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

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:
Internationalism
Writing WA

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