16145 |
GER 106 BASIC Intensive German |
Stephanie Kufner |
M T
W Th
8:50 am-11:10 am |
OLINLC 208 |
FLLC |
8
credits Basic Intensive German is designed to enable
students with little or no previous experience in German to complete three
semesters of college-level German within five months: spring semester at Bard,
plus four weeks in August at Bard College Berlin (upon successful completion
carrying four additional credits). Students will meet ten hours a week
(including a one-hour conversation class with the German language tutor).
Outside of class, students will have the opportunity to connect and prepare for
course work with innovative teaching and learning experiences online. The
communicative approach actively involves students from day one in this class.
As the course progresses, the transition is made from learning the language for
everyday communication to the reading and discussion of classical and modern
texts (such as Goethe, Heine, Kafka, Brecht) as well as of music and film. The
concluding four weeks of the program will be spent at Bard’s sister campus in
Berlin: Students will further explore German language and culture in a twenty
hours per week course, which is accompanied by guided tours introducing
participants to Berlin’s intriguing history, architecture, and vibrant cultural
life. Students interested in this class must consult with Prof. Stephanie Kufner before on-line registration (Need-based financial aid for the
Berlin section of the course is available; please discuss further details with
instructor.) Class size: 20
16601 |
LIT
/ GER 199 kafka: prague, politics and the fin-de siecle |
Franz
Kempf |
M W 10:10 am-11:30 am |
OLIN
203 |
ELIT |
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. Class size: 18
16197 |
GER / LIT 2704 German Literature in 7 Dates |
Thomas Wild |
T Th 4:40 pm-6:00 pm |
OLIN 201 |
FLLC |
Cross-listed: German
Studies This course offers seven relevant access points to German
literature and history between the 18th and 21st centuries. The starting points
of these explorations will be dateable events, such as January 1774 when Goethe
establishes his literary fame after six somnambulant weeks of writing The Sorrows of Young Werther, or
November 1949 when Hannah Arendt first revisits Germany after the Second World
War. A date is the temporal center around which a singular work crystallizes.
The constellation of dates this course creates will also reflect on pivotal
(German) traditions of conceiving history itself (Nietzsche, Benjamin).
Readings further include Kant's What is
Enlightenment?, Goethe's Faust,
Büchner's Danton’s Death, Rosa
Luxemburg's writing on revolution, as well as Hungerangel by the German Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller. The
compendium A New History of German Literature (2004) will furnish apposite
background reading. Taught in English. This course is part of the World
Literature offering. Class size:
22
16198 |
GER 303 Grimms’ MÄrchen |
Franz Kempf |
T Th 10:10 am-11:30 am |
OLIN 101 |
FLLC |
“Enchanting, brimming with wonder and magic,
the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are the special stories of childhood that
stay with us throughout our lives,” writes translator and Grimm scholar Jack Zipes. Unfortunately, we seem to know these tales only in
adaptations that greatly reduce their power to touch our emotions and engage
our imaginations. Through a close reading of selected tales, with emphasis on
language, plot, motif, and image, this course explores not only the tales’
poetics and politics but also their origins in the oral tradition, in folklore
and myth. The course considers major critical approaches (e.g., Freudian,
Marxist, feminist) and conducts a contrastive analysis of creative adaptations
(Disney, classical ballet, postmodern dance) and other fairy-tale traditions
(Perrault, Straparola, Arabian Nights). Creative and critical writing assignments. Conducted in German. Class
size: 20
16199 |
GER 331 Poetry and Philosophy |
Thomas Wild |
T Th 11:50 am-1:10 pm |
OLINLC 120 |
FLLC |
Is there something like a sensory reasoning?
Who has the capacity to formulate the unspeakable? How can we address— with
words— the crisis of language? Is humor a thought or a sentiment? Poetry and philosophy
have for centuries offered fascinating responses to such questions— not least
in the German tradition. Poets, philosophers, and poetic thinkers—from Goethe,
Kant, and Schiller, to Hölderlin, Heidegger, and
Rilke, or from Heine, Nietzsche, and Kafka, to writers of the Avant-Garde, and
on to Benjamin, Brecht, and Arendt—have all had something to say on these
questions. The beauty and precision of their language(s) will foster our
analytical vocabulary and will (we hope!) inspire ambitious and playful writing
experiments and provoke a semester of joyful conversations with these thinkers
of and in the German language. Conducted in German. Class
size: 16
16200 |
GER 418 German Expressionism |
Franz Kempf |
T Th 1:30 pm-2:50 pm |
OLINLC 210 |
FLLC |
Less a style than a Weltanschauung of
a rebellious generation, German Expressionism – flourishing roughly between
1905 and 1925 – is generally seen as an artistic
reflection of a common feeling of crisis whose origins can be sought, for
instance, in the loss of a cohesive world view, especially in the wake of
Nietzsche's pessimistic diagnosis; the disappearance of individualism in
burgeoning urban centers; the hypocrisy of Imperial Wilhelminian
Germany; the soulless materialism and the (self-) alienation of increased
industrialization; and the collapse of Newtonian science. Readings will include
works by Frank Wedekind, Gottfried Benn, Georg Heym, Else Lasker-Schüler, Kafka,
Georg Kaiser, and Georg Trakl. Since Expressionism
involved not just literature but painting, music, and film, we will also
consider works by the Brücke- and Blaue Reiter-associations of painters, Alban
Berg’s opera Wozzeck, and films such as Der
letzte Mann, M, and Die Büchse
der Pandora. Taught in German. Class
size: 15
16415 |
PHIL 375 The Philosophy of Nietzsche |
Daniel Berthold |
M 1:30
pm-3:50 pm |
ASP 302 |
HUM |