiency development normally covered in GERM 101 and GERM 102. The course is for students with prior experience with German who need a concentrated review or students with previous other foreign language background who wish to work at an accelerated pace. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An five-credit accelerated course which covers material and proficiency development normally covered in GERM 101 and GERM 102. The course is for students with prior experience with German who need a concentrated review or students with previous other foreign language background who wish to work at an accelerated pace. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An five-credit accelerated course which covers material and proficiency development normally covered in GERM 101 and GERM 102. The course is for students with prior experience with German who need a concentrated review or students with previous other foreign language background who wish to work at an accelerated pace. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An five-credit accelerated course which covers material and proficiency development normally covered in GERM 101 and GERM 102. The course is for students with prior experience with German who need a concentrated review or students with previous other foreign language background who wish to work at an accelerated pace. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is designed to help students increase their proficiency in the German language while emphasizing authentic cultural contexts. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration and develop tools and discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Cultural topics are expanded and deepened. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 102 or GERM 110 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is designed to help students increase their proficiency in the German language while emphasizing authentic cultural contexts. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration and develop tools and discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Cultural topics are expanded and deepened. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 102 or GERM 110 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is designed to help students increase their proficiency in the German language while emphasizing authentic cultural contexts. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration and develop tools and discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Cultural topics are expanded and deepened. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 102 or GERM 110 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is designed to help students increase their proficiency in the German language while emphasizing authentic cultural contexts. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration and develop tools and discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Cultural topics are expanded and deepened. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 102 or GERM 110 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is designed to help students increase their proficiency in the German language while emphasizing authentic cultural contexts. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration and develop tools and discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Cultural topics are expanded and deepened. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 102 or GERM 110 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

The course aims to help students attain a comfort level with extended discourse in German within culturally appropriate contexts. Students develop the ability to comprehend authentic spoken German on a variety of topics at length. They develop effective strategies for comprehending a variety of texts and text types. They gain increased facility with extended discourse, such as narrating and describing. Writing in German is also developed so that students can write extensively about familiar topics. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 203 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

The course aims to help students attain a comfort level with extended discourse in German within culturally appropriate contexts. Students develop the ability to comprehend authentic spoken German on a variety of topics at length. They develop effective strategies for comprehending a variety of texts and text types. They gain increased facility with extended discourse, such as narrating and describing. Writing in German is also developed so that students can write extensively about familiar topics. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 203 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

The course aims to help students attain a comfort level with extended discourse in German within culturally appropriate contexts. Students develop the ability to comprehend authentic spoken German on a variety of topics at length. They develop effective strategies for comprehending a variety of texts and text types. They gain increased facility with extended discourse, such as narrating and describing. Writing in German is also developed so that students can write extensively about familiar topics. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 203 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

The course aims to help students attain a comfort level with extended discourse in German within culturally appropriate contexts. Students develop the ability to comprehend authentic spoken German on a variety of topics at length. They develop effective strategies for comprehending a variety of texts and text types. They gain increased facility with extended discourse, such as narrating and describing. Writing in German is also developed so that students can write extensively about familiar topics. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 203 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

One often hears horror movies referred to as trash. Does horror necessarily deserve this condemnation (or plug)? Why does an occasional horror film like Get Out or The Silence of the Lambs win respectability or even a best-picture Oscar? What are the criteria by which we decide whether any film or work of art is good, bad, or perhaps not art at all? The course will examine horror films from various eras and places, some of which were repudiated at their release only to be recuperated later as art-house classics. But all challenge cultural assumptions about art and horror as mutually exclusive categories, and all employ shock, horror, or the uncanny as compelling means of representing social anxieties and historical traumas. Our objective will be to reflect on questions of aesthetic value, and to explore the themes, narrative strategies, and audience effects of horror. We will draw on a variety of theoretical approaches like Freud’s description of the uncanny or Todorov’s concept of the fantastic. In some sense horror cinema was “born” in Weimar Germany, so we will begin with silent German films, but our investigations will extend to Universal Studio’s depression-era horror (which owed a debt to German expressionist cinema) and to modern horror (Argento, Romero, Cronenberg, Haneke, Peele). Course prerequisite: guts. First, films like Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) or Franju’s Les Yeux sans Visage (1960) will disabuse you of any notion that Quentin Tarantino invented grossness. Second, you may find that by seriously engaging film studies, introducing theoretical concepts, and “over”-reading, the course will “ruin the fun.” My hope is that the opposite will be the case (and that fun and work are no more mutually exclusive than art and horror). Student obligations: a series of short papers, oral presentations, and one longer research paper. Two exams and an informal log responding to class readings. Hopefully the Twin Cities will offer some cultural events relevant to our theme that we can visit as a class.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

