Classes

Benjamin's Artwork Essay or Cultural History as the Rigorous Study of Art and Media
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2012

Program Seminar, Doctoral Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities (with Brigid Doherty)

This seminar explores Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" as an experiment in and a critique of modernist cultural history. Through its exacerbation of the antinomies of analyzing cultural production…

Robert Musil / Thomas Bernhard
Semester:
Spring
Offered:
2012

Robert Musil and Thomas Bernhard offer two of the most provocative critiques of the relationship between narration and the construction of subjectivity in all of twentieth-century literature. The first half of the seminar will be devoted to a reading of Musil’s The Man without Qualities, the second to a series of novels from the first…

The Essay as Form: Texts and Phototexts (Graduate)
Semester:
Spring
Offered:
2011

The advent of photomechanical reproduction in the 1890’s posed a challenge to the essay as great as that posed by photography to painting in the 1840’s. This seminar will explore the range of formal possibilities available to the essay (and essayism) in twentieth-century prose fiction and non-fiction and in photo essays and phototexts. While…

Introduction to German Philosophy (Undergraduate)
Semester:
Spring
Offered:
2011

An introduction to German thought from the Enlightenment to the present through study of its major authors (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Adorno.) The course offers a survey of German intellectual history with emphasis on aesthetics, the theory of knowledge, and moral, social, and political philosophy.

The German Novel in the Twentieth Century (Undergraduate)
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2010

This course surveys the most important German-language novels in the twentieth century. Through close readings of the novels we will explore not only aesthetic issues of form and language, but the situation of each novel in Germany’s troubled history. 

Benjamin's Baudelaire: Toward a Theory of Modernity (Graduate)
Semester:
Spring
Offered:
2010

In the course of the 1930’s, the figure of Charles Baudelaire emerged as the central organizing motif in Walter Benjamin’s attempt to develop a comprehensive theory of urban capitalist modernity. The seminar will trace the development of this theory from the mid-1920’s (Origin of German Trauerspiel; Benjamin’s intensive engagement…

After 1968: Art and Literature in Germany (with Brigid Doherty; Graduate)
Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2009

This seminar examines a range of practices in writing, drawing, photography, painting, film, television, and other forms of notation and recording in the period 1968-1983. Topics will include political and literary writings associated with the German “student movement;” ends of the modernist novel in Uwe Johnson and Peter Weiss; the reception…