Courses - Spring 2017

Please note that this webpage will be updated as information becomes available

For GE courses, please check out our General Education Web page.

German 1101.01 • German I

4 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

GE Foreign Language course
Introduction to language and culture of the German-speaking world, with emphasis placed on the acquisition of basic communication skills in cultural context. CEFR Levels A1/A2. Not open to native speakers of this language through regular course enrollment or EM credits, or to students with 2 or more years of study in this language in high school, except by permission of dept.
Text: ISBN 978-3-12-606128-5  Netzwerk A1: Deutsch als Fremdsprache

German 1102.01 • German II

4 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

GE Foreign Language course
Continued development of German-language skills and cultural knowledge for effective communication. Emphasis on more advanced language structures, sustained interactions, reading and writing. CEFR Levels A2/B1. Not open to native speakers of this language.
Prereq: 1101.01, or 4 sem cr hrs of 1101.51.
Texts: ISBN 978-3-12-606128-5  Netzwerk A1: Deutsch als Fremdsprache;
and ISBN 978-3-12-606998-4 Netzwerk A2: Deutsch als Fremdsprache

German 1103.01 • German III

4 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

GE Foreign Language course
Development of skills for independent use of German. Discussions, presentations, writing, & listening/viewing activities that address topics of contemporary German-speaking world. CEFR Level B1. Not open to native speakers of this language through regular course enrollment or EM credit.
Prereq: 1102.01, or 4 sem cr hrs of 1102.51, or 1266.
Texts: ISBN 978-3-468-96994-2  Berliner Platz 2 Neu: Deutsch im Alltag: Student Pack PLUS and ISBN 978-0-934034-38-8  English Grammar for Students of German, fifth edition.

German 1101.51 • 1102.51 • 1103.51  Self-paced Individualized

GE Foreign Language course
each course is 4 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

German 2101 • Texts and Contexts I: Contemporary German Language, Culture and Society

Heck | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

Development of communication skills and knowledge about recent social, cultural, and political developments in German speaking countries through texts, media and film; CEFR level A2/B1. Closed to native speakers of this language.
Prereq: 1103.01 or 1103.51, or equiv, or permission of instructor. No audit. FL Admis Cond course.

German 2102 • Texts and Contexts II: 20th-Century German Language, History and Culture

Frazier | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

Continued development of communication skills; gain an understanding of major social and cultural developments in 20th century German history through texts, media, film. CEFR level B1/B2. Closed to native speakers of this language.
Prereq: 2101 or equiv, or permission of instructor. FL Admis Cond course.
Texts:
ISBN 978-3-19-011657-7  Hering,  Matussek & Perlmann-Balme, Übungsgrammatik für die Mittelstufe. Hueber Verlag, 2009.
ISBN 978-3-12-676615-9  Mittelpunkt B2 + C1 Redemittelsammlung, Klett Verlag, 2008.

German 2251 •Fan Fiction: From Homer to Harry Potter ~ German Literature and Popular Culture

Birkhold | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

Enthusiastic readers of Harry Potter write sequels, prequels, and spinoffs and post them online every day. But writing fan fiction is far from new. In this course, we will investigate the surprising history of this literary form. Beginning in classical antiquity and ending with J.K. Rowling, we'll analyze works of fan fiction, asking how ideas of originality, authorship, and intellectual property influence art and literature. Along the way, we'll study great works of German literature and philosophy, including texts by Goethe and Kant, whose ideas still shape thinking about fan fiction today. Do characters belong to the authors who create them? Or to the readers who love (or hate) them? We will work together to determine if certain narratives or characters lend themselves to fan fiction and we will examine how works of fan fiction successfully connect to the texts on which they are based. 

All works in English translation; taught in English. GE lit course.

German 2253 • Magic, Murder, and Mayhem

Grotans | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

Origins and highlights of German culture and life to 1648 as reflected in literary and poetic works, Germanic mythology, religion, and the arts. Come explore the Middle Ages in German literature and culture. You'll meet dragonslayers and come into contact with the Holy Grail, love potions, pirates, and the Thirty Years' War.
GE lit and diversity global studies course. Taught in English.