“Kafkaesque” is a word that has become part of everyday vocabulary in innumerous languages, used by millions of people who might or not have ever read Kafka. Evidently, the work of this German-speaking Jewish author from Prague captured something about modern life that no word could express except one deriving from his own name. This is probably why ‘everybody knows’ the word and ‘nobody can explain’ it. To understand therefore the “Kafkaesque” is to understand at once Kafka’s work and modern life, at least as we know it since the early twentieth century. To do so, in this course we are going to read closely some of Kafka’s stories and excerpts from his novels, as well as some influential commentaries on both his work and the conditions of modernity. We shall also have the chance to see and compare adaptations of his work (including his diaries) in the media of graphic novel and film. All readings will be in English. The course requires no pre-knowledge and is appropriate for all level students. This is a core course toward the Critical Theory Concentration.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This is a language course in which participants expand their abilities in all four language modalities - particularly oral and written expression - through engagement with numerous aspects of the life, literature, and culture of German-speaking countries and their multicultural societies, as well as their relations to the world. Including an extensive review of important advanced language topics, this course offers students the opportunity to improve their German to university-level proficiency. Every semester. (4 credits) Prerequisite(s): GERM 204, placement test or permission of instructor

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This is a language course in which participants expand their abilities in all four language modalities - particularly oral and written expression - through engagement with numerous aspects of the life, literature, and culture of German-speaking countries and their multicultural societies, as well as their relations to the world. Including an extensive review of important advanced language topics, this course offers students the opportunity to improve their German to university-level proficiency. Every semester. (4 credits) Prerequisite(s): GERM 204, placement test or permission of instructor

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This is a language course in which participants expand their abilities in all four language modalities - particularly oral and written expression - through engagement with numerous aspects of the life, literature, and culture of German-speaking countries and their multicultural societies, as well as their relations to the world. Including an extensive review of important advanced language topics, this course offers students the opportunity to improve their German to university-level proficiency. Every semester. (4 credits) Prerequisite(s): GERM 204, placement test or permission of instructor

