Spring 2013

Lower Division Courses

German 1. Elementary German (5 units)

Brandon Winter (sec. 1, M-F 8:00 - 8:50A, 101 Olson) CRN 45944

Description of course: 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 2 or 3 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 contact the instructor or the German staff adviser directly.

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

Texts:

Option 1: New “bundle” textbook, which includes the required Instant Access Code for all of your homework and lab assignments, from the UCD bookstore: Vorsprung: A Communicative Introduction to German Language and Culture, 2nd Edition by Thomas Lovik, J. Douglas Guy and Monika Chavez, 2nd edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). 

Option 2: Used textbook (make sure you get the 2nd edition), and, separately, a new Instant Access Code. The UCD bookstore sells these Access Codes separately for those who have obtained a used textbook. If they are out of Access Codes, have them order you one. If you want to order the Access Code directly from the publisher (a bit more expensive than the bookstore), order this from Cengage Learning (www.cengage.com): Quia Instant Access Code for Lovik/Guy/Chavez Vorsprung: A Communicative Introduction to German Language and Culture, 2nd Edition, 2007. ISBN10: 0-8400-6330-X, ISBN13: 978-0-8400-6330-4.

Option 3: Buy the Instant Access Code from the bookstore or online, just like you would for option 2, and then, instead of getting the regular, hard-cover textbook, buy the eBook version of Vorsprung. If you are considering the eBook, you need to be sure that you will be able to bring your laptop/ipad/tablet, etc. to class every day.


German 3. Elementary German (5 units)

Konrad Mathesius (sec. 1, M-F 8:00 - 8:50A, 163 Olson) CRN 45945
Cameron Mortimer (sec. 2, M-F 9:00 - 9:50A, 163 Olson) CRN 45946
Lauren Nossett (sec. 3, M-F 10:00 - 10:50A, 102 Hutchison) CRN 45947

Description of course: This is the continuation of German 2 in areas of grammar and the basic language skills, and the last course in the Elementary German series.

Prerequisite: German 2.

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

Texts:

Option 1: New “bundle” textbook, which includes the required Instant Access Code for all of your homework and lab assignments, from the UCD bookstore: Vorsprung: A Communicative Introduction to German Language and Culture, 2nd Edition by Thomas Lovik, J. Douglas Guy and Monika Chavez, 2nd edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). 

Option 2: Used textbook (make sure you get the 2nd edition), and, separately, a new Instant Access Code. The UCD bookstore sells these Access Codes separately for those who have obtained a used textbook. If they are out of Access Codes, have them order you one. If you want to order the Access Code directly from the publisher (a bit more expensive than the bookstore), order this from Cengage Learning (www.cengage.com): Quia Instant Access Code for Lovik/Guy/Chavez Vorsprung: A Communicative Introduction to German Language and Culture, 2nd Edition, 2007. ISBN10: 0-8400-6330-X, ISBN13: 978-0-8400-6330-4.

Option 3: Buy the Instant Access Code from the bookstore or online, just like you would for option 2, and then, instead of getting the regular, hard-cover textbook, buy the eBook version of Vorsprung. If you are considering the eBook, you need to be sure that you will be able to bring your laptop/ipad/tablet, etc. to class every day.

 


German 10. Fairy Tales (4 units)

Elisabeth Krimmer (TR 9:00 - 10:20A, 55 Roessler) CRN 62416

Description of course: This course introduces students to the genre of fairy tale with a particular focus on the life and works of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Walt Disney. All works will be situated in their respective cultural and political contexts. In addition, we will discuss different adaptations of these classic tales, for example, in U.S. popular culture, fairy tale films produced in the former East Germany and adapted to a Cold War context, French adaptations, as well as Hollywood feature films such as Pretty Woman and Enchanted. Throughout we will pay particular attention to the construction of race, gender, sexuality, and power in these tales. Students will also get to know different theories of and approaches to folk tales and fairy tales, including historical and psychoanalytic analysis. The fairy tales to be discussed include Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and The Little Mermaid. Taught in English.

Prerequisite: None.

G.E. credits:  ArtHum, Visual Literacy, Writing Experience.

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

Texts:

  • The Classic Fairy Tales (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999)
     

German 20. Intermediate German (4 units)

Karina Deifel (MWF 10:00 - 10:50A, 209 Wellman) CRN 45948

Description of course: 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 3.

G.E. credits:  ArtHum, World Cultures.

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

Texts:

  • T. Barske, M. McKinistry, K. Schestokat, J. Sokolovsky, Denk Mal (Vista Higher Learning)
     

German 22. Intermediate German (4 units)

Jesse Goplen (MWF 11:00 - 11:50A, 229 Wellman) CRN 45949

Description of course: This is the continuation of German 21. This course is a review of grammatical principles by means of written exercises; expanding of vocabulary through readings of modern texts.

Prerequisite: German 21.

G.E. credits: ArtHum, World Cultures.

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

Texts:

  • A Course Reader
     

Upper Division Courses

German 103. Writing Skills in German (4 units)

Frieder Günther (TR 9:00-10:20A, 229 Wellman) CRN 62417

Description of course: This course focuses on different media and genres common in German academia as well as everyday life: emails, letters, résumés, job applications, lecture notes, abstracts, and term papers. This course helps students expand vocabulary, improve grammar skills, and raise their awareness of styles and cultural issues related to writing for various audiences and purposes. At the end of the quarter, participants should be able to write a variety of texts in German. This course is useful especially for students who plan to study or work in Germany in the near future.

Prerequisite: German 22.

G.E. credits: ArtHum, World Cultures, Writing Experience.

Course Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Extensive Writing.

