Index# 03732
Will count toward SAS-Germn, Russ & E Euro Lang & Lit Major
Will count toward SAS-Germn, Russ & E Euro Lang & Lit Minor
This course investigates the depiction of animals in relation to the human: How do writers and artists explore the demarcation between the human and the animal? How do they challenge the denigration of the animal in Western philosophy? What defines an animal? Can the animal speak, can it suffer, can it be understood? What does it mean to be looked at by an animal? What happens when we love a pet? In what way does the animal challenge our thinking of ethics, gender, and identity? We will trace the paths of wolves, horses, cats, dogs, mice, rats, and snakes who destabilize and reconfigure literary texts, theories of knowledge, Western anthropocentrism, and biopolitics.
Readings include fairy tales by the Grimm brothers, poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gottfried Benn, Georg Heym, Bertolt Brecht, and short stories by Edgar Allen Poe and Franz Kafka. These texts will be accompanied by the Expressionist art group The Blue Rider and filmic examples such as Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man and Ulrich Seidel’s Animal Love, together with theoretical reflections on the status of the animal by Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Donna Haraway, Vicki Hearne, Martin Heidegger, Michel Serres, and Marc Shell.
About Professor Behrmann
Professor Behrmann has published widely on 19th to 21th century literature, criticism, and film: from Rahel Varnhagen and Adalbert Stifter to Frank Wedekind and Apollinaire, from Hugo Ball and Walter Benjamin to Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht, from Klaus Mann to Susan Sontag, Wolfgang Herrndorf, and Alfred Hitchcock. Her current research project, Hunger Artists: Labor and Poverty in German Texts, examines the productive versus unproductive labor and the modalities of limitless privation and libidinal excess that is implemented in literary and theoretical representations of the labor of the poor. Her book, Geburt der Avantgarde – Emmy Hennings, for which she received the DAAD/GSA Best Book Prize (2019), reconsiders the hidden traces and contributions of women writers in modernist literature and undertakes a
critical revision of established avant-garde historiography and theory. In addition to this study, Professor Behrmann has co-edited three volumes of an annotated study edition containing five early novels and the complete poems of Emmy Hennings. She has also co-edited a special issue on “Dada 1916/2016” in The Germanic Review as well as the award-winning anthology, Emmy Hennings Dada.