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course prepares students for upper-level courses in German Studies through the critical investigation of important political, social and aesthetic topics in the context of German cultural history from 1815-1945. Such topics include the tension between the German Kulturnation and the political nation, the economics and philosophical critique offered by socialism, imperialism as discourse and political tool, the aesthetic revolution of modernism in the arts, and the debacle of fascism and the Holocaust.  In addition to historical sources, students read literary and autobiographical texts, view films, and investigate examples of material culture from a variety of periods. Conducted in German. Prerequisite(s): Prerequisite: GERM 305, placement test, or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What happens when God dies? And what if he’s always already been dead? Few authors have pursued the consequences of secular modernity as persistently as Nietzsche and Freud, both of whom were reacting to Darwin’s discovery of natural selection, which did away with nature as proof of God. Focusing on the related domains of ethics, subjectivity, aesthetics, and cultural value, we will explore how modern thought tries, and just as frequently fails, to overcome its religious past. Discussion topics include: the loss of “truth” as a meaningful term; ethics beyond good and evil; alienation, ideology, and false consciousness; art as ersatz-God; mourning, trauma, and transience. Readings include all or parts of: Nietzsche, Daybreak, The Gay Science and The Genealogy of Morals; Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Totem and Taboo. Requirements: Readings, three papers, weekly reading responses. Alternate years.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course explores depictions and concepts of "class" in literature, film, and political discourse since the French Revolution. Discussion topics include the invention of the bourgeois family; the Lumpenproletariat (prostitutes, rogues, vagabonds) in literature and art; revolutionary culture and politics in the inter-war period; depictions of class in contemporary mass culture. How does "class consciousness" emerge in German history? Is class an economic necessity or a consequence of culture and politics? Why is culture still fascinated by class? Taught in German. Prerequisite(s): GERM 308, GERM 309, or the equivalent.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Continuation of introduction to German language and culture. Vocabulary acquisition continues within broader contexts. Emphasis on both oral and written production with continuing development of reading and listening skills. Students develop creativity and facility with the language using primarily concrete vocabulary within meaningful contexts. The course provides an introduction to extended reading in German as well. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 101 with a grade of C- or better, or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Continuation of introduction to German language and culture. Vocabulary acquisition continues within broader contexts. Emphasis on both oral and written production with continuing development of reading and listening skills. Students develop creativity and facility with the language using primarily concrete vocabulary within meaningful contexts. The course provides an introduction to extended reading in German as well. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 101 with a grade of C- or better, or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Continuation of introduction to German language and culture. Vocabulary acquisition continues within broader contexts. Emphasis on both oral and written production with continuing development of reading and listening skills. Students develop creativity and facility with the language using primarily concrete vocabulary within meaningful contexts. The course provides an introduction to extended reading in German as well. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 101 with a grade of C- or better, or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Continuation of introduction to German language and culture. Vocabulary acquisition continues within broader contexts. Emphasis on both oral and written production with continuing development of reading and listening skills. Students develop creativity and facility with the language using primarily concrete vocabulary within meaningful contexts. The course provides an introduction to extended reading in German as well. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 101 with a grade of C- or better, or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An five-credit accelerated course which covers material and proficiency development normally covered in GERM 101 and GERM 102. The course is for students with prior experience with German who need a concentrated review or students with previous other foreign language background who wish to work at an accelerated pace. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An five-credit accelerated course which covers material and proficiency development normally covered in GERM 101 and GERM 102. The course is for students with prior experience with German who need a concentrated review or students with previous other foreign language background who wish to work at an accelerated pace. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An five-credit accelerated course which covers material and proficiency development normally covered in GERM 101 and GERM 102. The course is for students with prior experience with German who need a concentrated review or students with previous other foreign language background who wish to work at an accelerated pace. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is designed to help students increase their proficiency in the German language while emphasizing authentic cultural contexts. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration and develop tools and discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Cultural topics are expanded and deepened. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 102 or GERM 110 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is designed to help students increase their proficiency in the German language while emphasizing authentic cultural contexts. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration and develop tools and discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Cultural topics are expanded and deepened. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 102 or GERM 110 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is designed to help students increase their proficiency in the German language while emphasizing authentic cultural contexts. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration and develop tools and discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Cultural topics are expanded and deepened. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 102 or GERM 110 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is designed to help students increase their proficiency in the German language while emphasizing authentic cultural contexts. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration and develop tools and discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Cultural topics are expanded and deepened. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 102 or GERM 110 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

The course aims to help students attain a comfort level with extended discourse in German within culturally appropriate contexts. Students develop the ability to comprehend authentic spoken German on a variety of topics at length. They develop effective strategies for comprehending a variety of texts and text types. They gain increased facility with extended discourse, such as narrating and describing. Writing in German is also developed so that students can write extensively about familiar topics. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 203 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

The course aims to help students attain a comfort level with extended discourse in German within culturally appropriate contexts. Students develop the ability to comprehend authentic spoken German on a variety of topics at length. They develop effective strategies for comprehending a variety of texts and text types. They gain increased facility with extended discourse, such as narrating and describing. Writing in German is also developed so that students can write extensively about familiar topics. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 203 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

