German Studies 238 - TOPICS IN MEDIA STUDIES

Topics course. pending CAP approval. Would Goethe's Werther have used e-mail? What if Dangerous Liaisons had appeared as a blog? Starting with two epistolary novels, Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774) and Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons (1784), we will study the art and function of letter-writing by men and women in fiction and reality from the 18th century to the present. Additional readings from, for example, Schiller, Austen, F. Schlegel, Rahel Levin, Fontane, Freud, Kafka, Rilke, Proust, Th. Mann, H. Arendt, Derrida. Taught in German.

Topic: Reading Other People's Mail: Letters in Literature & Life.