Fall 2016

Please click here to see the Fall Schedule as a PDF

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  LOWER DIVISION COURSES  

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German 001. Elementary German (5 units)

Course Description: This is an introduction to German grammar and development of all language skills in a cultural context with special emphasis on communication.

Course Placement: Students who have successfully completed, with a C- or better, German 002 or 003 in the 10th or higher grade in high school may receive unit credit for this course on a P/NP grading basis only. Although a passing grade will be charged to the student's P/NP option, no petition is required. All other students will receive a letter grade unless a P/NP petition is filed. For more information, please directly contact the instructor or the German staff adviser, Amy Lowrey (allowrey@ucdavis.edu). This course is not open to students who have completed German 001A.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities and World Cultures.

Format: Discussion - 5 hours; Laboratory - 1 hour.

Textbooks:

• Robert Di Donato and Monica D. Clyde, Deutsch: Na klar! An Introductory German Course [7th Edition] (McGraw-Hill Education, 2015)
• Jeanine Briggs and Lida Daves-Schneider, Workbook/Laboratory Manual to accompany Deutsch: Na klar! [7th Edition]  (McGraw-Hill Education, 2015)
   

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German 002. Elementary German (5 units)
Kirsten Harjes

MTWRF 9:00-9:50A
192 Young Hall
CRN 36003

Course Description: This is the continuation of German 001 in areas of grammar and the basic language skills, and the second course in the Elementary German series.

Prerequisite: German 001.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities and World Cultures.

Format: Discussion - 5 hours; Laboratory - 1 hour.

Textbooks:

• Robert Di Donato and Monica D. Clyde, Deutsch: Na klar! An Introductory German Course [7th Edition] (McGraw-Hill Education, 2015)
• Jeanine Briggs and Lida Daves-Schneider, Workbook/Laboratory Manual to accompany Deutsch: Na klar! [7th Edition]  (McGraw-Hill Education, 2015)
   

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German 020. Intermediate German (4 units)
Amila Becirbegovic

MWF 9:00-9:50A
141 Olson Hall
CRN 36005

Course Description: This is the first course of 2nd year German. Students will review grammar, and begin to read and discuss short, literary texts of cultural and historical interest. Class is conducted in German.

Prerequisite: German 003.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, Oral Skills, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Extensive Writing.

Textbook:

• Tobias Barske, et al., Denk Mal! Deutsch ohne Grenzen - with SuperSite Access [2nd Edition]  (Vista Higher Learning, 2016)
   

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German 021. Intermediate German (4 units)
Kirsten Harjes

MWF 11:00-11:50A
140 Physics Building
CRN 36006

Course Description: Review of grammatical principles by means of written exercises, expanding of vocabulary through readings of modern texts.

Prerequisite: German 020.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities and World Cultures.

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Extensive Writing.

Textbook:

• Tobias Barske, et al., Denk Mal! Deutsch ohne Grenzen - with SuperSite Access  (Vista Higher Learning, 2012)
   

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German 045. Vampires (4 units)    In English
Kirsten Harjes

Lecture: MW 10:00-10:50A
Film Viewing: W 5:10-8:00P
194 Young Hall

Course Description: History of representations of vampires and the undead generally from the 16th through 21st centuries. Emphasis on transnational history of the vampire genre; psychologies of horror effects; issues of race, gender, and class; intersections with prejudice, medicine, modernity.

Prerequisite: None.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities.
GE credit (New): American Cultures, Governance & History, Arts & Humanities, Domestic Diversity, Oral Literacy, Visual Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 2 hours; Discussion - 1 hour; Film Viewing - 3 hours.

Textbooks:

• TBA
   

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  UPPER DIVISION COURSES   

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German 120. Survey of German Culture (4 units)
Chunjie Zhang

MW 10:00-11:50A
227 Olson Hall
CRN 53530

Course Description: This course will explore German culture from the perspective of the recent refugee crisis. We will discuss the current situation within a larger historical and cultural context in Germany and Europe. Readings include short media reports, essays on immigration, films, and video clips in German language. Immigration as a contentious issue reflects deep-seated prejudices as well as cultural values in the German tradition in its global context. This course is taught in German.

Prerequisite: German 022.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, Oral Literacy, Visual Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Discussion - 1 hour.

Textbooks:

• TBA
  

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German 144. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud (4 units)    Taught In English    No German Required   [Cross-listed with HUM 144]
Sven Erik Rose

TR 12:10-1:30P
166 Chemistry Building
CRN 53271

Course Description: The esteemed French philosopher Paul Ricoeur famously characterized the triumvirate of modern master-thinkers Karl Marx (1818-1883), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in terms of a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” By this Ricoeur meant that Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, each in his own way, are all detectives of sorts: they look at what is happening on the surface of things as so many dissembling fictions that individuals and societies perpetuate in order to evade various kinds of unsettling "deep" truths that actually structure our desires and morals, our culture and politics, our identities and consciousness, our very sense of who we are. In this course we will explore how Marx, Nietzsche and Freud developed modes of analysis to unveil the deeper, latent meanings and forces that they understood to reside behind or beneath our consciousness (or false consciousness).

According to Marx, the social structure in capitalist societies appears to be "natural," and thus ineluctable, but is in fact an effect of historically contingent production forces and the specific--and changeable--relations between people under the capitalist system. One of the chief obstacles that Marx identifies as standing in the way of revealing the true secrets of the capitalist world is how what he calls "commodity fetishism" creates a seductive optical illusion that makes it difficult for us to understand how the world we live in actually works. One of Marx's goals is to try to break this spell.