The course aims to help students attain a comfort level with extended discourse in German within culturally appropriate contexts. Students develop the ability to comprehend authentic spoken German on a variety of topics at length. They develop effective strategies for comprehending a variety of texts and text types. They gain increased facility with extended discourse, such as narrating and describing. Writing in German is also developed so that students can write extensively about familiar topics. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 203 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

With the rise of Donald Trump and right-wing movements elsewhere, it’s instructive to examine the appeal of populist movements. The Nazis were among the earliest populists to exploit the power of the media in shaping the political/cultural imagination. The course explores the role of film under National Socialism, including the organization of the film industry, the films’ Hollywood style and reliance on a star system, and the conundrum of separating propaganda from entertainment. Although we’ll study a few documentaries (Triumph of the Will, The Eternal Jew), the course will emphasize feature films, the movies people paid to see. We’ll also contrast Nazi propaganda with American propaganda from the same period.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This is a language course in which participants expand their abilities in all four language modalities - particularly oral and written expression - through engagement with numerous aspects of the life, literature, and culture of German-speaking countries and their multicultural societies, as well as their relations to the world. Including an extensive review of important advanced language topics, this course offers students the opportunity to improve their German to university-level proficiency. Every semester. (4 credits) Prerequisite(s): GERM 204, placement test or permission of instructor

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This is a language course in which participants expand their abilities in all four language modalities - particularly oral and written expression - through engagement with numerous aspects of the life, literature, and culture of German-speaking countries and their multicultural societies, as well as their relations to the world. Including an extensive review of important advanced language topics, this course offers students the opportunity to improve their German to university-level proficiency. Every semester. (4 credits) Prerequisite(s): GERM 204, placement test or permission of instructor

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This is a language course in which participants expand their abilities in all four language modalities - particularly oral and written expression - through engagement with numerous aspects of the life, literature, and culture of German-speaking countries and their multicultural societies, as well as their relations to the world. Including an extensive review of important advanced language topics, this course offers students the opportunity to improve their German to university-level proficiency. Every semester. (4 credits) Prerequisite(s): GERM 204, placement test or permission of instructor

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course prepares students for upper-level courses in German Studies through the critical investigation of important political, social and aesthetic topics in the context of German cultural history from 1945 through the present. Such topics include the tension between consumer culture and Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the West Germany of the 1950s, the theory and practice of collectivism in East Germany, the significance of the Wall, political upheaval and terrorism in West Germany, real existierender Sozialismus in the East, German unification, multiculturalism, and contemporary topics such as environmentalism and sustainability. In addition to historical sources, students read literary and autobiographical texts, view films, and investigate examples of material culture from a variety of periods. Conducted in German. Prerequisite(s): GERM 305, placement test, or permission of instructor

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course we read closely a selection of German literary texts and compare them to their film adaptations. The literature may range from German "classics" to popular "best sellers," and the films from critically acclaimed cases to box office successes, as a way of gauging social diversity in interests and taste. Beyond focusing on literary analysis, the course will address questions such as: how the written word is translated to the screen; what happens when the film adaptation occurs in another language and culture; what difference it makes if the work was written in the 1920s and filmed in the 2000s. Taught in German. Prerequisite(s): GERM 308 or GERM 309

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course we shall approach films as a medium that, through all of its means (from dialogue to more formal aspects, such as camera angle or editing), raises and attempts to negotiate philosophical, ideological, and political issues and conflicts. We shall be exposed to different methodologies of film analysis while examining: (a) a few representative films of three influential European film movements (German expressionism, Italian Neo-Realism, French nouvelle-vague), as a means of tracing the itinerary of European cinema from an action-oriented to a reflection-oriented practice; (b) the British and later American work of Alfred Hitchcock, as a mode of cinematography that employs the “gaze” as a principle of structural organization; and (c), American films of the 1970’s - 1990’s, as attempts to represent the world of late capitalism. In addition to several articles and book chapters that will be available on moodle, students need to purchase: Fredric Jameson: The Geopolitical Aesthetic; Slavoj Žižek: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. All readings and class taught in English.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Designed as a capstone experience in German studies, the seminar brings together fundamental questions engaged by the field of German studies, and enhances students' understanding of the theories and methodologies informing contemporary scholarship. Part of the seminar will be devoted to study of an aspect of German studies; students will then conduct independent research, which will serve as the basis of class discussions during the latter part of the semester. Changing topics may include: Constructing National Identity; Radicalism and Conservatism in Modernism; Goethe's Faust ; Centrality and Marginality in German Culture; Translingual Interventions: Migration and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Germany, Stardom and Charisma. Taught in German. Prerequisite(s): GERM 308

