Dr. Evelyn Trotter Office hours: TBA

GCS 201.

(561) 297-2529

German Literature in Translation: “Kafka etc.”

GET 3130: Spring 2004 TR 12:30-1:50

Course description:

GET 3130 “Kafka etc.” focuses on modern German literature in translation. A reading knowledge in German is not required since all primary and most secondary texts can be read in English; however, students with a reading knowledge of German may elect to read all primary texts in German. Course readings will focus on selected stories and novels by Franz Kafka, Arthur Schnitzler; Rainer Maria Rilke; and Nobel prize winners Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann.

All selected texts share the thematic treatment of the conflicting relation between artist and his/her society, which (although symptomatic of all German literature form its origin to the present day) “hit the nerve of the time” (Hermann Glaser) in modernism.

Course Objectives

The course will give special consideration to the diverse styles which differentiate the texts in spite of a shared common theme, with the purpose of allowing students to develop a working knowledge of such diverse stylistic directions as symbolism, impressionism, expressionism and the very unique Kafkaesque style, all of which encompass the diversified literary German modern period.

Besides differentiating stylistic choices, a synopsis of the authors’ respective autobiographical background offers an abundance of enhancing multi-cultural topics.

The course will explore the extension of the subjective individual generation conflict between fathers and sons/daughters to the modern artists’ conflicted separation from traditional German writing as literary exemplifications of the modern Zeitgeist.

The dual approaches to the texts as studies of the German literary tradition and critical readings in world literature are tripled by an analysis of the employed translative method in the linguistic/cultural transfer as an evaluative form of literary criticism. The course will be of interest to students of German, Comparative Literature, World Literature, Jewish and translation studies.

Course procedure

The first half of the course will introduce the literary background of modernism and introduce Thomas Mann, Schnitzler, Hesse and Rilke as representative modernists. The second half of the course will concentrate on Kafka’s stories which will be integrated to modernism and compared and contrasted to the previously introduced writers. Class lectures, discussions, and presentations are entirely in English. The course will be a mixture of lectures and discussions. Students are expected to present two brief (ten minutes) oral reports one on a scholarly essay (copy provided,) and to give a more extensive oral presentation of the major project, a written 15 -20 pages research paper on a writer/topic of their choice from a list of provided suggestions or self-chosen topics with my approval.

Grading/tests

Class participation, homework reading assignments 25%

2 oral reports 25%

One Final 25%

Research paper 25%

Tentative Syllabus

Topics	Readings/lectures
Week 1:
Introduction to the course	Syllabus.
Intro to German modernism	Background, representatives, characteristics

Week 2
Arthur Schnitzler: Fin de Siècle	“Fraeulein Else”
Symbolism, Stream of Consciousnes	“Fraeulein Else”
Freud and literary psychoanalysis

Week 3
Thomas Mann: The German ambiguity;	Excerpts from Buddenbrooks;
The role of art and the being of the artist
Symbolism and mythology	“Tonio Kroeger”

Week 4
Hermann Hesse: post romantic dualism	“Beneath TheWheel”

Week 5
Rainer Maria Rilke
	“Letters to a Young Poet”

Week 6
Franz Kafka’s triple isolation; influences	(leture on) Jakob von Gunten (by Robert Walser,1908)

Kafka and scholarship:	“Everybody’s Darling”

Week 7
Leitmotif and life	The Judgement
Fathers and Sons	[Jacques Lacan]
Writing and Being: The balancing Act of the Self	The Judgement


Week 8
Mythological structure	“Metamorphosis” [Nabokov’s essay]
Kafkaesque

Week 9
Alienation, frustration, isolation:	“The Stoker” Amerika; The Man Who Disappeared
Existentialism or the entrapment of writing between necessity and curse	“Letter To His Father”

Week 10
Translative Issues:	Excerpts from Walter Benjamin’s writings
Metamorphesis or transformation
The two meanings of Schuld: guilt or debt? Etc.
Reading Kafka	Writing in progress

Week 11
In the footsteps of Kafka	Ilse Aichinger, Harold Pinter and more
Kafka Today:
And how do you read Kafka?	In-class reading of Der Mann vor dem Gesetz

Week 12
German modernist writers	compare and contrast

Week 13-15
Final analysis of course	Oral presentations
Paper presentations;	Paper readings and discussions
Preparation for final

TEXTS

Kafka, Franz. The Sons (Three classic stories of filial revolt “The Metamorphosis,” The Judgement, and “The Stoker,” grouped together with his own fictive poignant “Letter To His Father”,) Ed. Sara Bershtel and Mark Anderson, Schocken Books,1989.

Schnitzler, Arthur. “Fraeulein Else.” Trans. F.H. Lyon, Pushkin Press, 2001.

Mann, Thomas. “Tonio Kröger” in Trans.

Hesse, Hermann. Peter Camenzind, Trans. Michael Roloff, Noonday Press, 1988.

---, “Under The Wheel”

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet, Trans. M.D. Herter Norton and Franz Xaver Kappus, W.W. Norton & Co., 1994

---, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Trans. M.D. Herter Norton, W.W. Norton & Co., 1992

Suggested Readings [optional]

The Cambridge Companion to Kafka. Ed. By Julian Preece.

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, edited by Ritchie Robertson.

The Camden Companion. to Arthur Schnitzler

The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture, edited by Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will.

The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, edited by Michael Levenson.