Target Level
English, B1-B2, C1-C2
Description
The following is a course description and reading list from a course I developed and taught over Zoom in Spring 2021. The class was taught in English and I offered an additional discussion section for students to read and discuss the literary texts in German.
Course Description
Germany is a recognized worldwide leader in environmental movements thanks to the nuclear power phase-out, the renewable energy transition, and the rise of the Green Party. Similarly, there is a long aesthetic tradition depicting nature and the nonhuman world in German-language literature and poetry. In this course, conducted in English, we will trace the development of contemporary Germany’s environmental practices through its literary and cultural legacy by reading and analyzing texts from established writers and thinkers. We will connect these literary and historic roots to contemporary environmental issues, look at successful protest movements, and explore Germany as a model for environmental initiatives and engaged citizenship around the globe.
Course Goals
By the end of this class, students will:
- learn the cultural history of environmentalism in Germany and different environmental movements
- understand how the concept of “Nature” is culturally constructed
- identify literary genres and major literary movements in German-language literature
- read, interpret, and appreciate major works in German literary history
- research, compare, and present environmental issues and policies in Germany
Primary Texts Reading List:
- Borges, Jorge Luis, “On Exactitude in Science”
- Brecht, Bertolt, Life of Galileo
- Brecht, Bertolt, “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake”
- Celan, Paul, “A Leaf”
- Celan, Paul, “Death Fugue”
- Droste-Hülshoff, Annette von, “In the Grass”
- Droste-Hülshoff, Annette von, The Jews’ Beech-Tree
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von “May Song”
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, The Sorrows of Young Werther
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, “Wanderer’s Night Song (II)”
- Humboldt, Alexander von, Views of Nature
- Kehlmann, Daniel, Measuring the World
- Mayröcker, Friederike, “what do you need”
- Tawada, Yoko, “Fukushima 24”
- Trojanow, Ilija, The Lamentations of Zeno
- Uexküll, Jakob von, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans
- Wolf, Christa, Accident: A Day’s News
Secondary Sources Reading List:
(selected chapters from the following works; additional texts were also included)
- Dassow Walls, Laura, The Passage to the Cosmos
- Garrard, Greg (editor), The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism
- Ghosh, Amitav, The Great Derangement
- Goodbody, Axel, Nature, Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century German Literature: The Challenge of Ecocriticism
- Goodbody, Axel (editor), The Culture of German Environmentalism: Anxieties, Visions, Realities
- Hager, Carol, and Mary Alice Haddad (editors), NIMBY Is Beautiful: Cases of Local Activism and Environmental Innovation Around the World
- Heise, Ursula, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species
- Heise, Ursula, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global
- Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- Lekan, Thomas and Thomas Zeller (editors), Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History
- Wulf, Andrea, The Invention of Nature
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Additional texts, articles, news items, images, and other media were also included.