ELEMENTARY GERMAN I
Prerequisites: No prior German.
German 1101 is a communicative language course for beginners, taught in German, in which students develop the four skills -listening, speaking, reading, and writing- and a basic understanding of German-speaking cultures. Emphasis is placed on acquiring the four language skills within a cultural context. Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to understand, speak, read, and write German at a level enabling them to communicate with native speakers and provide basic information about their background, family, daily activities, student life, work, and living quarters. Completion of daily assignments, which align with class content, and consistent work are necessary in order to achieve basic communicative proficiency. If you have prior German, the placement exam is required.
- MWR 8:40 a.m.-9:55 a.m.
- MWR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
- MTR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Julia Perrin
Info - 4 points
ELEMENTARY YIDDISH I
This course offers an introduction to the language that has been spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews for more than a millennium, and an opportunity to discover a fabulous world of Yiddish literature, language and culture in a fun way. Using games, new media, and music, we will learn how to speak, read, listen and write in a language that is considered one of the richest languages in the world (in some aspects of vocabulary). We will also venture outside the classroom to explore the Yiddish world today: through field trips to Yiddish theater, Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods, Yiddish organizations, such as YIVO or Yiddish farm, and so on. We will also have Yiddish-speaking guests and do a few digital projects. At the end of the two-semester course, you will be able to converse in Yiddish on a variety of everyday topics and read most Yiddish literary and non-literary texts. Welcome to Yiddishland!
- TR 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Agnieszka Legutko
CULPA: 1 Info - 4 points
ELEMENTARY DUTCH II
Fundamentals of grammar, reading, speaking, and comprehension of the spoken language. During the spring term supplementary reading is selected according to students needs.
- TR 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
- MW 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Wijnie de Groot
CULPA: 11
Info
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Instructor:
Ben de Witte de Witte
Info - 4 points
ELEMENTARY FINNISH II
Fundamentals of grammar and lexicon. Building proficiency in aural comprehension, reading, speaking, and writing. Linguistic structures in the cultural context.
- MW 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Heli Sirvioe
Info - 4 points
ELEMENTARY GERMAN II
Prerequisites: GERM UN1101 or the equivalent. If you have prior German outside of Columbia’s language sequence, the placement exam is required. German 1102 is the continuation of Elementary German I (1101). It is a four-skill language course taught in German, in which students continue to develop listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in German and an understanding of German-speaking cultures. Emphasis is placed on acquiring the four language skills--listening, speaking, reading and writing--within a cultural context. Students expand their communication skills to include travel, storytelling, personal well- being, basic economics, recent historical events, and working with movie segments. Completion of daily assignments, which align with class content, and consistent work are necessary in order to achieve basic communicative proficiency.
- MTR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
- MWR 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
- MW 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
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Instructor:
Xuxu Song
Info -
Instructor:
Ron Sadan
Info - 4 points
ELEMENTARY SWEDISH II
This course is a continuation of the introductory Swedish 101 course. It will introduce you to the Swedish language as it is used in Sweden today. You will also learn about aspects of contemporary Swedish culture, main events and figures in Swedens history, and Swedish traditions. Upon the completion of the course, students who have attended class regularly, have submitted all assignments and taken all tests and quizzes should be able to: talk about themselves, families, interests, likes and dislikes, daily activities, education, professional interests and future plans in some detail; understand and participate in a simple conversation on everyday topics such as educational choices, subjects, plans for the weekend and the holidays, places to live, transportation, etc read and fully comprehend edited texts on familiar topics understand the main ideas and identify the underlying themes in original texts such as literary fiction, film, and newspaper articles write short essays on a familiar topic using the relevant vocabulary understand and utilize the information in a variety of authentic texts (e.g. menus, signs, train schedules, websites) carry out simple linguistic tasks that require speaking on the phone (e.g. setting up an appointment, asking questions about an announcement, talking to a friend) fill in forms requesting information, write letters, e-mails, notes, post cards, or messages providing simple information; provide basic information about Sweden including: Swedens geography, its political system and political parties, educational system, etc. discuss and debate familiar topics recognize significant figures from Swedens history and literary history use and understand basic vocabulary related to important aspects of contemporary Swedish culture and Swedish traditions and contemporary lifestyles in Sweden. pronounce Swedish well enough and produce Swedish with enough grammatical accuracy to be comprehensible to a Swedish speaker with experience in speaking with non-natives. Methodology The class will be taught in a communicative way. It will be conducted primarily, but not exclusively in Swedish. In-class activities and homework assignments will focus on developing speaking, reading, writing, listening skills and a basic understanding of Swedish culture through interaction. Authentic materials will be used whenever possible.
