|
|
German 371
Fall Semester 2013Professor David Pike dpike@email.unc.edu Office hours: TTh 11:30 - 12:30 p.m. and by appointment
The German Novelle
This course offers an assortment representative texts commonly referred to in German as Novellen, a "genre" or type of short story generally considered to be rather unique to German literature. Both the texts and the authors are "canonical." Our approach is very straightforward: we will read these texts in German - please do not look for English translations, locating English versions of these texts is not acceptable - and as far as possible we will discuss them in German. We are concerned with close readings and close textual analysis. We focus little, if at all, on the authors themselves in any kind of biographical sense; and we are not especially interested either, at least not in any overarching way, in issues systematically related to the Novelle as a genre; in fact, some of the texts, though often referred to as Novellen, were not characterized as such by their authors. In any case, we will have our hands full engaging the texts largely in their own right without venturing off into more theoretical discussions of genre. What distinguishes a Novelle from a short story or even a short novel is a question we will deal with, but it is not likely to be one that we concentrate too much on. Course expectations are straightforward: I expect you to attend class regularly (please see below for the course attendance policy) and to participate in our discussions. The presupposition for that is, of course, that you do the reading and come to class prepared to talk about the texts. There will be two substantial writing assignments in the course of the semester: one paper of approximately 6 pages in length, in English, around the middle of the semester; and one paper of around 12 pages due at the time of the final examination. This paper is also to be written in English. For those of you who strongly prefer to write in German, I have no objection, but the course is preeminently a literature, not a language course. Our readings will include the following books - I do not rule out adding another one or two or perhaps substituting something else for a book on the list below. As far as I can see, all texts are available online here. The texts listed before are, therefore, not hyperlinked. We will be reading these texts in the approximate order given below, but it is not sacrosanct; nor do I wish to assign in advance specific numbers of class days to be spend on each text.
*Attendance policy: you are allowed three absences without reason. Use them judiciously. Each absence after the three lowers your grade by one full grade point: that is, from an A to a B. A fifth miss lowers your grade from an A to a C, and so on. Missing class is not only not cool, my policy enforces a fairly consequential sanction if you do elect to skip class.
|
|
