The German Immersion program will be offered in the Spring 2010 semester, therefore Basic German (101-102) will not be offered in the fall of 2009. Students interested in the Immersion course should contact Professor Kempf early in the fall semester.
German
Immersion:
Intensive study (12 credits) of a foreign language helps to create a
highly effective and exciting learning environment for those who wish to
achieve a high degree of proficiency in the shortest possible time. German
immersion is designed to enable students with little or no previous experience
in German to complete two years of college German within five months (spring
semester at Bard, plus June in Germany for 4 additional credits). To achieve
this goal, students take fifteen class hours per week during the semester at
Bard, and twenty hours per week during June at Collegium Palatinum, the
German language institute of Schiller International University in Heidelberg.
Each participant will be able to enroll concurrently in one other course at
Bard. This will allow the student to pursue a more balanced study program or to
fulfill certain requirements (e.g., First Year Seminar).
99009 |
GER / LIT 199 Kafka: Prague, Politics and the Fin-de Siecle |
Franz Kempf |
. T . Th . |
10:30 - 11:50 am |
OLINLC 118 |
FLLC |
Kafka can be read as the chronicler of modern
despair, of human suffering in an unidentifiable, timeless landscape. Yet he can also be read as a representative
of his era, his “existential anguish” springing from the very real cultural and
historical conflicts that agitated Prague at the turn of the century (e.g.
anti-Semitism, contemporary theories of sexuality). The course will cover Kafka’s shorter fiction ranging from
fragments, parables and sketches to longer, complete tales (e.g. The
Judgment, The Metamorphosis), as well as the novels The Trial and The
Man Who Disappeared (Amerika) and excerpts from his diaries and letters.
Together they reveal the breath of Kafka’s literary vision and the
extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought. Taught in English.
Students with an advanced proficiency in German can read selections in the
original for extra credit.
99834 |
GER / LIT 213 German Operas & Ideas |
Franz Kempf Screening: |
. T . . . . . . . F . . . . F |
2:30 - 3:50 pm 10:30 - 11:50 am 1:00 – 4:00 pm |
OLINLC 118 OLINLC 120Weis Cinema |
FLLC |
Opera is not just about a tenor and a soprano who want to make
love, and a baritone who won’t let them, but also about liberty, redemption,
tyranny, injustice, humanity, decadence.
Far from dismissing love as a primal force in human affairs - nor, for
that matter, the sensuality and immediacy of music - this course attempts to
trace German intellectual history from the Enlightenment to Modernism and
beyond through the study of major operas and the literary works that spawned
some of them. Operas: Mozart’s The Magic
Flute (1791), Beethoven’s Fidelio
(1805/1814), Carl Maria von Weber’s Der
Freischütz (1821), Wagner’s The
Flying Dutchman (1843), Richard Strauss’s Salome (1905), Alban Berg’s Wozzeck
(1925), Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera (1928), Hans Werner Henze’s Der Prinz von Homburg (1960), and Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten (1965). Literary works:
Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s Die
Soldaten (1776); Heinrich von
Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg
(1821); Heinrich Heine’s Aus den Memoiren
des Herren von Schnabelewopski (1834); Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1836). Musical expertise neither expected nor provided.
Students with an advanced proficiency in German can read selections in the
original for extra credit. Course taught
in English. Eight obligatory Friday afternoon screenings. Extra
time commitment will be compensated for throughout the semester.
99113 |
GER 201 Intermediate German I |
Florian Becker |
M T W . . |
12:00 -1:00 pm |
OLINLC 118 |
FLLC |
For
students who have completed a year of college German (or equivalent). The
course is designed to deepen the proficiency gained in GER 101 and 102 by
increasing students’ fluency in speaking, reading, and writing, and adding
significantly to their working vocabulary. Students improve their ability to
express their own ideas and hone their strategies for understanding spoken and
written communication. Selected 20th-century literary texts and
audivisual materials, including an unabridged comedy by Friedrich
Dürrenmatt.
99115 |
GER 201 Intermediate German I |
Stephanie Kufner |
. T W Th . |
12:00 -1:00 pm |
OLINLC 120 |
FLLC |
See
above.
99114 |
GER 456 Neo-Avantgarde and Student Movement in
1960s Germany |
Florian Becker |
M . . . . . . W . . |
3:00 -4:20 pm 3:00 -4:20 pm |
OLINLC 120 OLINLC 206 |
FLLC |
An interdisciplinary examination of the aesthetic
and intellectual shifts that transformed West German cultural and political
life in the years leading up to the student rebellion of 1968. The aesthetic
production on which we will focus creatively re-appropriated many of the
strategies of the historical avant-garde (especially those of Dadaism), often
in the hope to subvert the “spectacle” of consumer capitalism and to transform
everyday life. We will engage closely with a variety of texts and projecs,
seeking to attain a theoretically informed understanding of these now
historical ambitions, and of their relation to wider processes of societal
change. Topics will include: experimental poetry (“Wiener Gruppe,”
Heißenbüttel, Enzensberger); theatre and anti-theatre (Handke, Weiss); “New
German Cinema” (Fassbinder, Kluge); visual art (Beuys, Fluxus, Pop and
Capitalist Realism); pronouncements and manifestoes of the student movement
(Dutschke, Baumann, Gruppe SPUR). Theoretical essays by Adorno, Bürger,
Schneider, Enzensberger, Mayer, Habermas.
All readings and classroom discussion will be in German. Short seminar
presentations and sustained work on writing skills.