German 2254 • Grimms' Fairytales and their Afterlives

Birkhold | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

In the present course, we will be trying to understand the meaning and the enduring appeal of one of Germany’s greatest successes in the realm of cultural exportation—a book whose circulation figures are exceeded in Western culture only by those of the Bible, namely, Grimms’ fairy tales.  This will mean asking a series of interlocking questions.  How did the fairy tales come about?  What were the aims of their compilers?  How do the tales play to those aims?  How do they exceed them?  How do the tales tend to work structurally?  What have their social and psychological effects been?  How have they helped shape—and been reshaped by—popular cultures outside Germany, like popular culture in the U.S.  In reckoning with these questions, we will be enlisting the help of a parade of great critics, including Vladimir Propp, Bruno Bettelheim, Erich Auerbach, and Jack Zipes.
Required Texts:
Jack Zipes, The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
Assigned films will be available at drm.osu.edu
Other readings will be posted on Carmen.
All works in English translation; taught in English.
Repeatable to a maximum of 9 cr hrs. GE lit course.

German 2255 • Postwar Germany and Japan

Reitter | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

In the present course, we will be probing the dynamics of postwar culture in Germany and Japan by looking closely at an extensive body of the cultural material produced in these two most notorious “perpetrator nations”--films, theoretical writings, memoirs, artist manifestos, and, above all, literary works--and by subjecting our material to cross-cultural analysis, which should deepen as our basis for drawing distinctions, comparisons, and connections expands. In doing all this, we will enlist the help of a few secondary resources, most notably the groundbreaking recent efforts of the critic Ian Buruma. Team-taught with faculty in Japanese.
Prereq: Not open to students with credit for Japanse 2255. Cross-listed in Japanese. GE cultures and ideas course.

German 3101 • Texts and Contexts III: Historical Perspectives

Grotans | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

Development of intermediate/advanced communication skills; broadening of cultural and historical knowledge through interaction with literary and non-literary materials informed by historical perspective; CEFR level B2. Closed to to native speakers of this language.
Prereq: 2102 or equiv, or permission of instructor.

German 3200 •  Short Prose Forms: Historical Developments in German Stories and Essays ~ Topics in German Literature, Art and Film

Fischer | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

The course introduces students to the pleasures and challenges of reading short German texts of various genres from three centuries: fairy tales, stories, aphorisms, and essays. Our reading will be slow and detailed with an eye on grammar and vocabulary building. At the same time, we will concentrate on developing an understanding of German cultural history. Class discussions will be in German; quizzes and two short papers will be written in German.

All texts are available online or will be provided by instructor. Taught in German.
Prereq: 2102 or equiv, or permission of instructor. Repeatable to a maximum of 6 cr hrs

German 3252 • The Holocaust in Literature and Film

Richards | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

Why, faced with a historical catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, would we devote a class to film and literature about it, rather than to “the facts”?

HOW YOU SAY THINGS MATTERS

Come find out why.

Taught in English. Prereq: Not open to students with credit for 399, or Yiddish 3399 (399). GE lit and diversity global studies course.

German 3351 • Democracy, Fascism and German Culture

Richards | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017 

Explore the history of the Weimar Republic and of Nazi Germany through the literature, film, music, visual arts and design produced between 1918 and 1945. We will be uncovering the roots of fascism and looking also at its echoes in works created in post-Nazi Germany. What can the cultural products tell us that the history books can’t? Were the 1920s really the golden age of German cinema? How did the arts change after the Nazis came to power in 1933? Why did the Nazis burn books and call certain artistic styles “degenerate”?
Taught in English. Meets Film Studies' Pre-1950s requirement.
Prereq: Not open to students with credit for 299. GE cultures and ideas and diversity global studies course. 

German 3600 • News and Views - Topics in German Linguistics/Language

Taleghani-Nikazm | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

For course details, please contact Professor Taleghani-Nikazm
Taught in German.
Prereq: 2102 or equiv, or permission of instructor. Repeatable to a maximum of 6 cr hrs.

German 4200 •  “Roaring Twenties?” ~ Senior Seminar in German: Literature, Art and Film (German) 

Fischer | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

In this course, we learn about the Berlin-centered culture of the Weimar Republic (the so called Golden or Roaring Twenties). We will discuss innovations in art, music, theater, film, dance, sports, fashion, architecture, and media. With this backdrop, we will read exemplary texts from a number of authors – mainly short prose, but also some poetry and at least one play. The reading will be slow and as detailed as we can get. Most texts are available online. Depending on students’ interests, we will select the readings from some of the following authors: Frank Wedekind, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Kurt Tucholsky, Egon Erwin Kisch, Erich Kästner, Else Lasker-Schüler, Gottfried Benn, and Irmgard Keun.