- MW 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Heli Sirvioe
Info - 4 points
ELEMENTARY YIDDISH II
This course offers an introduction to the language that has been spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews for more than a millennium, and an opportunity to discover a fabulous world of Yiddish literature, language and culture in a fun way. Using games, new media, and music, we will learn how to speak, read, listen and write in a language that is considered one of the richest languages in the world (in some aspects of vocabulary). We will also venture outside the classroom to explore the Yiddish world today: through field trips to Yiddish theater, Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods, Yiddish organizations, such as YIVO or Yiddish farm, and so on. We will also have Yiddish-speaking guests and do a few digital projects. At the end of the two-semester course, you will be able to converse in Yiddish on a variety of everyday topics and read most Yiddish literary and non-literary texts. Welcome to Yiddishland!
- TR 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
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Instructor:
Agnieszka Legutko
CULPA: 1 Info - 4 points
INTERMEDIATE GERMAN I
Prerequisites: GERM UN2101 or the equivalent. If you have prior German outside of Columbia’s language sequence, the placement exam is required.
Intermediate German UN2102 is conducted entirely in German and emphasizes the four basic language skills, cultural awareness, and critical thinking. A wide range of topics (from politics and poetry to art) as well as authentic materials (texts, film, art, etc.) are used to improve the 4 skill. Practice in conversation aims at enlarging the vocabulary necessary for daily communication. Grammar is practiced in the context of the topics. Learning and evaluation are individualized (individual vocabulary lists, essays, oral presentations, final portfolio) and project-based (group work and final group project).
- MWR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
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Instructor:
Julia Perrin
Info - 4 points
INTERMEDIATE DUTCH II
Prerequisites: DTCH UN1101-UN1102 or the equivalent. Continued practice in the four skills (aural comprehension, reading, speaking, and writing); review and refinement of basic grammar; vocabulary building. Readings in Dutch literature.
- TR 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
- MW 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
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Instructor:
Wijnie de Groot
CULPA: 11
Info
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Instructor:
Nicolette Dekens
Info - 4 points
INTERMEDIATE GERMAN II
Prerequisites: GERM UN2101 or the equivalent.
Intermediate German UN2102 is conducted entirely in German and emphasizes the four basic language skills, cultural awareness, and critical thinking. A wide range of topics (from politics and poetry to art) as well as authentic materials (texts, film, art, etc.) are used to improve the 4 skill. Practice in conversation aims at enlarging the vocabulary necessary for daily communication. Grammar is practiced in the context of the topics. Learning and evaluation are individualized (individual vocabulary lists, essays, oral presentations, final portfolio) and project-based (group work and final group project).
- MTR 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
- MTR 1:10 p.m.-2:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Simona C Vaidean
CULPA: 5
Info
- 4 points
Intermediate Conversation
Prerequisite
: Completion of 1102 or equivalent. If you have prior German outside of Columbia's language sequence, the placement exam is required.
Desire to speak lots of German! Students in Intermediate Conversation should have completed the equivalent of two semester of college German or placed at the Intermediate level at Columbia. This conversation group is designed for students are either taking Intermediate German I or II and would like additional practice or who take only this class because they wish to maintain their spoken German.
The course is designed to improve your ability to speak and understand and manage German in everyday situations; to provide opportunities to participate in conversational situations on any topics you are interested in; to strengthen and acquire skills to understand German spoken at normal conversational speed; to expand active and passive vocabularies speaking skills; and to maintain a certain level of written German through short written activities. This is a 2-point course and does not count towards the language requirement.
ADVANCED DUTCH II
see department for details
- TR 1:15 p.m.-2:30 p.m.
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Instructor:
Wijnie de Groot
CULPA: 11
Info
- 3 points
Literature in the 18th and 19th Centurie
Lit in the 18th & 19th Ce
Prerequisite OR Corequisite: GERMUN3333
This class will provide an introduction to the rich and varied forms of literary production between 1750 and 1900 by focusing on the culture of Sensibility, the Enlightenment, Storm and Stress, Romanticism, the “Vormärz” and Realism. We will situate major literary innovations of the 18th century in the context of changing reading and theater cultures and focus primarily on Lessing’s innovative domestic tragedy, and on poems and an epistolary novel by Goethe. Then we will discuss the literary production of the 19th century by analyzing changing concepts of art, music and literature during those times of great social and political change. We will study (and translate) poems, and read pamphlets and novellas by Tieck, Kleist, Hölderlin, Novalis, Brentano, Eichendorff, Günderrode, Droste-Hülshoff, Heine, Büchner, Mörike, Keller and Fontane.