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Introduction to German language and culture. Emphasis on comprehension of oral and written contemporary German as well as developing elementary oral proficiency. The course emphasizes vocabulary recognition and acquisition within a variety of concrete contexts. Students develop facility with German within highly structured contexts. Contemporary culture in German-speaking countries provides the content of the course. For beginning students with no previous German language instruction. Students with any previous training in German must take the German placement exam. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Introduction to German language and culture. Emphasis on comprehension of oral and written contemporary German as well as developing elementary oral proficiency. The course emphasizes vocabulary recognition and acquisition within a variety of concrete contexts. Students develop facility with German within highly structured contexts. Contemporary culture in German-speaking countries provides the content of the course. For beginning students with no previous German language instruction. Students with any previous training in German must take the German placement exam. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Introduction to German language and culture. Emphasis on comprehension of oral and written contemporary German as well as developing elementary oral proficiency. The course emphasizes vocabulary recognition and acquisition within a variety of concrete contexts. Students develop facility with German within highly structured contexts. Contemporary culture in German-speaking countries provides the content of the course. For beginning students with no previous German language instruction. Students with any previous training in German must take the German placement exam. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Introduction to German language and culture. Emphasis on comprehension of oral and written contemporary German as well as developing elementary oral proficiency. The course emphasizes vocabulary recognition and acquisition within a variety of concrete contexts. Students develop facility with German within highly structured contexts. Contemporary culture in German-speaking countries provides the content of the course. For beginning students with no previous German language instruction. Students with any previous training in German must take the German placement exam. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An five-credit accelerated course which covers material and proficiency development normally covered in GERM 101 and GERM 102. The course is for students with prior experience with German who need a concentrated review or students with previous other foreign language background who wish to work at an accelerated pace. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An five-credit accelerated course which covers material and proficiency development normally covered in GERM 101 and GERM 102. The course is for students with prior experience with German who need a concentrated review or students with previous other foreign language background who wish to work at an accelerated pace. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An five-credit accelerated course which covers material and proficiency development normally covered in GERM 101 and GERM 102. The course is for students with prior experience with German who need a concentrated review or students with previous other foreign language background who wish to work at an accelerated pace. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An five-credit accelerated course which covers material and proficiency development normally covered in GERM 101 and GERM 102. The course is for students with prior experience with German who need a concentrated review or students with previous other foreign language background who wish to work at an accelerated pace. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is designed to help students increase their proficiency in the German language while emphasizing authentic cultural contexts. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration and develop tools and discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Cultural topics are expanded and deepened. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 102 or GERM 110 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is designed to help students increase their proficiency in the German language while emphasizing authentic cultural contexts. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration and develop tools and discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Cultural topics are expanded and deepened. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 102 or GERM 110 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is designed to help students increase their proficiency in the German language while emphasizing authentic cultural contexts. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration and develop tools and discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Cultural topics are expanded and deepened. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 102 or GERM 110 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is designed to help students increase their proficiency in the German language while emphasizing authentic cultural contexts. Through exposure to a variety of texts and text types, students develop oral and written proficiency in description and narration and develop tools and discourse strategies for culturally authentic interaction with native speakers. Cultural topics are expanded and deepened. Three hours per week plus conversation laboratory hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 102 or GERM 110 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

