German and Italian - BA (Hons)

UCL (University College London)

This module belongs to Italian. This is an intensive mandatory module for all students who are studying Italian in any Modern Languages and Modern Languages Plus combination, as well as for those following the single honours Italian BA. The module assumes a satisfactory performance in the first year Italian language module. The aim of the module is to develop knowledge and use of Italian and a knowledge and understanding of Italian culture sufficient for students to cope successfully with the demands of their Year Abroad programme in Italy. In view of this, the module will also aim at developing increasing autonomy in student learning, including the ability to identify and plan individual strategies for the learning of Italian and the study of literary, historical and other subjects in Italian.

This module belongs to German. This is a language module that develops a range of core linguistic skills, including spoken and written German, reading comprehension, and translation from German into English. The module consists of 3 components: Discussion and Essay: students write essays and give presentations on selected literary, historical and cultural themes. Translation and Reading Comprehension: this seminar introduces translation techniques, addresses linguistic differences between English and German, and develops techniques for reading and understanding German texts. German Grammar: this seminar will focus on the structure and use of the German language. Topics include word order, case, adjectival endings and verb forms.

This module belongs to German. This module will examine a representative selection of German films made, mostly before 1989, by prominent post-war directors in the Federal Republic of Germany, such as Herzog, Wenders, Fassbinder and Tykwer. These films pay particular attention to German history and society and we will discuss as an ongoing theme the ways in which they reflect contemporary perceptions of Germany and its troubled past. The course will thus introduce students to post-war German culture more broadly, as well as to techniques of film analysis.

This module belongs to German. The module will provide an introduction to linguistic concepts and topics which help us to understand the structure and use of the German language in contemporary times. The fields studied in the module include: phonetics and phonology; inflection and derivation; syntax; lexical structure, lexical borrowing, and sociolinguistic variation. Although the main focus of the module will be on the German language, comparisons with contemporary English will also be made where relevant. Primary material will be taken from newspapers and magazines, television and the internet where necessary. Students will be encouraged to find their own examples of linguistic phenomena from these sources. An essential part of the module will involve background reading of secondary material to consolidate understanding of guiding linguistic theories and principles.

This module belongs to German. This module builds on work completed in the first year, using translation and comprehension exercises to enhance fluency in reading, writing and understanding contemporary German, as well as continuing to explore its relation to English. Passages for translation and comprehension will include contemporary literary, historical and journalistic texts.

This module belongs to German. In this class, students will grapple with the significance of the Weimar and Nazi eras for modern German history. Topics will include the characteristic features of Weimar culture and politics, the origins of the National Socialist movement and its rise to power, the National Socialists? utopian vision and their various efforts to implement it, and the relationship between state and society. Students will also consider the nature of everyday life, the persecution of Jews and other minorities, the uses of terror, the horrific culmination of the Nazi regime?s ideological goals in the Second World War and the Holocaust, and, finally, the memorialization of the period.

This module belongs to German. This module will cover major narrative and lyric texts from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Consideration will be given to both predominant themes (courtliness and heroism; conflicting demands of love and society; transgression) and broader literary theoretical questions (alterity; developments in medieval narrative technique; textual in/stability).

This module belongs to German. This module will examine a representative selection of German literature from the Enlightenment to the late 19th century, focusing on the question how important literary epochs, from the Enlightenment itself to Poetic Realism, have engaged with and 'debated' the concept of Enlightenment. The module introduces students to texts by the century's most acknowledged authors, including Kant, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Eichendorff, Heine, Kleist, Bchner, and Keller. The module thus offers a broad overview over and explicitly links the century's most important literary and intellectual movements, while at the same time complementing the core modules GERM0013- Love, Violence and Laughter: Medieval and Early Modern German Literature and Culture up to 1740 and GERM0015- The Challenge of Modernity: Literature and Culture from 1870 to the Present.

This module belongs to German. This course explores some of the most exciting - and disturbing - ideas and artworks of the fast-moving modern age. It reflects the ways in which, from the late nineteenth-century onwards, the German-speaking world seemed to be turned upside-down by shocking historical events, radical ideas and new cultural forms. The works studied in this course show how these developments could be experienced as exhilarating, disturbing, liberating, traumatic - or all of these at once. The module begins with writing from the German Empire after 1871, and then considers classic texts of early modernism, to the Weimar years and the rise of Nazism, to the Third Reich. Finally, it looks at important currents in cultural and socio-political life of the post-1945 period.

This module belongs to German. This is an integrated language-culture module for second-year students. It is taught entirely in German and designed as preparation for university-level study or work experience during the Year Abroad. As such, it functions on two levels: Content: This module aims to provide students with the literary, cultural and political history of the two capitals of Germany and Austria. The module will teach analytical skills in German using several texts, from literary genres (poetry, drama, prose) to non-literary genres (newspaper articles, political speeches, editorials). Language acquisition: All work for this module (reading, writing, speaking) must be done in German.

