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German 001. Elementary German (5 units)
| Section | Instructor | CRN |
| 001 | Staff | 45547 |
| 002 | Staff | 45548 |
| 003 | Staff | 45549 |
| 004 | Staff | 45550 |
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 (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, 2016)
- Jeanine Briggs and Lida Daves-Schneider, Workbook/Laboratory Manual to accompany Deutsch: Na klar![7th Edition] (McGraw-Hill Education, 2016)
German 002. Elementary German (5 units)
Staff
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 (New): Arts & Humanities and World Cultures.
Format: Discussion - 5 hours; Laboratory - 1 hour.
Textbooks:
- Lee Forester, et al., Auf Geht's [4th Edition] (Live Oak Multimedia)
German 020. Intermediate German (4 units)
Staff
Course Description: This is the first course of second 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 (New): Arts & Humanities, Oral Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.
Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Writing.
Textbooks:
- Reinhard Zachau, et al., Cineplex: German Language and Culture through Film (Focus Publishing, 2014)
German 021. Intermediate German (4 units)
Staff
Course Description: Review of grammatical principles by means of written exercises, expanding of vocabulary through readings of modern texts.
Prerequisite: German 020.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, Oral Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.
Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Writing.
Textbooks:
- Reinhard Zachau, et al., Cineplex: German Language and Culture through Film (Focus Publishing, 2014)
German 048. Myth and Saga in the Germanic Cultures (4 units) In English
Kirsten Harjes
Course Description: Germanic mythology and Germanic paganism have co-existed with Judeo-Christian beliefs from very early on – from around 1500 BCE. We will trace the history and culture of this mythology all the way up to its most recent incarnation: the Vikings’ Norse mythology, as it was documented for the first time in writing by Icelanders in the 11th - 13th centuries. Our sources will include detailed interpretations of the pagan gods, poetry from that period, and famous family sagas such as the mythical Volsung Saga and the Laxardal Saga. The texts will reveal surprising views of the natural world and the human mind, including ideas about how to gain knowledge, or restrain power.
The course also provides an introduction to the “history on the ground” during what’s called the Long Middle Ages: tribal migration patterns, trade routes, gender relations, slavery, political organizations, networks between Europe and the Middle East, early educational institutions, and various technological developments, from paper-making to longboat-construction.
Prerequisite: None.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, Visual Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.
Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Term Paper.
Textbooks:
- TBA
German 101A. Survey of German Literature: 800-1800 (4 units)
Kirsten Harjes
Course Description: This course will acquaint students with literary works from 800-1800. This includes the older Germanic languages like Gothic, Old High German and Middle High German. We will also talk about the development of the German language and the history that influenced language. We start off with runes and charms and end with young Goethe. On the way, we will discuss the Nibelungenlied, Humanism, Mathias Claudius, and Moses Mendelssohn.
Prerequisite: German 022.
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities, Oral Literacy, Visual Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.
Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours.
Textbooks:
-
Gudrun Clay, 1000 Jahre Deutsche Literatur [2nd Edition] (Focus Publishing, 2008)
German 121. The Medieval Period in German Literature (4 units)
Carlee Arnett
Course Description: Literary-philosophical profile of the Mittelhochdeutsche Blütezeit in terms of the significant epics, romances, and lyric poetry. Readings in German.
Prerequisite: German 022 or consent of instructor (clarnett@ucdavis.edu).
GE credit (New): Arts & Humanities.
Format: Discussion - 3 hours; Writing.
Textbooks:
- TBA
German 144. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud (4 units) In English No German Required [Cross-listed with HUM 144]
Sven-Erik Rose
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 (New): Arts & Humanities and World Cultures.
Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Term Paper.
Textbooks:
- TBA
German 206. Cognitive Grammar for Applied Linguists (4 units)
Carlee Arnett
Course Description: This course will focus on the role of grammar in the first and second year language classroom. We will read articles that describe a new syntactic theory, Cognitive Grammar, as well as articles on the acquisition of certain grammatical structures by classroom learners. The course will alternate between lecture, student led discussion of the readings and hands-on application of CG to the grammar presented in first and second year textbooks in Spanish, French and German. At the end of the course, students will be able to discuss the role of grammar in language instruction and critically evaluate materials used to teach grammar in the first and second year. Students will also be able to identify and discuss the theoretical framework used in their textbooks. In the term paper, students will design a classroom research project that evaluates how effectively a grammatical structure is taught.
This course is taught in English and counts toward the Designated Emphasis (DE) in Second Language Acquisition.
Prerequisite: Graduate standing.
Format: Seminar - 3 hours; Term Paper.
Textbooks:
- TBA
German 297: Modern Yiddish Culture, Fall 2019
Professor Sven-Erik Rose
Fridays 1:10-5:00 PM, Sproul 412B
Yiddish is a fascinating “peripheral” European culture that is very rich in its own right, spanning multiple national and political contexts and opening up critical perspectives on how to look at dominant European discourses of culture, gender, territorial claims, and more. Germanists have a special obligation to become conversant with major trends in Yiddish culture, since Yiddish culture was itself one of the victims of the German genocide of European Jewry. That said, this seminar will not, primarily, be about the Holocaust, but rather about the vibrant and extremely diverse transnational Yiddish cultural currents between the late 19th century and the Holocaust, as well as about attempts to sustain Yiddish cultural practice after the catastrophe.
We will survey the rise of modern Yiddish literature in the late 19th and early 20th century through the work of the triumvirate of modern Yiddish “classic” authors, Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher Sforim, 1835-1917), Shalom Rabinovitz (Sholem Aleichem, 1859-1916), and Yitskhok Leybush Peretz (1852-1915). We will furthermore explore the staging of tradition to various esthetic and political ends in modernist Yiddish drama (Peretz, A Night in the Old Marketplace; S. Ansky, The Dybbuk, 1920), and also read key works of experimental modernist prose including Dovid Bergelson’s “At the Depot” and Descent (1913); Yiddish women’s poetry (e.g. Anna Margolin, 1887-1952 and Kadya Molodovsky, 1894-1975); and Yiddish culture in the USA (e.g. Mani Leyb, 1883-1953; Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, 1886-1932; Yankev Glatshshteyn, 1896-1971; and Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1902-1991). Along the way, we will engage with varieties of Yiddish nationalism and Yiddish socialism; touch on Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union; and read recent scholarship including Naomi Seidman on fault lines between European vs. Ashkenazic Jewish gender systems and Zohar Weiman-Kelman on intersections between Yiddish and queer theory.
The seminar will be conducted in English, and all readings can be read in English translation.