UCLA
The Department of Germanic LanguagesPhoto credit: Patricia Wiley
The UCLA Department of Germanic Languages offers a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in English and German. For information about specific section times and locations please view the UCLA Schedule of Classes.
For a complete listing and description of department courses visit the UCLA General Catalog.
Lecture, four hours. Requisite: course 101B. P/NP or letter grading.
Lecture, four hours; language laboratory. Requisite: course 103B. Grammatical exercises, conversation, reading and analysis of simple texts. P/NP or letter grading.
Lecture, five hours; laboratory, one hour. P/NP or letter grading.
Lecture, five hours; laboratory, one hour. Enforced requisite: course 1. P/NP or letter grade.
Lecture, five hours. Enforced requisite: course 2. P/NP or letter grading.
Lecture, four hours; laboratory, one hour. Enforced requisite: course 4. P/NP or letter grading.
Lecture, three hours. Enforced requisite: course 5. Advanced grammar and composition course with readings from select literary works. P/NP or letter grading.
Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Use of media of Yiddish cinema (classic films and documentaries) as primary focal points to examine ways in which one heritage culture, that of Ashkenazic Jews, adapted to forces of modernity (urbanization, immigration, radical social movements, assimilation, and destructive organized anti-Semitism) from late-19th century to present. Exploration of transformational themes in depth through viewing of selected films, readings, research and weekly papers, and in-class discussions. P/NP or letter grading.
Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour.
In this course we will be tracing the evolution of German literature and thought from the age of Romanticism to the present day. We will use literature to understand the main themes that constitute the building blocks of our modern day self-understanding. We will focus on two literary texts in particular: Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’, and Hermann Hesse’s ‘Siddhartha’. Other authors will include Schiller, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Rilke, Adorno, Sachs, Celan, Heidegger and Handke.
Lecture/screenings, five hours; discussion, one hour. History of Holocaust and its present memory through examination of challenges and problems encountered in trying to imagine its horror through media of literature and film. P/NP or letter grading.
Seminar, three hours. Limited to senior German majors. Collaborative discussion of and reflection on courses already taken for major, drawing out and synthesizing larger themes and culminating in paper or other final project. Must be taken in conjunction with one course numbered 140 or higher. Letter grading.
Lecture, three hours. Taught in German. Introduction to most important terms and resources of literary analysis to help students develop and improve skills in close and critical reading of literary texts, develop basic research techniques, acquire familiarity with basics of literary and cultural analysis, and find pleasure in pursuit of literary and cultural study. Letter grading.
Lecture, three hours. Enforced requisite: course 152 or 153. Taught in German. Literature after 1945 in German-speaking countries, including issues such as national borders, ethnic identity, gender relations, and commercialization of culture. Letter grading.
Wednesdays 2-5, Bunche Hall 1265
For a long time, literary studies has taken the monolingual book written by an author in his or her first (and assumedly only) language as the standard object of investigation. With that, it was both following and reproducing a broader modern paradigm that established monolingualism as the norm across many arenas—the subject as naturally monolingual, the presumed monolingual learner of “second” language acquisition, the monolingual nation, the monolingual national literature and so on. What these assumptions obscured, exoticized, pathologized, or censured were myriad forms of multilingualism, language crossing, and language mixing.
What happens if we no longer take monolingualism for granted? What objects come into view, what practices and processes, what poetic resources? How might we have to rethink familiar narratives, constellations, and categorizations of literature? What do methodologies look like that investigate mono- and multilingualism?
In this course, students are invited to develop a critical lens towards both mono- and multilingualism in ways that help them to expand and revise their own research interests and projects. To this end, the course introduces both key scholarly contributions and exemplary literary texts that allow us to encounter and think through some of the central issues. Topics include: institutions and processes of monolingualization, “monolingualism of the Other,” multilingualism and memory, language choice and resistance, archives of multilingualism/ multilingualism as an archive, the privilege of the non-native writer, translation and/or multilingualism.
Primary readings may include Franz Kafka, Jacques Derrida, Yoko Tawada, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christine Brooke-Rose, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Paul Celan, and Olumide Popoola, among others. Students are invited to introduce additional literary readings from their own fields to expand our corpus. All readings will be available in original and translation whenever feasible. Please contact me at yildiz@humnet.ucla.edu if you have any questions.
For our first class meeting, please read my introductory chapter to Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition, available on CCLE (under “week 1”) or directly from me.
Seminar, three hours. Special focus on particular theoretical school or interpretive paradigm. Content varies with instructor. Letter grading.
Seminar, to be arranged. Preparation: apprentice personnel employment as teaching assistant, associate, or fellow. Teaching apprenticeship under active guidance and supervision of regular faculty member responsible for curriculum and instruction at UCLA. May be repeated for credit. S/U grading.