This module belongs to German. The New German Cinema is associated with some of the biggest names in twentieth-century film-making and beyond, like Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders. While the works of the New German Cinema are extremely diverse, they share a drive to set themselves apart from the art and storytelling of the past, in terms of both themes and style. Its key themes include German histories of violence; the Nazi past; the family, its secrets and the stories it tells about itself; the so-called Economic Miracle; outsiders and society; revolt and protest; and gender, ethnicity and identity.

This module belongs to Italian. The course explores the pivotal role Italy played in the early 19th century. Politically divided, culturally torn between legacies of the classical world and the new nationalist ideology that swept through Europe after the Napoleonic wars, Italy was a powerful magnet for the development of the new subjectivity we indicate with the word Romantic. Goethe, Heine, Byron, Shelley, Stendhal, and most of the great writers, musicians and artists visit Italy between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. They write, compose and paint inventing a new idiom. In Italy itself, the solitary and extraordinary genius of Giacomo Leopardi reacts and enlightens a debate that will shape following generations, in many ways still very relevant today. Alessandro Manzoni's The Bethroted will also be part of the reading list. We will also refer to Operas and paintings of this period.

This module belongs to Italian. Between 1860 and 1925 Italy underwent profound transformations: the creation of the Italian state, and its difficult aftermath; industrialisation and urbanisation; the spread of literacy, popular culture and the vote; the traumas of the First World War and the rise of Fascism. The module aims to examine Italian literature?s response to some of these changes by examining a variety of the most important works of the period, ranging from verismo and children?s literature, to modernism.

This module belongs to Italian. Throughout its history, Italian cinema has shown a particular interest in the mixing up of fiction and reality through the production of films that combine documentary elements with fictive ones. This module will be focused on examples that move along the whole spectrum between documentary and fictional film. The lectures will provide the students with the historical and social background to the films and with a range of film-critical terminology that will be applied to the material introduced by the module tutor. Furthermore, various topics, such as the cinematic representation of power, the struggle for civil rights, the anthropological analysis of disadvantaged realities and the influence of media, will be investigated and discussed during the lectures and the subsequent seminars.

Italy was exceptional in sixteenth-century Europe for the large number and adventurousness of the publications produced by women. This module explores this phenomenon by looking at literary practices and ideas on gender and women in Italy c.1380-1600 in a selection of texts by both male and female writers. You will study selected works by Giovanni Boccaccio and Vittoria Colonna, as well as by the Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco and Moderata Fonte who set out more radical positions and challenges to the status of women. You will study these writers against the context of significant social, historical and intellectual shifts over the period, such as the rise of printing, the Counter-Reformation, and challenges to Aristotelian thought on women. The module aims to provide critical perspectives on the early modern representation of women and on literary culture. You will explore related topics of sex vs gender, women?s writing and the literary canon, the Renaissance debate on women (querelle des femmes), Petrarchism, religious culture, and neoplatonic ideas on beauty and love.

Your third year is spent abroad. This will not only bring the language and culture you are studying to life, but also strengthen your resourcefulness and self-reliance. You will normally spend this year studying at a university in your chosen country (or countries if you are studying two languages), but alternatives, such as work placements, may be possible.

This module belongs to Italian. This is a mandatory module for all students who are studying Italian in any Modern Languages or Modern Languages Plus combination, as well as for Italian BA students. The module requires successful completion of ITAL0009 Second Year Italian Language and of the Year Abroad Programme. The aims of the module are: to develop a high level of knowledge of Italian as a medium of understanding, communication and expression; to develop the understanding of the structure of Italian and of the historical and sociocultural contexts in which it has developed and it is used; and to study Italian as a gateway to other areas and subjects (literature, history, philosophy etc) and possibly further study at postgraduate level. Please note that a thorough knowledge of basic Italian grammar is a prerequisite for this course.

This is a German module. This is an advanced final year / MA German language module which combines intensive language work (reading, writing, listening, speaking) with the discussion of complex topics ranging from "Erinnerung" to "Identit?. The module focuses on German essay writing on an academic level as well as the oral discussion and presentation of the topics dealt with in class.

This is a German module. The module will focus on the medieval German text of Parzival in its entirety. We will refer to Wolfram?s treatment of his French source (of which passages may be read in English translation) and will set him in his historical context - literary, political, social and religious. Topics to be covered will include narrative strategies, codes and techniques; history and fictionality; ideologies of chivalry and nobility; gender; courtly culture; religious belief.