The course aims to help students attain a comfort level with extended discourse in German within culturally appropriate contexts. Students develop the ability to comprehend authentic spoken German on a variety of topics at length. They develop effective strategies for comprehending a variety of texts and text types. They gain increased facility with extended discourse, such as narrating and describing. Writing in German is also developed so that students can write extensively about familiar topics. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 203 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

The course aims to help students attain a comfort level with extended discourse in German within culturally appropriate contexts. Students develop the ability to comprehend authentic spoken German on a variety of topics at length. They develop effective strategies for comprehending a variety of texts and text types. They gain increased facility with extended discourse, such as narrating and describing. Writing in German is also developed so that students can write extensively about familiar topics. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 203 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

The course aims to help students attain a comfort level with extended discourse in German within culturally appropriate contexts. Students develop the ability to comprehend authentic spoken German on a variety of topics at length. They develop effective strategies for comprehending a variety of texts and text types. They gain increased facility with extended discourse, such as narrating and describing. Writing in German is also developed so that students can write extensively about familiar topics. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 203 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

The course aims to help students attain a comfort level with extended discourse in German within culturally appropriate contexts. Students develop the ability to comprehend authentic spoken German on a variety of topics at length. They develop effective strategies for comprehending a variety of texts and text types. They gain increased facility with extended discourse, such as narrating and describing. Writing in German is also developed so that students can write extensively about familiar topics. Three hours per week plus laboratory conversation hour. Prerequisite(s): GERM 203 with a grade of C- or better, or placement test, or consent of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

One often hears horror movies referred to as trash. Does horror necessarily “deserve” this condemnation (or plug)? Why does an occasional horror film like The Silence of the Lambs win respectability or even a best-picture Oscar? What are the criteria by which we determine whether any film or work of art is good, bad, or perhaps not art at all? The course will examine horror films from various eras and places, some of which were repudiated at their release only to be recuperated later as arthouse classics. But all challenge cultural assumptions about art and horror as mutually exclusive categories, and all employ shock, horror, or the uncanny as compelling means of representing social anxieties and historical traumas. Our objective will be to reflect on questions of aesthetic valuation, and to explore the themes, narrative strategies, and audience effects of horror; we will draw on a variety of theoretical approaches like Freud’s notion of the uncanny or Todorov’s of the fantastic. In some sense horror cinema was “born” in Weimar Germany, so we will begin with silent German films, but our investigations will extend to Universal Studio’s depression-era horror (which owed a debt to German expressionist cinema), to modern horror (Franju, Powell, Hitchcock), and contemporary “post-modern” horror (Argento, Romero, Cronenberg, Haneke).Course prerequisite: guts. First, films like Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) or Franju’s Les Yeux sans Visage (1960) will disabuse you of any notion that Quentin Tarantino invented grossness. Second, you may find that by seriously engaging film studies, introducing theoretical concepts, and doing what some call “over”-reading, the course will “ruin the fun.” My hope is that the opposite will be the case (and that fun and work are no more mutually exclusive than art and horror).Student obligations: a series of short papers, oral presentations, and one longer research paper. Two exams and an informal log responding to class readings. Hopefully the Twin Cities will offer some cultural events relevant to our theme that we can visit as a class.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This is a language course in which participants expand their abilities in all four language modalities - particularly oral and written expression - through engagement with numerous aspects of the life, literature, and culture of German-speaking countries and their multicultural societies, as well as their relations to the world. Including an extensive review of important advanced language topics, this course offers students the opportunity to improve their German to university-level proficiency. Every semester. (4 credits) Prerequisite(s): GERM 204, placement test or permission of instructor

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This is a language course in which participants expand their abilities in all four language modalities - particularly oral and written expression - through engagement with numerous aspects of the life, literature, and culture of German-speaking countries and their multicultural societies, as well as their relations to the world. Including an extensive review of important advanced language topics, this course offers students the opportunity to improve their German to university-level proficiency. Every semester. (4 credits) Prerequisite(s): GERM 204, placement test or permission of instructor

