For students with little or no previous instruction in German. This course is designed to develop listening comprehension and speaking proficiency as well as reading and writing skills. Instruction will include grammar drills, review of readings, communication practice, guided composition, and language lab exercises. Readings furnish insights into many aspects of German civilization and culture, thus conveying to students what life is like in the German-speaking countries today. Indivisible.

Close reading of selected tales, with emphasis on language, plot, motif, image, and the relation to folklore. Critical examination and application of major approaches: Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, and feminist.

This survey of major German-language poets will provide a general overview of lyric poetry over the past two centuries (starting with Goethe, Schiller and Hoelderlin) while concentrating, on the one hand, on early 20th-century Expressionist writing (Rilke, Hofmannsthal, George, Heym, Trakl, Lasker-Schueler, Benn) and, on the other, on more recent voices: both the post-war generation (Celan, Huchel, Eich, Krolow, Bobrowski, Enzensberger and others) and the younger writers of the 1980s and 1990s. Emphasis is on close readings (themes, structures, imagery, meter), but attention will be paid as well to questions of social and historical context and these poems' place in the German literary tradition. Conducted in German.

For Nietzsche, Heine was "the highest conception of the lyric poet. I seek in vain . . . for an equally sweet and passionate music. He possessed that divine malice without which I cannot conceive of perfection." Acquiring an appreciation of both the music and the malice of Heine's artistry is the primary goal of the seminar. Close reading of the collected poems and selected prose works (e.g, Travel Sketches, political journalism, On the History and Philosophy in Germany). Significant attention will be paid to the cultural and political contexts of his works, with readings drawn from Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach, Madame de Staël, and Wagner. Conducted in German.