This is a German module. In Austria the period between approximately 1890 and 1938 was not only one of enormous political upheavals (the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the founding of the First Austrian Republic, and its subsequent annexation to Nazi Germany), it was also a time of intense cultural and intellectual ferment. Focusing on key works of the fin de si?e and of the interwar period, this course will explore some of the distinctive preoccupations of Viennese modernism ? sexuality and the gendered self, aestheticism, and Sprachkrise ? as well as examining literary responses to questions of national identity and cultural tradition.

This is a German module. The module will examine the complex relationship between language, power, and ideology in Germany society, and will trace how language has been employed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by individuals, groups, organisations, and institutions to exercise power and to communicate a particular ideology or world-view. During this module, we will address a variety of linguistic topics and issues, including political discourse, defining 'propaganda' or 'ideological language'; the ?misuse? of language; the nature of linguistic groups; language planning. The analysis of primary texts will draw upon aspects of linguistic theory, including sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and semantics.

This module looks at three major twentieth-century novels in detail. All three books explore the problem of interpretation and raise questions about how reality can be understood and represented. In each novel the narrative technique is a crucial tool for undermining the reader's expectations, both in relation to specific historical events and in relation to the process of textual interpretation itself. The books challenge our desire for clarity and explanation in an era when the category of truth has been profoundly relativized.

This is a German module. This module examines the interaction between psychology and German literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will analyse a selection of literary texts that have either been inspired by psychological findings or have been the subject of psychological interpretations. This will not only give an insight in the psychological theories of literature, but also help to understand the formation of psychology as a science in the second half of the nineteenth century and the crucial role literature played for the development of psychoanalysis around 1900. At the same time, the module will investigate some of the ways in which psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic theories influenced the work of major writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and Hermann Hesse.

This is a German module. This module examines the development of an African diaspora in the German lands from the Middle Ages to the present-day, with emphasis on the dramatic shifts in regimes of the past 200 years. Along with surveying contexts in which Africans and their descendants came to German-speaking lands, we will consider the diverse ways in which they have shaped and been shaped by a society that variously tolerated, rejected, or accepted them on specific terms. By paying due attention to transnational contexts, the module will complicate ideas of a single black experience as well as a monolithic and consistent idea of ?Germanness?.

This is a German module. In this module we will explore the problem and the promise of surveillance in German-language culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students will encounter crucial and often opposing theories of the forms surveillance can take, and test the applicability of these theories to the changing representations of surveillance in literary texts and films made in the German-speaking context. The theoretical approaches and primary texts handled in the module will give students a grounding in the contributions that German-language culture has made to discussions of how surveillance shapes behaviour, and the narratives and forms that literature and film in German create for living with and responding to surveillance.

This is a German module. This module focuses on key films of the Weimar and Nazi eras. Weimar-era films have had a lasting impact on world cinema. They range from documentary to horror to sci-fi, and their often spectacular, startling or challenging themes, to be explored here, include automata, madness, the modern metropolis, technology, new images of women in modernity, sexuality, performance and gender politics. The module then goes on to explore the varied ways in which film production in the Nazi era which followed reflected and interacted with the regime?s (cultural) policy.

This is a German module. This is an enhanced module in translation from and into English. The material used is taken from literary works and journalistic texts, reflecting different styles of writing, old and modern, and varying linguistic registers. All material can be accessed via Moodle.

This is an advanced final year / MA language module in translation from and into German. It enhances understanding of idiom, style and register, and develops advanced language mediation skills.

This is a German module. This is an enhanced module in translation from and into English. The material used is taken from literary works and journalistic texts, reflecting different styles of writing, old and modern, and varying linguistic registers. All material can be accessed via Moodle.

The expatriate German writer W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) is considered one of the great world writers of recent decades. His writing addresses questions which are central to the modern condition as he saw it. These issues include nature and its destruction, crime, mental disturbance, decay, social outsiderdom, art, violence and history. Sebald?s writing is also about beauty, travel, art, friendship and quirky, utopian refuges from the struggles of the world. It is fascinating too for its highly unusual style, such as the enigmatic use of images, photographs and documentary material and curious narrators. Sebald was born and brought up in (West) Germany, and wrote his literary texts in German. However, he is of special interest to readers of literature in London, for he lived and worked throughout almost all his adult life in England, and his work demonstrates profound engagement with a wide range of modern European literature and history. This module explores his major works.

The cultural representation of deviant, particularly criminal, women reveals much about what a society considers the norm for acceptable female behaviour. During Germany?s eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women?s role in society was debated more ardently than ever before. ?Erudite? women (weibliche Gelehrte) were admired in the eighteenth century and vilified in the nineteenth; Schiller?s ?demure housewife? (zchtige Hausfrau) was the laughing stock of educated readers of the early nineteenth century and the expected norm twenty years later. Much of the age?s fluctuating definition of femininity was developed on the back of a specific type: the female criminal.