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This is a language course in which participants expand their abilities in all four language modalities - particularly oral and written expression - through engagement with numerous aspects of the life, literature, and culture of German-speaking countries and their multicultural societies, as well as their relations to the world. Including an extensive review of important advanced language topics, this course offers students the opportunity to improve their German to university-level proficiency. Every semester. (4 credits) Prerequisite(s): GERM 204, placement test or permission of instructor

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course prepares students for upper-level courses in German Studies through the critical investigation of important political, social and aesthetic topics in the context of German cultural history from 1815-1945. Such topics include the tension between the German Kulturnation and the political nation, the economics and philosophical critique offered by socialism, imperialism as discourse and political tool, the aesthetic revolution of modernism in the arts, and the debacle of fascism and the Holocaust.  In addition to historical sources, students read literary and autobiographical texts, view films, and investigate examples of material culture from a variety of periods. Conducted in German. Prerequisite(s): Prerequisite: GERM 305, placement test, or permission of instructor

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Today we often hear people dismiss the Western (mostly European) philosophical tradition as a bunch of "dead white men." In other words, the argument goes, these thinkers harbored such passe notions as universal truths, a universal subject, and an individual in total control of itself and endowed with a pure reason unadulterated by rhetoric, imagination, fiction, and politics. Why should we bother with "dead white men" now that we understand that truth depends on historical context, that the self is decentered by the unconscious, that identity is constituted by gender, race, class, and other cultural factors, that truth is linked to power, and that ideology is omnipresent? Unfortunately, this all-too-familiar attitude overlooks its own faulty presupposition: it presumes a clear-cut break between philosophical tradition and contemporary thought, as if contemporary thought had no tradition out of which it emerged and could, therefore, merely discard what preceded it. Hence the popularity of phrases like "philosophy is dead." It is all the more ironic to see this attitude prevail in the West at the very moment that multiculturalism has become our cause celebre : all cultural traditions are supposed to be "respected," except the West's own tradition. (Perhaps as a new way for the West to reinstate surreptitiously its superiority as the sole culture with no tradition?) This course pursues a close reading of texts by various "dead white men" as the unconscious (i.e., repressed and, for that matter, all the more powerful) undercurrent of contemporary thought. Assigned texts will include: Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, as well as texts by twentieth-century thinkers that stress the dependence of contemporary thought on philosophy. No pre-knowledge required; all readings in English. With different reading lists this course may be taken more than once for credit.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course explores the modern fascination with the uncanny, the mysterious, the magical, and the demonic in two related genres: murder mysteries and tales of the supernatural. We will ask why both of these genres were invented in German Romanticism and what function they play in later contexts. Course materials include stories of the uncanny by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Tieck; Goethe's "Faust"; Grimm's fairy tales; the fantastic realism of the nineteenth century; Kafka's "Metamorphosis"; German TV crime drama. Taught in German. Requirements: weekly reading responses; three short papers with revisions.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Hate speech (cross burnings, cyberbullying of LBGTQs), but also revolutionary messages that can cause political or religious conversions (political speeches, the gospel) are uses, perhaps abuses of language with real effects -- ways of "doing things with words." In this course, we will explore how words have the power to effect real-world change, both for good and for ill. What uses of speech constitute forms of injury or of undue influence? What uses are transformative or emancipatory? How do we draw the line between these two valences of "forceful speech"? Readings and discussion topics will include theories of rhetoric, persuasion, and performativity (Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, John Austin, Derrida); instances and studies of transformative speech in religion and psychoanalysis (Luther, Freud); political speech from the language of emancipation (Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King) to National Socialist propaganda (Goebbels); racist and sexist hate speech (Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Critical Race Theory); the constitutionality of laws against hate speech in view of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech (U.S. Supreme Court rulings); the injurious and salutary effects of insults and invective (Randall Kennedy, Flannery O’Connor, comedy sketches of Chris Rock, the Hollywood movie "Lincoln"); depictions and uses of rhetoric and invective in literature (Homer, Thucydides, Shakespeare, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist). Requirements: one short and two mid-length papers, weekly reading responses.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials