GERM 355 - Advanced Seminar

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2015/2016b: Verboten: Censorship and Cultural Production in Germany and Austria. What effect does censorship have upon cultural production? Does it necessarily limit such production, or can it also paradoxically spurn cultural innovation? This course investigates particular state policies of censorship in German-speaking Europe from the absolutist and authoritarian states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth to the present-day Federal Republic. We study the casualties these policies have incurred, but also focus on the imaginative ways in which writers, artists, and filmmakers have subverted the censor’s gaze. In addition, we consider whether, as Freud has posited, the psyche is continually subject to its own self-censorship, and what consequences this might hold for the creative process. Readings may be drawn from Goethe, Lessing, Moritz, Heine, Wedekind, Schnitzler, Brecht, Wolf, and Biller. Mr. Schreiber.

Prerequisite: GERM 260 or GERM 270 or the equivalent.

One 3-hour period.