Spring Quarter 2018

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German 001. Elementary German (5 units)
Will Mahan

MTWRF 9:00-9:50A
267 Olson Hall
CRN 65384

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 02 or 03 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 advisor (allowrey@ucdavis.edu).

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, 2016)
  • Jeanine Briggs and Lida Daves-Schneider, Workbook/Laboratory Manual to accompany Deutsch: Na klar! [7th Edition]  (McGraw-Hill Education, 2016)

German 003. Elementary German (5 units)

Section Instructor Day/Time Room CRN
 001  Stefanie Schoeberl  MTWRF 9:00-9:50A  1342 Storer Hall  65386
 002  Erin Altman  MTWRF 10:00-10:50A  1342 Storer Hall  65387
 003  Kirsten Harjes  MTWRF 11:00-11:50A  1342 Storer Hall  65388

Course Description: Completion of grammar sequence and continuing practice of all language skills through cultural texts.

Prerequisite: German 002.

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, 2016)
  • Jeanine Briggs and Lida Daves-Schneider, Workbook/Laboratory Manual to accompany Deutsch: Na klar! [7th Edition]  (McGraw-Hill Education, 2016)

German 020. Intermediate German (4 units)
Astrid Exel

MWF 10:00-10:50A
267 Olson Hall
CRN 81635

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 Literacy, World Cultures and Writing Experience.

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Writing.

Textbook:

  • Denk Mal! [2nd Edition]  Supersite Plus Code (with virtual text)  (Vista Higher Learning, 2016) 
    Please purchase directly through the Vista Higher Learning website (the ISBN of this bundle is 978-1626809208

German 022. Intermediate German (4 units)
Monika Sierkowska

MWF 11:00-11:50A
267 Olson Hall
CRN 65391

Course Description: This class concludes the intermediate German language series and 2nd year German. Students will continue to work on their speaking, writing, reading, and listening skills, and fine-tune their knowledge of German grammar in context. The class is not organized around a textbook. Instead, the instructor will select a novel, or put together a reader with short stories and other readings, focusing on a specific topic of their choice.

Prerequisite: German 021.

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

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Writing.

Textbooks:

  • TBA

German 113. Goethe's Faust (4 units)     In English
Andreas Kilcher

TR 12:10-1:30P
1116 Hart Hall
CRN 82555

Course Description: Faust is one of the most dazzling figures in European literature and cultural history. A real person who lived in the late 1400s and early 1500s, Doctor Faust held a degree in theology; but it was as an itinerant magician, astrologer, and alchemist who set out to dismantle the taboos of the medieval world including pacts with the devil, magic, sexual desire, and hunger for power and knowledge that he became a highly controversial hero of folk legend and literature. Since the first "Faust Book," a collection of stories about this provocative embodiment of transgression and hubris, published anonymously in 1587, a wide range of literary works and films have explored Faust's conflict-ridden quest to liberate human knowledge from the limitations of theology and to achieve absolute knowledge of the human being and of nature through diverse—and distinctly ungodly—means, including cosmology, medicine, astrology, and magic. In Western culture, Faust has become a cipher for the risky pursuit of modern knowledge, and this course's treatment of Faust literature from the 1500s to the present will center on the question of knowledge as it is negotiated through the Faust figure. Does the end of achieving knowledge justify all means of attaining it? Can knowledge be evil? What is the relation between knowledge and morality and between knowledge and action? Does modern knowledge unleash forces that humanity is not equipped to handle and that could be our undoing? Can modern knowledge truly liberate itself from the irrational? Who is well and who ill-served by various forms of knowledge? How do modern pursuits of knowledge participate in and perpetuate gender roles and hierarchies? How are knowledge and violence mutually implicated? These are just some of the questions students in this course will explore. Course texts will range from the early modern period (the anonymous 1587 "Faust Book" and a 1589 play by the English author Christopher Marlowe) to the reinvention of Faust around the year 1800 (above all, Faust I and II by the most exalted German writer through the ages, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) to, finally, 20th-century recreations of Faust in such works as Thomas Mann's novel, Doktor Faustus (1947), published in the wake of Germany's Nazi period and World War II.
 
Students may do the reading for this course in German or in English. No knowledge of German is required for this course.

Prerequisite: None.

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

Format: Discussion - 3 hours; Term Paper - 1 hour.

Textbooks:

  • TBA


German 120. Survey of German Culture (4 units)
Gail Finney

MW 10:00-11:50A
207 Wellman Hall
CRN 81637

Course Description: Major developments in German arts, philosophical thought, social institutions, and political history after 1945.

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

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

German 176A. Classic Weimar Cinema (4 units)     In English     [Cross-listed with Film Studies 176A]
Jaimey Fisher

Lecture:
TR 12:10-1:30P
234 Wellman Hall

Film Viewing:
W 6:10-9:00P
216 Wellman Hall

CRN 81638

Course Description: Weimar Cinema – the diverse film culture of 1920s Germany – gave birth or early impetus to some of the most important film genres for global cinema, including horror, film noir, science fiction, and melodrama.  The course will chart how it was within the context of Weimar Germany and, above all, its uneasy confrontation with modernity and modernization that the horror film, film noir, science-fiction film, and the melodrama all emerged.  In these cultural products, the class will discuss various topics like: the twentieth-century revolution in aesthetics, the impact of war on society, Expressionism in text and in film, technology and the metropolis, changing gender roles as well as the changing nature of work.  Focusing on these questions of modernity and cinema as well as the origins of these film genres, the course will reevaluate the canonical films of this period, including The Cabinet of Dr. CaligariNosferatuMetropolis, and M as well as address lesser known works like Dr. Mabuse the GamblerThe Last Laugh, and Girls in Uniform.  This course will analyze these films but also the varied and variegated scholarly approaches to Weimar Cinema. A study of Weimar cinema, in fact, affords an indispensable occasion on which to engaged with what is probably the most famous single book of film criticism, Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler.  But the course will not only address Kracauer’s canonical work, but also set Kracauer in a mutually illuminating dialogue with Lotte Eisner and Thomas Elsaesser – and thereby offer diverse approaches to film, an approach that will highlight the range of approaches and stakes in film studies.

