WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2015-2016       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
Violence and Representation: German Drama and Prose, 1810 to 2010
GRST 360
Fall 2015 not offered

In this seminar we will examine the representation of violence in German prose and drama from 1810 to the present. How can literary language express situations and experiences that overwhelm, even shatter, the subject? How does literature remember the violent history of wars and genocide? How do literary texts distinguish between violence that is only destructive and violence that also liberates, such as revolutionary and anticolonial violence? Finally, we will consider the violence inherent in literary representation itself. The historical subject matters treated in the texts we discuss include the Trojan War, the War on Terror, the two world wars, the Shoah, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. We will read dramas by Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner, Heiner Müller, Bertolt Brecht, and Peter Weiss, and prose by Heinrich Heine, W. G. Sebald, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Anna Seghers, Ernst Jünger, Franz Kafka, Clemens Meyer, and Anne Duden.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA GRST
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Student Option
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: GRST214 OR GRST217
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (GRST-MN)

Last Updated on APR-19-2024
Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email ? Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459