THIS COURSE IS ONLY FOR ESPS STUDENTS. IT IS TAUGHT TOGETHER WITH ITAL4040. The course offers European Social and Political Studies finalists a half-unit in Italian language assessed on the basis of the essay in Italian and the Italian oral.

This module belongs to Italian. The modules central themes are national identity and nation-building in Italy between Unification and the First World War. The first seminars are taken up by a theoretical and historical discussion of nations and nationalism, and by preparatory study of the state of Italian society in 1860. The main body of the module comprises topics that may include the following: education and children?s literature; crime and criminal anthropology; political culture; feminism; opera; patriotic monuments; Italian cuisine; Futurism; the South; the Galatian state. A representative work is studied for each topic, along with a wide range of historical and theoretical material. Students are therefore expected to know the set works in detail, to engage with new theoretical concepts, and to develop a good understanding of the central questions related to the issue of national identity in Liberal Italy.

This module belongs to Italian. This module offers the opportunity to study Dante?s Commedia, one of the most famous works of European literature. It is a poem that broke the mould in its own time, and has continued to fascinate readers ever since. At a time when serious literature was supposed to be written in Latin, Dante used everyday Italian, which caused scandal by giving open access to his opinions of popes and political leaders, bankers and warriors, poets and artists. The poem plunges its readers into a vividly imagined journey through the afterlife, raising all sorts of questions along the way about what Dante wanted to say, and how he chose to say it. What did he mean by calling his poem about death and judgement a ?comedy?? Why did he make the pagan poet Virgil his major guide to a Christian afterworld? Where did he imagine heaven, hell and purgatory to be located, and how did he claim to have gone there?

This module belongs to Italian. This module explores perceptions of identity in Renaissance Italy, bringing recent perspectives to the compelling thesis of Renaissance man?s individuality in Burkhardt?s foundational The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). The focus is especially on how identity could be construed, or socially, politically, and culturally constructed, by individuals or groups, through theatre and the rich culture of the princely courts. We will examine Castiglione?s Il cortegiano (1528), which provides a subtle portrait of the court of Urbino and of the multifarious roles played by the ideal courtier. Theatrical works by Bibbiena, Ariosto and the Intronati of Siena will provide a further basis for exploring the complex dynamics involved in ?self-fashioning?, from dress and leisure pursuits to more challenging issues of imitation and dissimulation. Students will explore the aesthetics and ethics of performance, debates on nobility, linguistic issues, class and political identity, gender play, and also attitudes to sociability and humour. The study of theatrical texts will allow students opportunities to engage practically in class with issues of performance. A theatre visit will be programmed depending on availability.

This module belongs to Italian. Since the middle of the twentieth century the Italian novel has undergone profound transformations. Each generation of writers tends to take certain themes as its own and to establish stylistic trends: neorealism, experimentalism, new narrativity, ?I cannibali?. Within each generation important alliances are formed with publishing houses and newspapers, new literary magazines are founded, the map of Italian society is redrawn. These groupings tend to be abandoned once individual careers have been established. Each new generation of writers unfailingly accused the older one of provincialism, of being too tied to the national tradition. Occasionally, however, unexpected alliances appeared between young writers and others fifty years older ?I nuovi narratori? and Morante, Moravia, Bilenchi; ?I cannibali? and ?Gruppo 63?. The module will examine these changes in relation both to generational differences and to the individual careers of the authors themselves.

This module belongs to Italian. This module gives students practice of translation from Italian into English and vice versa, and of essay writing in English. For the translation classes, Affiliate students are allocated to the Final Year language groups to work on a range of texts. One half of each term is spent working on translation from English into Italian, the other half on translation from Italian into English, with different tutors. Students are encouraged to reflect on and discuss problems inherent in the practice of translation.

This module belongs to Italian. This module gives students practice of translation from Italian into English and vice versa, and of essay writing in English. For the translation classes, Affiliate students are allocated to the Final Year language groups to work on a range of texts. One half of each term is spent working on translation from English into Italian, the other half on translation from Italian into English, with different tutors. Students are encouraged to reflect on and discuss problems inherent in the practice of translation.

This module introduces students to representations of men on horseback in literature, arts, popular artefacts and publications, caricatures, animations, and films in Italy since 1861, and considers how images of cavalrymen and knights were received, transformed, appropriated and re-adapted by single authors and artists, cultural movements, and political powers. Students will look at a very broad range of primary sources from 1861 to the present by both canonical and lesser-known Italian writers, artists, and directors, and will learn how to connect and interpret written and visual images through the lenses of various theories.