Texts:

  • Pennylyn Dykstra-Pruim and Jennifer Redman, Schreiben lernen: A Writing Guide for Learners of German (Yale University Press, 2011)
     

German 112. Memory of War in Film, Literature, and Architecture (4 units)

Kirsten Harjes (MWF 11:00-11:50A, 235 Wellman) CRN 45966

Description of course: What are the images and stories by which we choose to remember past atrocities and wars? What kind of national identity, what kind of soldier, and what justification for current policy emerges from these memories? In this seminar, we will take a historical and comparative look at commemorations of war, terror, and genocide in the US and Germany since the period of the American Civil War and German nation-building in the 1860s and 1870s. The course begins with an introduction to recent understandings of memory in neuroscience, psychology, and religious studies. We then turn to the growing body of scholarship on collective memory as applied to the Civil War, slavery, the Vietnam War, World War II, and the Holocaust, as well as more recent events in the Middle East.

Prerequisites: Upper-division standing or consent of instructor.

G.E. credits:  ArtHum, World Cultures.

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

Texts:

  • Heinrich Boll, And Where Were You, Adam? (Northwestern University, 1994)
  • Irene Dische, The Empress of Weehawken (Picador, 2008)
  • Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (Grove Press, 2006)
  • Toni Morrison, Beloved (Everyman's Library, 2006)
  • Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (Mariner Books, 2009)
     

German 120. German Culture (4 Units)

Chunjie Zhang (MW 12:10 - 2:00P, 101 Wellman) CRN 62418

Description of course: This course will explore German culture through multimedia forms. We will deal with major political, social, and cultural aspects after 1945 through music, art, theater, radio plays, films, and literature.  
We will start the course discussing German political singer/songwriters such as Wolf Biermann and Franz Josef Degenhardt and internationally well-known German art exhibitions such as dOKUMENTA and German artists such as Joseph Beuys. Responding to the experience of World War II, the radio play became a very popular and important genre after 1945 in Germany. We will talk about award-winning writer Ingeborg Bachmann's radio play The Good God of Manhattan and explore the intertextuality between this radio play and the drama The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht, arguably the most famous Marxist playwright and writer in German literature of the twentieth century and beyond. We will also discuss the role of literature by reading Peter Handke's novel A Short Letter for a Long Farewell. In the end, we will deal with German cinema and discuss major trends, directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders, and topics such as immigrants in Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Prerequisite: German 22.

G.E. credits: ArtHum, World Cultures, Writing Experience.

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

Text:

  • Bertolt Brecht, Der Gute Mensch Von Sezuan (Suhrkamp, 2008)
  • Ingeborg Bachmann, Die Hoerspiele (Piper Verlag GmbH, 1996)
  • Peter Handke, Der Kurze Brief Zum Langen Abschied (Suhrkamp, 2001)
     

Graduate Courses
 

German 297. Sec. 01: Cultural Encounters and Transcultural Imaginations (4 Units)

Chunjie Zhang (W 5:10-08:00P, 412B Sproul) CRN 62427

Description of course: This course focuses on the representations of non-European cultures in the German and European discourse around 1800, a time period of seminal importance for the emergence of the world market, modern sciences, and the loaded term of modernity. We read German travel narratives, literature, and philosophy -- three textual genres that register intensive negotiations with non-European cultures as well as extensive imaginations of transculturation. While postcolonial critique of representations points out that European misconceptions of the non-Europeans justify Europe's cultural superiority and its colonial control, we endeavor to shift our attention to the contributions of non-European cultures in the European discourse to show the impact of non-European cultures on the making of German and European cultural identities.  We will read works by eighteenth-century authors such as Georg Forster, Adelbert von Chamisso, Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schiller, Immanuel Kant, Joachim Heinrich Campe, August von Kotzebue. We will also read critical works by Emmanuel Eze, Nicholas Thomas, Suzanne Zantop, and Dipesch Chakrabarty, scholars from a variety of disciplines such as literary studies, philosophy, anthropology, and intellectual history. 

Prerequisite: Graduate standing.

Texts:

  • A Course Reader
     

German 297. Sec. 02: Space, Place, and Mobility in Recent Cultural Theory (4 Units) 

Jaimey Fisher (R 2:10-5:00P, 104 Sproul) CRN 62426

Description of course: The seminar aims to engage with the conceptual terms, via some of the central texts, of what has been called the spatial turn in cultural theory. Why (and in what forms) have notions of space and spatiality gained such critical purchase across a wide array of fields, including literary criticism, media studies, art, history, anthropology, etc.? We will query this among other questions, like: what, precisely, is to be gained by focusing on space and the spatial aspects of social and cultural experience; how studies of space and spatiality intersect (or, too often, do not) history and economy; whether and in what inflections space and spatiality have remained overly vague. Topics to include: spatial vs. temporal orientation, space vs. place and the issues of scale therein, poetics and production of space, movement and mobility, public and private spheres, intersections of space with race/class/genre, urban vs. rural spaces, intersections of space with the body, varied mappings of space, with relevant writings by Gaston Bachelard, Doreen Massey, Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, David Harvey, Gillian Rose, Fredric Jameson, Derek Gregory, Edward Soja, Michel de Certeau, among others.

Taught in English.

Prerequisite: Graduate standing.

Texts:

  • Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994)
  • Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Belknap Press, 2006)
  • David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Wiley-Blackwell, 1991)
  • Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Wiley-Blackwell, 1992)
  • Doreen B. Massey, For Space (Sage Publications, 2005)
  • Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960)
  • Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space(University of California Press, 1987)
  • Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Verso, 2009)

[RECOMMENDED]

  • David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (Routledge, 2005)
     

 
Other Courses Taught by German Faculty

Jaimey Fisher, Professor (FMS 1, Introduction to Film) CRN various