German Lit’s Greatest Hits

Catalog description

This course explores some of German literature’s greatest hits from the Middle Ages to the present. The readings are organized into three broad groupings, each of which will explore a different genre: Erzählungen/Novellen (short narratives/novellas), Lyrik (poetry), and Romane (novels) or Dramen (plays). You will get to know the work of authors such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ingeborg Bachmann, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg Büchner, Bertolt Brecht, Gerhart Hauptmann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Alfred Döblin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Paul Celan, Ludwig Tieck, Christa Wolf, and others. Historically, literature is deeply entwined with culture and language, and this is emphatically true of the German-speaking world. Reading and engaging with these texts in classroom discussion, formal and informal writing assignments, and presentations will deepen your knowledge of the German cultural context and make you a better reader, writer, and speaker of German. Our primary goal that will lead us through these texts will be to develop your advanced communication skills in spoken and written German, giving you the tools to shape your own lines of inquiry into the relationship between text and context, literature and society, aesthetics and history. This course counts as one of three advanced German seminars needed for the German major or double major, and one of two advanced German seminars needed for the German minor. Course taught in German. Prerequisite: successful completion of GERM 204 or instructor permission. Offered every other year.