Forms of (Be)Longing:
Critical Approaches to German Literature
LEARNING GOALS
This course is intended to introduce you to the basic techniques of literary and cultural analysis, to develop your ability to interpret through close reading German-language literature, and to refine your writing, translation, and presentation skills. To do so, we will read and discuss a wide range of texts across four centuries (18th-20th) and three genres (lyric, prose narrative, drama). We will also critically discuss how literary canons are formed, investigate the limits of a “national” literature, and explore the reasons why we write and read in the first place.
THEMES
Each of our texts will focus in a different way on issues of human longing and belonging. In each case, we will reflect on the ways that the form of the text at hand inflects and shapes its representation of what humans long for and how they create a sense of belonging. The texts we will discuss approach these topics from different perspectives and with different emphases, but most are refracted through the lens of love, desire/sexuality, and identity. The course will explore the following questions, always taking the texts at hand as observational proving grounds for our ideas: What is longing? And how does it connect to the wish of belonging? Why does longing play such an important role in cultural artifacts like novels, poetry, plays, operas, music, film, etc.? How have issues around love and desire been connected to questions of identity? What historical, cultural and philosophical shifts have occurred in German culture’s use of love and sexuality? How do writers and poets link human love to metaphysical longing? Most fundamentally, what is the relation between longing and its (literary) representations?