Germanic Languages and Literatures
Humanities Quadrangle, 203.432.0788
http://german.yale.edu
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Chair
Paul North
Directors of Graduate Studies
Kirk Wetters
Professors Rüdiger Campe, Fatima Naqvi, Paul North, Sophie Schweiger, Kirk Wetters
Affiliated Faculty Jennifer Allen (History), Thomas Connolly (French), Fatima El-Tayeb (Ethnicity, Race and Migration; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies), Paul Franks (Philosophy), Gundula Kreuzer (Music; Theater and Performance Studies), John Peters (English; Film and Media), Steven Smith (Political Science), David Sorkin (History), Nicola Suthor (History of Art), Katie Trumpener (Comparative Literature; English; Film and Media)
Fields of Study
German literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; literary and cultural theory; literature and philosophy; literature and science; media history and theory; visuality and German cinema.
Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
The faculty in German considers teaching to be essential to the professional preparation of graduate students. Four terms of teaching are required, but six is the norm. Teaching usually takes place in years three and four, but students may seek teaching in any term. Students normally teach undergraduate language courses under supervision for at least three terms. Other teaching experiences are available thereafter in literature, theory, film, etc.
Students are required to demonstrate, besides proficiency in German, a reading knowledge of one other foreign language in the third term of study.
In the first two years of study, students take four courses per term. Of these sixteen courses, one must be GMAN 501, Methods of Teaching German as a World Language; and at least one must be taken in pre-nineteenth-century topics. Three of the sixteen courses in the first four terms may be audited. Up to two of the courses taken for credit may be directed readings under the supervision of a faculty member, with the approval of the DGS. Up to two credits may be awarded for prior graduate-level work, provided the student’s first-year record at Yale is good and the total number of courses taken for credit at Yale are not fewer than twelve.
A written examination must be taken at the end of the fifth term of study, followed by an oral discussion approximately a week after the written exam. A dissertation prospectus should be submitted no later than the end of the sixth term. All students will be asked to defend the prospectus in a discussion with the faculty. The defense will take place before the prospectus is officially approved, usually in late April or May of the sixth term. Students are admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D. upon completion of all predissertation requirements, including the prospectus. Candidates who wish to write the dissertation in a language other than English, in this case in German, should notify the DGS at the prospectus defense.
After the submission of the prospectus, the student’s time is devoted mainly to the preparation of the dissertation. A dissertation committee will be set up for each student at work on the dissertation. It is expected that students will periodically pass their work along to members of their committee, so that faculty members in addition to the dissertation adviser can make suggestions well before the dissertation is submitted. Drafts of each chapter must be submitted in a timely fashion to all members of the student’s committee: the first chapter should be submitted to the committee by February 1 of the fourth year of study; the second chapter should be submitted by January 1 of the fifth year. There will be a formal review of the first chapter. After the dissertation is submitted, the DGS convenes a defense colloquium with the candidate, the committee, the department, and invited guests.
Two concentrations are available to graduate students: Germanic Literature and German Studies. There are special combined degrees with Film and Media Studies and Early Modern Studies; see below.
Special Requirements for the Germanic Literature Concentration
During the first two years of study, students are required to take sixteen term courses, four of which may be taken outside the department. Three courses may be audited.
Special Requirements for the German Studies Concentration
During the first two years of study, students are required to take sixteen term courses, seven of which may be taken outside the department. Three of those courses may be audited. Students are asked to define an area of concentration and to meet with appropriate advisers from within and outside the department.
Combined Ph.D. Program with Film and Media Studies
The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures also offers, in conjunction with the Film and Media Studies Program, a combined Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures and Film and Media Studies. For further details, see Film and Media Studies. Applicants to the combined program must indicate on their application that they are applying both to Film and Media Studies and to Germanic Languages and Literatures. All documentation within the application should include this information.
Combined Ph.D. Program with EARLY MODERN STUDIES
The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures also offers, in conjunction with the Early Modern Studies Program, a combined Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures and Early Modern Studies Program. For further details, see Early Modern Studies.
Master’s Degrees
M.Phil. See Degree Requirements under Policies and Regulations.
M.A. Students who withdraw from the Ph.D. program may be eligible to receive the M.A. degree if they have met the requirements and have not already received the M.Phil. degree. For the M.A., students must successfully complete eight graduate term courses and demonstrate the knowledge of another foreign language chosen in consultation with the DGS. Candidates in combined programs will be awarded the M.A. only when the master’s degree requirements for both programs have been met.