Taught in German. Counts toward fulfillment of advanced requirement for the major.
Prereq: 3101 and one course at the 3000 level, and Sr standing, or permission of instructor. Repeatable to a maximum of 6 cr hrs.

German 4602 • German for the Professions

Heck | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

4602 will continue to develop cultural and language skills in the business context. Particular areas of focus will be: issues involved in working in a team, e.g., clear communication and conflict, telephone etiquette, and developing strategies and techniques as well as the linguistic tools for writing an effective CV/resumé (Lebenslauf) in German and for interviewing. The final project for the class will be the submission of a cover letter and Lebenslauf for a job (of student’s choice) in Germany, followed by an interview.
CEFR level B1-B2.
Prereq: 3602 or equiv, or permission of instructor.

German 8200 • Figuring the Sun:The Lyric of Goethe, Hölderlin, and Günderrode ~ Seminar in Literature and Literary Culture

Mergenthaler | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017   Mondays 8:30-11:00

In this course, we will explore, from a historical and comparative perspective, the central role that sun figures played in the reinvention of poetry as an independent genre in German literature in the late 18th and early 19th century.

Poets employed solar metaphors, symbols, and allegories were to reflect on new ideas of self-determination and its limits, as well as on the lyric genre itself. They express changing views of language, literature, self, nature, gender relations, history, and politics, expanding and challenging our current ways of reading literature and understanding the world.

Readings (all provided via Canvas): poetry (ca. 1600-1850); literary history and interpretation; cultural history of the sun; theory of lyric poetry; theory of poetic language

Course requirements: participation: 10% / assignments: 20% / presentation: 20% / paper or exam: 50%
Prereq: 6200, or Grad standing, or permission of instructor. Repeatable to a maximum of 30 cr hrs.

German 8300 •  Friedrich Nietzsche ~ Seminar in Intellectual History and Cultural Studies

Holub | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017   Mondays 1:00-3:30

Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most influential philosophers in the twentieth century and continues to attract considerable attention to the present day. In this seminar we will be looking at the breadth of Nietzsche’s writings, from his first non-philological book, The Birth of Tragedy, until the last writings, some of which were published after he had lapsed into insanity in 1889 or after his death in 1900. My particular focus on Nietzsche has been his connection with discourses of his own era, how he participated in conversations of the late nineteenth century on matters from rhetoric and philosophy to social issues and the latest theoretical debates in the natural sciences. We will pursue some of these directions in the seminar, but I also want to leave room for students to take up issues that are important for them. I would like to spend the first ten weeks to twelve weeks examining Nietzsche’s writings. During these weeks we will have students leading some of the discussions.

Toward the end of the term, however, I would like to have students present to the group their research projects. I will not be ordering any specific books for the course, but Nietzsche’s writings are available in German in various editions. The best and least expensive critical edition is the Studienausgabe in 15 volumes, published by dtv and de Gruyter, which is also among the editions in our seminar room. If students from outside the department wish to enroll and read his works in English, I would recommend the versions published by Cambridge and the new Stanford edition of his writings, neither of which, unfortunately, is complete with even the published writings. Nietzsche’s complete letters are also available in a dtv/de Gruyter edition (containing only the letters Nietzsche penned); there are currently only selections in English. There are several good biographies of Nietzsche, but still the most complete is the three-volume biography by Curt Paul Janz. In English the biographies by Ronald Hayman and Julian Young are good places to get an overview of his life. The biography of Rüdiger Safranksi (available in both the original German and an English translation) covers more philosophical ground. There are literally hundreds of volumes on Nietzsche and probably many thousand essays and articles. I can give some insight into a fraction of this literature on particular topics, as needed.
Prereq: 6200, or Grad standing, or permission of instructor. Repeatable to a maximum of 30 cr hrs.

German 8400 •  " ... on a Damaged Life" ~ Seminar in Film, Visual Culture and the Performing Arts 

Davidson | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017   Tuesdays 3:30-6:00

When he chose "Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben" as the subtitle of his aphoristic Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno may have landed on the primary leitmotif of artistic production in the first two decades of the fledgling Federal Republic. While Adorno explicitly addresses the chimeric idea of the individual subject in that work's dedication, as well as the autobiographical impulse that underscores the non-systematic system organizing those fragments, it is important to note the general sense of "life" that gives rise to these reflections. It is a distinction properly captured in the original Verso translation: Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life -- and inexplicably changed in 2005 to "...on a Damaged Life." While not pretending to the erudition that informs Adorno's text, this course explores variations of "damage" and "life" in German post-WWII culture, using the "reflective" medium par excellence: cinematic film.  

