Doctoral students must complete a minimum of 36 credit hours of graded graduate coursework, including 3 credit hours of cognate coursework with a B+ or better in the student's precandidacy stage (years one and two). Courses elected as visit (audit) do not meet this requirement, nor do any doctoral courses (those designated as 990, etc.) As candidates, students enroll in Ger 995 and are advised to audit or enroll in courses specific to their dissertation topic.
Students are expected to take all of their coursework in the German department during their first year. In addition to three required courses (German 531, German 540, and German 825), students may choose from a variety of electives taught at the 700 level. Students may enroll in cognate course(s) beginning in their second year, with permission from the current Director of Graduate Studies. Required courses include:
- German 540: Introduction to German Studies, taken in the Fall term of the first year. This seminar introduces students to the central theoretical and methodological debates in the discipline of German Studies;
- German 531: Teaching Methods, taken in the year they begin to teach. This course is intended to provide the theoretical and practical foundations for the teaching of German as a foreign language.
- German 825: The German Studies Colloquium, which students must take in the Winter of the first and second year (in addition, if students are not conducting research abroad, we expect them to make every effort to enroll and attend after their second year). The colloquium serves multiple goals:
It provides an opportunity for students to revise a seminar paper for the first-year review.
It serves as a site of interdisciplinary practice and debate.
It serves as a forum in which more advanced students can present conference papers and dissertation chapters.
It provides a framework within which students can explore and prepare presentations on specific topics directly related to conferences and workshops sponsored by the German Studies program.
It serves as a forum for professionalization.
The remaining elective graduate courses in the department fall into three categories. At the end of his/her studies, the student must have chosen at least one class from at least two of these rubrics:
- German 701/02: Textual and Visual Interpretations (3 credits): Courses under this rubric explore textual and visual rhetoric, questions of genre and media, and relations between text and image. Students are exposed to and work with a broad definition of textuality (including music, film, the visual arts, as well as literature), and seminars emphasize the theoretically informed, close analysis of texts from German-speaking Europe. These can include text-intensive seminars such as a recent intensive study of Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, or a class on Albrecht Duerer co-taught by Helmut Puff and an art historian, or Julia Hell's current class on post-1945 literary and visual culture.
- German 731/32: Cultural and Historical Analysis (3 credits): These courses focus on concepts of history, culture, and their interrelationship. Such courses provide analytical tools and readings to engage with the field of premodern and modern German cultural history, to explore and challenge its contemporary practice (historiography), and to expand its vision. Examples of classes under this rubric have included Modern Interpretations of the Premodern, Modernism/modernities, or Ruins of Modernity, another co-taught seminar.
- German 761/62: Critical Theory and Philosophy (3 credits): Courses under this rubric explore issues in aesthetics, theories of language and subjectivity, and the genealogy of critical thought in continental philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, among others), psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan), and sociology (Weber, Simmel, Elias). These courses may also treat the legacy of critical thought in the twentieth century, examining representatives of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas, Benjamin, and Kracauer), and the work of post-structuralists, feminists, and post-colonial theorists. These classes can be on a single theorist (Johannes von Moltke's recent Kracauer seminar), or classes taught by Andy Markovits and George Steinmetz on sociological thought, or Silke Weineck's seminar on Myth.
A listing of all undergraduate and graduate courses taught in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts may be found in the LSA Course Guide.