In his genealogy of modern moral conscience, Nietzsche diagnoses Judeo-Christian values as merely the deformed and "unhealthy" response of the weak to the experience of being dominated by the strong. While the strong do not need to resort to specious moral values, the weak do, for morality allows them to "triumph" in their goodness even as they are defeated in real contests of strength and power. In this way, Nietzsche purports to discover the "will to power" as the true force driving human culture, and he diagnosed his own Christian European culture as "decadent" for resorting to convoluted psychic strategies that dissembled this fundamental truth. For Nietzsche, the very way we understand ourselves to be moral beings keeps us from seeing the truths that moral values work to keep hidden!

Freud’s “detective work” is legendary: his case studies read like detective novels, as do his later mythic genealogies of modern civilization. Without question, Freud's claims to diagnostic mastery are at their most hubristic in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), in which he interprets the seemingly slightest and most banal gestures and slips of the tongue as windows onto the workings of the unconscious and its teeming and unruly desires. Freud invented psychoanalysis to try, like Marx and Nietzsche, to develop techniques for negotiating the thorny problem that the things our very consciousness tells us are true about ourselves are in fact distortions of radically different realities. Psychoanalysis refuses to take consciousness at face value and instead searches for ways to glimpse and analyze the workings of the unconscious.

Prerequisite: None.

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities and Writing Experience.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities and World Cultures.

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

• TBA
  

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German 160. Love in the Middle Ages (4 units)
Carlee Arnett

TR 2:10-4:00P
146 Robbins Hall
CRN 53272

Course Description: The aim of the course is to introduce students to the phenomenon of love in the German Middle Ages. This is not simply a thematic approach to the literature of the period, for the advent of amor, of courtly love, represented a highly significant station in the development of the individual as a reflective personality no longer absolutely bound to the dictates of the Church and medieval society. It will be demonstrated that the concept of love constituted an integral component of medieval German knighthood. At the same time, we will attempt to come to some conclusions regarding the dichotomy between the literary portrayal of love and the historical reality of women's status in the period from 1170 to 1250.

Prerequisite: German 022 or consent of instructor (clarnett@ucdavis.edu).

GE credit (Old): Arts & Humanities.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Discussion - 1 hour.

Textbooks:

• None
   

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  GRADUATE COURSES  

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German 262. Studies in Turn-of-the-Century Culture (4 units)
Gail Finney

W 2:10-5:00P
203 Wellman Hall
CRN 53273

Course Description: This seminar will be conducted on a two-track basis, so that students without a command of German may also participate: texts will be available in both English and German and class discussions will be conducted in English.

We will study major modes and topics in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German and Austrian literature and culture, such as the Naturalist attention to the worker as protagonist, the influence of Zola, the women’s emancipation movement, the femme fatale as topos, decadence and aestheticism, art nouveau, the figure of the dandy, and the roles of Freud, Wagner, and Nietzsche.

Authors treated include Gerhart Hauptmann, Henrik Ibsen, Elsa Bernstein, Frank Wedekind, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, and Thomas Mann.

Prerequisite: Graduate standing.

Format: Seminar - 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

• German-Language Titles:
  • Gerhart Hauptmann, Bahnwärter Thiel  (Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag GmbH, 1997)
  • Gerhart Hauptmann, Die Weber  (Ullstein Taschenbuch, 1996)
  • Elsa Bernstein, Dämmerung  (MLA Publications, 2003)
  • Frank Wedekind, Lulu  (Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag GmbH, 1989)
  • Frank Wedekind, Frühlings Erwachen  (Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag GmbH, 1989)
  • Robert Musil, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß  (Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, 2008)
  • Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Die Frau im Fenster / Der Tod des Tizian / Der Tor und der Tod: Drei Dramen  (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013)
  • Arthur Schnitzler, Anatol  (Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag GmbH, 1986)
  • Arthur Schnitzler, Fräulein Else  (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013)
  • Thomas Mann, Tristan  (Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag GmbH, 1991)
  • Thomas Mann, Wälsungenblut  (Fischer Taschenbuch, 1991)
     

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German 297. China, Europe, and Representation II: Aestheticism, Modernization, and New-Confucian Cosmopolitanism (4 units)    [Same class as COM 210]
Chunjie Zhang

T 2:10-5:00P
109 Olson Hall
CRN 36059

Course Description: “Whither China?” has become one of the central questions in global public consciousness. This question about the future of a significant civilization and political entity is deeply related to the past of the representations of China in European cultural and intellectual history. The theoretical concern about how to approach and understand the making and the reality of China is of utmost importance. How or does the “West” know China? How or does China know the “West”? How does such a strict division between China and the “West” come into being? Does it make sense at all? Exploring these questions from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, this graduate seminar consists of two parts offered in two consecutive academic years. In the first part, students and I have explored the representations of China in European cultural and intellectual history from the early eighteenth to the early twentieth century including the Enlightenment Sinophile of Confucianism, Hegel’s historicism, and Weber’s and Spengler’s pessimistic view of the decline of the West and the look for a salvation in the East, in particular in Daoism.

The second part of this seminar focuses on the Chinese representations of Europe in the early twentieth century while further exploring the aestheticization of China as visual images in the Western tradition until today. We will read the British royal architect William Chambers’ Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1773) and contrast it to the French philosopher Voltaire’s adaptation of the Chinese drama The Orphan of China: a Tragedy (1759). While Voltaire’s moralist message got lost over the centuries, Chambers’s aestheticization remains with us until today. Then we will move to the Chinese representations of the West, especially Chinese intellectuals’ understandings of the Chinese tradition and their visions of the world. Two trends of thoughts competed with each other: the European-styled belief in a world marching toward modernization and the cosmopolitan belief in an integrated philosophy of east and west as the ethics of life. Readings include works by Zeng Pu, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Xiong Shili, Mou Zongsan, Rudolf Eucken and Zhang Junmai.

Prerequisite: TBA

Format: Seminar- 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

• TBA