Further information is available upon request to the Registrar, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Yale University, PO Box 208210, New Haven CT 06520-8210; email, german@yale.edu.
Courses
GMAN 501b, Methods of Teaching German as a World Language Theresa Schenker
This course introduces a variety of language teaching principles and methods and discusses best practices in language teaching. Students get to know the most important second-language acquisition theories as background to our discussions on effective language teaching. We combine the principles of language teaching with observed classroom techniques as we discuss and prepare lesson plans for language-learning classrooms.
W 12pm-2pm
GMAN 532a / CPLT 566a / FILM 632a, Paper: Material and Medium Austen Hinkley
Paper is one of the most ubiquitous and indispensable media of the modern era. Although we are (still) surrounded by it, paper tends to recede into the background, working best when we do not notice it at all. This course sets out to challenge our understanding of paper as a neutral or passive bearer of inscriptions by foregrounding its material quality. Our focus will rest in equal parts on the media history of paper and on paper works of art – among them many literary texts – that reflect or take advantage of their medium. Studying materials and histories from the early modern period to the present, we will uncover paper’s status as a commodity bound up in a complex web of economic processes, as an instrument of political power, as a gendered and racialized object, and as a material that can be cut, shuffled, and even eaten. Ultimately, we will investigate the ways in which paper is still central to our lives, even in the age of tablets and PDFs. Readings will include Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems, Robert Walser’s “Microscripts,” and M. NourbeSe Philip’s “Zong!” The class will make several visits to the Beinecke Library for hands-on work with paper materials.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm
GMAN 544a / FILM 772a, Landscape, Film, Architecture Fatima Naqvi
Movement through post-1945 landscapes and cityscapes as a key to understanding them. The use of cameras and other visual-verbal means as a way to expand historical, aesthetic, and sociological inquiries into how these places are inhabited and experienced. Exploration of both real and imaginary spaces in works by filmmakers (Wenders, Herzog, Ottinger, Geyrhalter, Seidl, Ade, Grisebach), architects and sculptors (e.g. Rudofsky, Neutra, Abraham, Hollein, Pichler, Smithson, Wurm, Kienast), photographers (Sander, B. and H. Becher, Gursky, Höfer), and writers (Bachmann, Handke, Bernhard, Jelinek). Additional readings by Certeau, Freytag, J.B. Jackson, L. Burckhardt.
Th 9:25am-11:15am, W 6pm-8pm
GMAN 553a / ANTH 553a / CPLT 503a / SOCY 661a, Karl Marx's Capital Paul North
A careful reading of Karl Marx's classic critique of capitalism, Capital volume 1, a work of philosophy, political economy, and critical social theory that has had a significant global readership for over 150 years. Selected readings also from Capital volumes 2 and 3.
MW 11:35am-12:25pm
GMAN 555a / CPLT 557a / FILM 655a, Habit and Habitation: On Walter Benjamin’s Media Aesthetics and Philosophy of Technology Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
In recent years, Walter Benjamin has become one of the most quoted media theorists. His philosophy of technology is not as widely known as the concept of aura he developed in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. The contemporary relevance of his philosophy of technology lies in the fact that Benjamin establishes a connection between technology and different forms of habitation and between the latter and the concept of habit (Gewohnheit), which is etymologically related to the concept of habitation (Wohnen). This enables a comparison of Benjamin’s approach with the philosophies of technology developed by Heidegger, Deleuze/Guattari, and Simondon, all of whom associate technology with the shaping of environments and the problem of poesis. In our seminar, we reconstruct Benjamin’s media anthropology of technology through a close reading of his diaries and essays and compare it to philosophies of technology very much being discussed today.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm
GMAN 594b / CPLT 614b / FILM 770b, East German Literature and Film Katie Trumpener
The German Democratic Republic (1949–89) was a political and aesthetic experiment that failed, buffeted by external pressures and eroded by internal contradictions. For forty years, in fact, its most ambitious literary texts and films (some suppressed, others widely popular) explored such contradictions, often in a vigilant, Brechtian spirit of irony and dialectics. This course examines key texts both as aesthetic experiments and as critiques of the country’s emerging cultural institutions and state censorship, recurrent political debates, and pressing social issues. Texts by Brecht, Uwe Johnson, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, Johannes Bobrowski, Franz Fühmann, Wolf Biermann, Thomas Brasch, Christoph Hein; films by Slatan Dudow, Kurt Maetzig, Konrad Wolf, Heiner Carow, Frank Beyer, Jürgen Böttcher, Volker Koepp. Knowledge of German desirable but not crucial; all texts available in English.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm
GMAN 596a, Politics of Performance Sophie Schweiger
The stage is, and always has been, a political space. Ever since its beginnings, theatre has offered ways to rethink and criticize political systems, with the stage serving as a “moral institution” (Schiller) but also as a laboratory for models of representation. The stage also delineates the limits of representation for democratic societies (Rousseau), as it offers the space for experimentation and new modes of being together, being ensemble. The stage also raises the question of its own condition of possibility and the networks it depends on (Jackson). This course revisits the history of German and German-speaking theatre since the Enlightenment, and discusses the stage in its relationship to war, the nation state, the social question, femicide and gender politics, the Holocaust, globalization, and twenty-first-century migration. Readings include works by G.E. Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, Hugo v. Hofmannstahl, Georg Büchner, Peter Weiss, Ida Fink, Dea Lohar, Elfriede Jelinek, Christoph Schlingensief, Heiner Müller, and Elsa Bernstein.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm
GMAN 604a or b / CPLT 510a or b, The Mortality of the Soul: From Aristotle to Heidegger Martin Hagglund
This course explores fundamental philosophical questions of the relation between matter and form, life and spirit, necessity and freedom, by proceeding from Aristotle’s analysis of the soul in De Anima and his notion of practical agency in the Nicomachean Ethics. We study Aristotle in conjunction with seminal works by contemporary neo-Aristotelian philosophers (Korsgaard, Nussbaum, Brague, and McDowell). We in turn pursue the implications of Aristotle’s notion of life by engaging with contemporary philosophical discussions of death that take their point of departure in Epicurus (Nagel, Williams, Scheffler). We conclude by analyzing Heidegger’s notion of constitutive mortality, in order to make explicit what is implicit in the form of the soul in Aristotle.
HTBA
GMAN 665b / CPLT 666b / EMST 565b, Birth of the Political: Early Modern and Twentieth Century Rudiger Campe
Early modern European works on colonial war, sovereignty, and politics, sixteenth to seventeenth centuries (by Sepúlveda, Grotius, Machiavelli, Lipsius [neo-Stoicism], Hobbes) are read in conjunction with twentieth century debates from the inter-war period to circa 1968 (by Schmitt, Kantorowicz, Benjamin, Oestreich, Foucault, authors who refer back to the modern early works and have importantly shaped our modern understanding of “the political” and, with it, the notion of the “early modern”). The course is interested in critically tracing the echoes regarding “the political” between early modernity and our own times.
T 3:30pm-5:20pm
GMAN 750a, Exam Preparation Colloquium: Part I Sophie Schweiger
This course is designed to prepare students for the comprehensive qualifying exams. The course brings together key literary works and films across a range of periods (medieval, baroque, enlightenment, Junges Deutschland, realism, modernism, post-1945), in complex constellations. In doing so, it seeks to answer some of the following questions: What is the purpose of literary history and periodization? How can we think about genres in new and exciting ways? Where and how could one productively “decolonize” the German canon? Which types of scholarship have recently emerged to illuminate key works in an innovative manner? Guests are integrated into the course to help shed light on some of the works. The course is reading-intensive and discussion-based. This course is intended to be followed by GMAN 751 Exam Preparation Colloquium: Part II in the spring. Prerequisite: reading fluency in German.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm
GMAN 751b, Exam Preparation Colloquium: Part II Kirk Wetters
This course is designed to prepare students for the comprehensive qualifying exams. The course brings together key literary works and films across a range of periods (medieval, baroque, enlightenment, Junges Deutschland, realism, modernism, post-1945), in complex constellations. In doing so, it seeks to answer some of the following questions: What is the purpose of literary history and periodization? How can we think about genres in new and exciting ways? Where and how could one productively “decolonize” the German canon? Which types of scholarship have recently emerged to illuminate key works in an innovative manner? Guests are integrated into the course to help shed light on some of the works. The course is reading-intensive and discussion-based. This course is intended to be preceded by GMAN 750, Exam Preparation Colloquium: Part I in the fall. Prerequisite: reading fluency in German.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm