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This archived information is dated to the 2008-09 academic year only and may no longer be current.
For currently applicable policies and information, see the current Stanford Bulletin.
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Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09
Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09
Graduate courses in German General
Primarily for graduate students; undergraduates may enroll with consent of instructor.
GERGEN 206. Narrative, Visuality, Memory
(Same as GERGEN 306.) Moments in the history of the relationship between the verbal and the visual: the classical ars memoriae; the ekphrasis debates of the 18th century; the emergence of a new visuality and mnemonic art as structuring principles for modernist narrative. Authors include Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Winckelmann, Lessing, Diderot, Goethe, Moritz, Flaubert, Rilke, Joyce, and Proust.
3-5 units, not given this year
GERGEN 229. German Cinema
(Same as GERGEN 129.) History of German cinema in the Weimar Republic, Nazi era, and the immediate aftermath of WWII. German thought, political valences, and social potential as portrayed in film.
5 units, Win (Daub, A)
GERGEN 244. Germanic Theologies
(Same as GERGEN 144.) Thinkers from Martin Luther to Martin Buber who have transformed western notions about God. Contributions from philosophers, poets, and theologians on the role of the Bible, the meaning of revelation, and the status of human beings in the Universe. Readings from Luther, Hamann, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Rosenzweig.
3-5 units, Aut (Pourciau, S)
GERGEN 246. Being at Home in the World: Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment
(Same as GERGEN 346.) Is the world suited for human purposes? How Kant's answer broached issues that would prove central to modernity: how aesthetic enjoyment relates to morality and scientific rationality; analogies between art and nature; delight taken in beauty and the pleasurable pain of sublimity; creative genius and common sense; affinities between the reflective understanding of biological life and the enhancement of mental life through reflection on beautiful forms. Later theorists' critical responses.
3-5 units, not given this year
GERGEN 248. A Brief History of Misogyny
(Same as GERGEN 148.) Genealogy of philosophical misogyny in 19th- and 20th-century German thought from German idealism. Authors include Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Weininger, and the George circle. In English.
3-5 units, Spr (Daub, A)
GERGEN 270A. Postwar: German Culture after World War II
(Same as GERGEN 170A.) How did German culture react to WW II, the Holocaust, and the exile of Germans from E. Europe? Questions of representations, political debate, and the future of Germany in Europe. German cinema, architecture, and art related to the subject. Readings include: Adorno, Grass, Habermas, Kluge, Bachmann, Jelinek, and Beyer. Recommended: German, but not required.
3-5 units, not given this year
GERGEN 283. Scenarios of Dissolution in the Modern Novel
(Same as GERGEN 183.) How do novels capture chaos? 20th-century novels responding to catastrophes such as: the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (Musil, Roth); demise of the Third Reich (Mann); chaotic forces in an oppressive order (Bulgakov); corrosion of imperial confidence through fear of barbarian invaders (Coetzee); and transformation of masses into a mob destroying the body politic from within (Krasznahorkai).
4 units, not given this year
GERGEN 291A. Oedipus, Hamlet, Moses: Archetypes of the Hero
(Same as GERGEN 191A.) Texts that provided psychoanalysis with its foundational myths. Oedipus, Moses, and Hamlet as archetypes of the hero related to moments of emerging modernity: from mythos to logos, polytheism to monotheism, and action to thought. The interplay among knowledge, recognition, and desire; the role of sameness and alterity in the constitution of personal, familial, and national identities; and the relation between violence and the construction of history. Readings include: Exodus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Freud, Aeschylus, Euripides, Cavafy, Hofmannsthal, and Wolf; theoretical and critical essays by Laplanche, Lyotard, Lacan, de Certeau, Kofman, Assmann, Said, and Cavell.
3-5 units, not given this year
GERGEN 305. Technologies of the Self
(Same as GERGEN 205.) Important moments in the history of the discursive and rhetorical construction of the subject. Emphasis is on tensions between uniqueness and exemplariness, chronology and repetition, narrative and archive, and aesthetics and ethics of retrospection. Works by Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Montaigne, Rousseau, Goethe, Nietzsche, Joyce, Gide, Sartre, Leiris, and Barthes. Theoretical and critical essays including by Lejeune, Starobinski, De Man, Derrida, Marin, Koerner, Foucault, and Beaujour.
3-5 units, not given this year
GERGEN 306. Narrative, Visuality, Memory
(Same as GERGEN 206.) Moments in the history of the relationship between the verbal and the visual: the classical ars memoriae; the ekphrasis debates of the 18th century; the emergence of a new visuality and mnemonic art as structuring principles for modernist narrative. Authors include Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Winckelmann, Lessing, Diderot, Goethe, Moritz, Flaubert, Rilke, Joyce, and Proust.
3-5 units, not given this year
GERGEN 312. The Invention of Experience
(Same as GERGEN 212.) Experience viewed as a source of orientation irreducible to discursive knowledge in the 19th century. The encounter with art as the paradigm of experience; lived vs. cumulative experience; the modern crisis of experience; experiential openness and the authority conferred by experience. If it is neither pleasure nor knowledge sought in art, could it be experience? Role of Goethe in the cult of experience (Faust I, Elective Affinities). Montaigne, Hegel, Emerson, Rilke, Benjamin, Koselleck, and Gadamer.
3-5 units, Spr (Dornbach, M)
GERGEN 346. Being at Home in the World: Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment
(Same as GERGEN 246.) Is the world suited for human purposes? How Kant's answer broached issues that would prove central to modernity: how aesthetic enjoyment relates to morality and scientific rationality; analogies between art and nature; delight taken in beauty and the pleasurable pain of sublimity; creative genius and common sense; affinities between the reflective understanding of biological life and the enhancement of mental life through reflection on beautiful forms. Later theorists' critical responses.
3-5 units, not given this year
GERGEN 367. Freud and the Apostle Paul
(Same as GERGEN 267.) Intersections between Freud's psychoanalysis of society and Paul's political theology. Emphasis is on the issues of law, love, justice, community, and language. Readings include Freud and Paul, and theoretical essays by Taubes, Badiou, Santner, Agamben, Assmann, Zizek, and Boyarin.
3-5 units, not given this year
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