Prerequisite: Humanities 001.

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

Format: Lecture/Discussion - 3 hours; Writing; Film Viewing - 3 hours.

Textbooks:

  • TBA

German 297. Special Topics in German Literature (4 units)

German 297 may be repeated for credit when topic differs.

Section 001. Women in Film and Film Theory     In English
Elisabeth Krimmer

T 2:10-5:00P
109 Olson Hall
CRN 65452

Course Description: This course introduces students to feminist film theory and to works by select filmmakers. 

We will discuss theories by feminist film scholars, including Teresa de Lauretis, Laura Mulvey, Ruby Rich, bell hooks, Mary Ann Doane, Ann Kaplan, Susan Sontag and Gertrud Koch. Topics to be discussed include Leni Riefenstahl, the infamous Nazi director whose works influenced George Lucas and James Cameron and whoseOlympia created a filmic language for cinematic representations of athletic events; Rosa von Praunheim whose film I Am My Own Woman focuses on the East German transsexual Charlotte von Mahlsdorf and interrogates concepts of gender and sexuality; Fassbinder films that deal centrally with representations of nation, politics, and gender; and the German-Turkish director Fatih Akin, whose films explore the nexus of gender and migration; finally, we will analyze works by several female filmmakers who deal with the intersection of gender and violence, particularly politically motivated violence (terrorism) and sexualized violence (rape).
Note: this course is taught in the German department, but knowledge of German is not required.
 
For more information, please contact Elisabeth Krimmer (emkrimmer@ucdavis.edu).

Format: Seminar- 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

  • TBA

 

Section 002. Denkbilder / Thinking in Images: Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and the Frankfurt School     In English
Andreas Kilcher

R 2:10-5:00P
109 Olson Hall
CRN 65453

Course Description: According to a common understanding, literature and philosophy are mutually demarcated by a fundamental difference: While philosophy uses a technical language of exact terms and abstract concepts to construct systems of thought, literature tells stories and invents ingenious metaphors and ambiguous similes.

Even though this typological distinction may largely hold when comparing literature with systematic and analytical philosophy, it becomes far less neat, or even tenable, when another type of philosophy is at stake. The mode of continental philosophy that we will explore in this course shares with literature an interest in tangible things and singular human stories as well as a heightened attentiveness to language and the meticulous use of words. Moreover, it constructs and makes extensive use of allegorical stories and images, understanding these to add significant value to the machinery of abstract concepts. In our exploration of this kind of philosophical thinking in images, or the construction of “Denkbilder,” as Walter Benjamin aptly characterized this hybrid form of philosophical-literary writing, our focus will be on 19th and early 20th century German philosophy. We will discuss texts by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, and by a number of thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, Benjamin, Bloch, and Adorno, which self-consciously strove to overcome classical systematic philosophy and to experiment with new forms of philosophical writing in what Benjamin called “forbidden poetic” (unerlaubt dichterisch) ways.
 
Because we will be attending closely to questions of language, some reading knowledge of German will be beneficial, but NOT required for this seminar. All the texts can be read in English, and the class discussions will be conducted in English.

Format: Seminar- 3 hours; Term Paper.

Textbooks:

  • TBA
Andreas B. Kilcher is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich, among Europe’s most elite universities. He is a prominent scholar who has held high-profile academic positions and has the status of a public intellectual. He has written a wide range of monographs, edited volumes, articles, dictionary entries, and reviews on topics including the relation between literature and knowledge, German-Jewish literature and culture, and Kabbalah and esotericism. Professor Kilcher will be at UC Davis for one quarter only, Spring 2018, as the UC Davis Max Kade Visiting Professor in German.

Additional Courses that May be of Interest to Students


Film Studies 125. Epic Television: Another Golden Age of TV? (4 units)     In English
Jaimey Fisher

Lecture:
TR 1:40-3:00P
234 Wellman Hall

Film Viewing:
M 6:10-9:00P
216 Wellman Hall

CRN 81942

Course Description: The recent wave of “epic” television series (e.g., The SopranosThe WireGirls) has been hailed as another “golden age of television” and drawn talent, in filmmakers and actors, from other corners of the media industry to an unprecedented degree.  Television has long been a -- probably the -- key electronic medium for political identity and collective memory, but television – or what it is becoming – has begun to dominate prestige culture and arts as well.  This class does not accept this fact as given, but rather explores the transformations that underpin it, especially the technological, economic, and cultural transition from broadcast to subscription and digital television. These changes have brought television’s transmediality (what one critic calls its convergence character) to the forefront, a development indicative of the impact of digital media and distribution on conventional cultural forms. Besides exploring these technological and cultural changes, other course themes include: class; ethnicity; race; violence; police ethics and brutality; gender; sexuality/queer; US politics and identity, including the degradation of the US city; geopolitics of the world beyond US borders; representation of history and collective/prosthetic memory; the horror genre and the apparent irresistibility of the zombie genre.
 
Series explored will include the pilot and early (nonspoiler) episodes of: The SopranosThe WireGirlsTreme,HomelandMad MenBreaking Bad, Game of ThronesThe Walking Dead.

Prerequisite: Film Studies 001.

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

Format: Lecture - 3 hours; Film Viewing - 3 hours.

Textbooks:

  • TBA
Documents