Guided by a choice of Adorno's reflections that is willfully eclectic, we will lay out points of contact and of tension in the filmic contestation of these ideas in constellations within two temporal frames: the first corresponds to material-philological moments bracketed by the completion of Adorno's text in 1950 and its translation into English in 1974; the second corresponds to the "long" post-war period of recovery of the German film industry from the impact of the NS era stretching up to the moments in 1980 when a German film from 1979 won both the Golden Palm at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. A central concern of the course: how do "damage" and "life" in cinematic modes in the post-WWII era relate to current modes of investigation.

The course will meet weekly in a seminar-style, mixing lecture, discussion, and student presentations. It will be structured so that German- and English-speakers can contribute equally. We will engage deeply with texts by figures such as Adorno, Bloch, Boell, Dominick, Duerrenmatt, Forst, Hansen, Herzog, Huillet/Straub, Kaeutner, Kluge, Marcuse, Sanders, Schloendorff, Siodmak, Staudte, Thiele, Vajda, Vesely, and others. They will be contextualized within German-national and international aesthetic and political frames.

Students will be asked to view 1 film closely and read the equivalent of 1-2 articles per week; they will provide their colleagues with an introduction into and lead the discussion of 1 film. Students will be able to propose significant research projects, receive feedback on their projects, and then present their results to their peers. There will be ample opportunity for students to propose and present topics related to their areas of research, even if they come from different disciplines or have interdisciplinary interests. In addition to in-depth exposure to (German) film and thought of the late modernist period, participants will learn to write proposals in response to conference calls for papers; they will also generate a research project in a form that would be appropriate for conference-panel presentation.

For further information, and a provisional syllabus, please contact Professor Davidson

Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor. Repeatable to a maximum of 30 cr hrs.

German 8500 • Doctoral Colloquium

Mergenthaler | 1 credit unit | Spring Semester 2017

Regular student-driven discussions of ongoing dissertations, current topics in the professional field, and new research approaches to Germanic Studies.
Prereq: Successful completion of Ph.D. candidacy exams or permission from Director of Graduate Studies and instructor. Repeatable to a maximum of 9 cr hrs. This course is graded S/U. Admis Cond course.

Swedish 1102 • Swedish II

Risko | 4 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

GE Foreign Language
Development of skills necessary for the independent use of Swedish.  Discussions, presentations, writing and listening/viewing activities address topics of contemporary Sweden.
Prereq: Grade of C- or better in 1101. Not open to students with credit for 102.01, 103.01, or to native speakers of this language through regular course enrollment or EM credit. GE for Lang Course. FL Admis Cond Course.
Text: Althén, Anette. Mål 2 Lärobok (textbook with CD); Althén, Anette. Mål Övningsbok (workbook). Both Stockholm: Natur och Kultur (2007 edition).

Yiddish 2367 • Jewish-American Voices in U.S. Literature

Algar | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

GE Cultures and Ideas, GE Writing and Communication: level 2
Introduction to Jewish-American literature; development of expository writing and argumentation skills through systematic and critical reflection upon their own country from the perspective of an ethnic community.
Prereq: English 1110 (110) or equiv. Not open to students with credit for 367. GE writing and comm: level 2 and cultures and ideas course.

Yiddish 3371 • Yiddish Literature in Translation

Miller | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

GE lit and diversity global studies course
Reading, analysis, and discussion of representative works and of the development of major movements and genres in Yiddish literature.
Prereq: Not open to students with credit for 371 or JewshSt 3371. Cross-listed in JewshSt. 

Yiddish 3399 • Holocaust in Yiddish and Ashkenazic Literature

Hamblet | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

GE lit and diversity global studies course
Reading and analysis of texts, films and music pertaining to the topic of the Holocaust, the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany against European Jewry, and its impact on Ashkenazic-Jewish civilization.
Prereq: Not open to students with credit for 399. GE lit and diversity global studies course.

Yiddish 4721 / 7721 • Studies in Yiddish Literature

Miller | 3 credit units | Spring Semester 2017

Advanced study of specific literary periods, figures, and/or topics involving extensive reading and discussion of appropriate primary and secondary source materials.
Repeatable to a maximum of 9 cr. hrs.