Worlds, Wars, and the Self: German Culture from the Enlightenment to the Present

Catalog description

This course examines German literary texts and media from 1750 to the present across a wide array of genres, from short stories to dramas and even videos. Students survey seminal literary texts from the Enlightenment, like the genres of the bourgeois tragedy or the epistolary novel, before considering both canonical and lesser-known texts and visual media from the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. While this course focuses on the German literary canon beginning in the Enlightenment, other literary works, such as those by Bertolt Brecht or Emine Sevgi Özdamar, may be discussed later in the semester in their historical context. In addition to literary texts, students may also engage with works of art, films, and other audio-visual media. The sequence of texts and media from 1750 to the present demonstrates the diverse and multicultural aspects of contemporary German culture. Ultimately, this course explores with the ways in which modern German-speaking subjects have participated in, rebelled against, or conformed to the worlds in which they live. This course is conducted primarily in German.