GERM 46.03 8 Short Books That Will Change Your Life
This course is for anyone who has ever been afraid of great literature, for anyone who has fallen in love with good books before, and for anyone who has used them to make a difference in someone's life. You will learn how to read, understand, and see the world differently. We will read short but revolutionary books from different centuries, different kinds of writers, and different media; they will be about loss and love and loyalty and law, parasites and the climate catastrophe. Some of them will be about you. You will develop interpretive skills and will learn how to think about what it means for something to be "poetic," whether it is a mountain range, a crime, a love interest, or a toilet. Can the books we read in this class really change your life? (What would that even mean?) Maybe; maybe not. But they're certainly going to try.
Beginning with novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and continuing up to the present day, it will focus on topics such as love, politics and the importance of death. This course includes film adaptations.
Readings will include Goethe's Werther, Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas, Droste-Hülshoff's The Jews' Beech, Nietzsche’sThe Birth of Tragedy, Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Kafka'sThe Trial, Musil's Törless, Thomas Mann's Death in Veniceand Visitationby Jenny Erpenbeck. Conducted in English. German majors can take this course for major credit if they do additional work in German.