Modern German Literature

4 credits · Graduate

The seminar will focus on concentrated readings of selected passages from modernist German literature, ranging from Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Walser, Rainer Maria Rilke, Carl Einstein and Franz Kafka to Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Thomas Bernhard. Although the emphasis will be on fictional prose, we will also discuss theories of reading and modernist poetics. Our goals are to study the literary styles of modern German writers and to practice reading skills that draw equally on aesthetics, rhetoric, literary theory, and media history. The teaching will be explorative, interactive, non-hierarchical, and collaborative.