**This course is taught entirely in German.
- MW 4:10 p.m.-5:25 p.m.
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Instructor:
Dorothea von Muecke
Info - 3 points
Modern German Literature and the Unconsc
Modern Lit and Unconsciou
Course Description
This course will introduce students to a variety of Modern German literary texts, through the lens of the unconscious. The desire to uncover the roots of psychological darkness leads these texts to extreme corners of the human psyche. Students will read and examine literature and theoretical texts to gain a deeper understanding of the development of the concept of the unconscious in the late 1800s to early 1900s. The course will undertake close-readings of a few of Freud’s key texts:
The Interpretation of Dreams
,
Dora: Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
, and
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
. We will examine the unconscious from several perspectives: the female/foreign, the death drive, and the locative unconscious, which relies on specific environs to enrich and agitate the psyche. Authors considered in the course include: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Else Lasker-Schüler, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler, Alfred Döblin.
Guiding Questions
How does the concept of the unconscious develop in the early 20th century through literary and theoretical texts? How do writing styles and authorial choices influence our understanding of the unconscious? Freud attempts to map the human psyche as a topographical space, what other ways can we conceive of the psyche?
Course Objectives
Students will experience and gain familiarity with canonical Modern German texts
Students will have a rigorous understanding of Freud’s early conception of the unconscious
Students will have several critical lenses through which to analyze psychoanalytic theory and literature
Students will develop short answer writing skills and long-form essay, as well as peer-review editing skills
- R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Iloe M Ariss
Info - 3 points
Mechanical Muse: Writing Technologies Be
Each new writing technology has produced its own fantasies and fears. Plato had Socrates warn that the alphabet would ruin memory; Nietzsche, half-blind at a typewriter, noticed that “our writing tools are also working on our thoughts”; the Surrealists tried to write without an author; and the language model now produces fluent prose with no one behind it. This course reads that history backward and forward. We move from the alphabet and the golem’s animating letter, through the copyist’s pen around 1800 and the typewriter, phonograph, and Parlograph around 1900, to automatic writing, the card index, the computer, and generative AI: What does the apparatus do to the writer and to writing? And which imaginaries accompanied the introduction of new writing technologies? Along the way, we ask who has been imagined at the machine (the Muse, the copyist, the medium, the typist, the cyborg) and what each figure reveals about the fantasies attached to writing.
The course is organized around two theoretical frameworks. The first treats technology as an a priori of writing: in Friedrich Kittler’s account, “media determine our situation,” and the instrument conditions what can be written, and even thought, before any writer sets to work. The second, Rüdiger Campe’s “scene of writing,” treats writing as an ensemble of language, instrument, and the gestures of the writing body, whose friction literature often stages. Much of our discussion will test one framework against the other: Does the apparatus determine what is written, or is it one element among others in the scene of writing?
You will also write in four genres, each with its own purpose: the reading journal (collecting and annotating), the scene-of-writing commentary (close reading of a single scene), the analytical essay (based on the reading journal but making an argument and developing a specific topic), and the co-writing experiment with a reflective essay (writing with AI, then thinking about what it did). Each genre builds on the one before. For each assignment you will receive a prompt and a rubric. Learning to write in these genres is part of the course.
Readings and lectures in English. No prerequisites.
- TR 10:10 a.m.-11:25 a.m.
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Instructor:
Oliver Simons
CULPA: 4
Info
- 3 points
BERL/ISTANBUL:MIGRATN,CLTR,VAL
BERL/ISTANBUL:MIGRATNCLTRVAL
An intensive seminar analyzing questions of migration, identity, (self-) representation, and values with regard to the Turkish minority living in Germany today. Starting with a historical description of the „guest worker“ program that brought hundreds of thousands of Turkish nationals to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, the course will focus on the experiences and cultural production of the second and third generations of Turkish Germans, whose presence has profoundly transformed German society and culture. Primary materials include diaries, autobiographies, legal and historical documents, but the course will also analyze poetry, novels, theater plays and films. In German.
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Claudia Breger
CULPA: 2 Info - 3 points
SPIRIT/GHOSTS FR KANT-MARX(ENG)
SPIRITS/GHOSTS KANT TO MARX
When Kant was writing a treatise about true and false apparitions, showmen were deploying the magic lantern to terrify audiences with projected phantoms. Kant's ambivalence toward spirits remained formative for his critical philosophy. On the one hand, he insisted that we can only gain knowledge about appearances. Yet these appearances are somehow related to a supersensory thing-in-itself. At the same time, he warned against the transcendental illusion of speculative reason by comparing it to the optical mirage of the magic lantern. The optical medium thus became an epistemic figure for the limits of philosophical knowledge. This course traces that constellation and its recurrence through the philosophical theories of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Marx. Lectures, discussions, and readings will be in English.
- M 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Stefan Andriopoulos
CULPA: 6 Wikipedia h-index: 12 Info - 3 points
Orientalism and Empire
Nearly fifty years after the publication of Edward Said’s groundbreaking work Orientalism, the book is as relevant as ever. At the same time, there have been countless attempts to broaden the scope of inquiry to explore constructions of the Middle East and Asia from different cultural, historical, and theoretical perspectives, including feminist and Marxist revisions of Said’s conceptualization as well as important work examining the role of race and religion.
Focusing on the Germanophone context, this seminar traces the interrelationship between Orientalism—the study of the Orient—and the evolution of German scholarship and empire. Without having an imperial presence in the Middle East, Germany quickly developed an authoritative role in the study of many Orientalist fields, prompting several questions. Can Said’s framework be used to describe the experience of non-colonial powers in the Middle East? To what extent was German Orientalism informed by Germany’s colonial experiences—its belated acquisition of overseas colonies and its quasi-colonial relationship with Eastern European states? How does Orientalism reflect Germany’s own nation-building efforts to fabricate a mythic,
ancient past? How did Nazi Orientalism perpetuate and exploit these myths?
With the contemporary resurgence of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the Middle East and West, these questions take on renewed importance. Concluding with a discussion of the “migrant crisis” in Europe, this seminar proposes that a historical study of Orientalism can increase sensitivities to the cultural complexities of today’s global environment. Through an interdisciplinary focus on literature, visual arts, and theory, this seminar critically examines the role of scholarship and academia in exploring how humanities can shape and alter such perceptions. Does the study of Orientalism unwittingly contribute to the problem by perpetuating stereotypes and myths while undermining the agency of colonized or non-Western peoples?
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Annie Pfeifer
CULPA: 2 Info - 3 points
FAUST (ENG)
FAUST: Marlowe Goethe Mann
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Dorothea von Muecke
Info - 3 points
WALTER BENJAMIN (ENG)
In 1936, the exiled German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin wrote, “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”
Few thinkers or writers have as poignantly articulated how human experience is formed by crisis. Early in his career, he conceptualized a sudden departure from 19th-century modes of experience—a departure brought on by World War I and other developments in early 20th century European history. Between philosophy and history, Benjamin charted a course toward a new mode of experience in the midst of a growing social and political crisis.
Benjamin’s methodology was critique, a specifically historical way of analyzing transformative events and experiences. We will read the texts in which Benjamin tests out formative, critical experiences such as a child’s perception of color, fate and character, the violence of the law, mourning, memory, new media such as film and radio, and his writings on authors such as Baudelaire, Proust, Brecht, and Kafka.
Our reading will proceed roughly chronologically, as Benjamin’s attention shifted from theorizing experience to reflecting on Marxism, Nazism, and other political and social trends. Given Benjamin’s important contributions to a vast number of fields, we will be reading texts in political theory, literary theory, art history, film, and media studies.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Annie Pfeifer
CULPA: 2 Info - 3 points
Rumor and Media: Technologies, Circulati
Rumor & Media: Tech,Circ,
Generative AI and social media are accelerating the circulation of rumors. Yet our current surge of disinformation has striking historical precedents. Gutenberg’s printing press not only facilitated the scientific revolution but also led to a proliferation of pamphlets about various monsters. In the 1840s, the rotary printing press brought about a wave of fabricated news stories. Nearly a century later, the live transmission of radio made listeners of Orson Welles’
War of the Worlds
believe Martians were really invading. But radio was also the medium in which FDR’s fireside chats successfully countered banking rumors.
This seminar examines how successive media revolutions have shaped the propagation of rumors and falsehoods, from printed broadsides to QAnon, anti-vax campaigns, deepfakes, and generative AI. We will also analyze the limits of fact-checking and how counternarratives that gain wide circulation can displace disinformation.
- W 10:10 a.m.-noon
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Instructor:
Stefan Andriopoulos
CULPA: 6 Wikipedia h-index: 12 Info - 4 points