Open to only the beginner, except by permission of instructor. For 1999 it has chosen Weimar, a town no larger than Springfield and located in the German province of Thuringia. The course, however, is also intended to address the question of how the ideals of Weimar classicism, from which the Weimar Republic would later draw its political inspiration, could prevent neither the dissolution of the Republic in 1933 nor a single moment of the twelve-year nightmare that ensued under Hitler and his henchmen. All work for this course is in English. This will include a number of oral presentations, short essays and one or two tests.
Students work a great deal with primary texts.
The course incorporates tools of stylistic analysis and an intensive grammar review. Barry Survey of the literary monuments of the German Enlightenment, German Classicism, and Romanticism. The literature is examined in light of the historical and intellectual movements of the various periods.