Background

Erzählanfänge is a course I developed to meet the requirements of third and fourth year content classes within the undergraduate curriculum of the German major at the University of Chicago.

However, the course also constituted something of an experiment. The idea was to overcome one of the difficulties that I have come across again and again in undergraduate teaching within the major: the German major (like, perhaps, most foreign language majors) attempts to do many things at once--develop fluency, transmit literary and intellectual tradition(s), teach analytical reading and writing skills--with students who are at very different levels and have very different interests. My solution was to build a course around close readings of great literary beginnings and provide students with four core questions that we would return to throughout the course. At the same time, I attempted to select texts that both demonstrated important formal features of narration / narrative structures and could serve as paradigmatic instances of major German literary movements (Die Leiden des jungen Werther, Der Sandmann, Das Schloß, Der Zauberberg, Die Blechtrommel).

There are, of course, potential hesitations regarding such an approach. One that I worried about (at least in advance) was that students would be frustrated with not finishing any of the works whose beginnings we read closely. Although I tried to make this into a pedagogical tool, rather than a drawback (more below), the concern itself turned out to be unfounded: the course took place in fall quarter, and a number of students told me they were going to finish some of the works we had started during the upcoming winter break.

Sample Materials

core documents

This section contains a number of documents distributed during the course of the class. Our foundation was a series of four questions about beginnings, which I made them return to with every text. This was distributed on the first day of class, and we used it to analyze both canonical beginnings (Genesis, The Iliad) and to preview the texts assigned during the coming semester.

Although not all of these texts were originally written in German, we worked with standard German translations of them. I have found that providing upper-level students with the German editions of texts they are familiar with in English both lowers affective barriers--making them more comfortable using 'advanced' work--and produces insights into structural and stylistic differences between English and German. In this case, we read a short passage from Aristotle's Poetics / Poetik, glossed.

Plot overview and listening

A major challenge I confronted was structural. The idea was to teach students that close analysis of texts' opening chapters can provide important insight into the issues that will recur throughout the text, and which it will have to somehow resolve--symbolically or otherwise--for its ending to be satisfying. But how could students see this, without simply having to take my word for it?

While drawing up the syllabus, I came across an extremely useful resource online: a series of videos (now sponsored by Reclam Verlag) designed to help German Gymnasiasten prepare for their Abitur in German literature. These videos, which cover nearly all canonical German texts, range from 8-12 minutes long and recapitulate major plot points and themes through reenactment in a Playmobil diorama. The level of language and formal analysis in these videos proved to be nearly perfect for my students, and as their creator also has something of a wry sense of humor (and occasionally engages in sudden shifts in linguistic register, between his own contemporary slang and early 19th-century prose), they provided not only a kind of thematically relevant listening exercise (with authentic speech!), but also an opportunity to explain nuances of contemporary German slang to undergraduates while still teaching Goethe / Hoffmann / Thomas Mann. In addition to giving them an overview of the entire work (of which they had read only the beginning), one additional benefit was that students realized, by virtue of their close readings, that the video's narrator occasionally made small mistakes in recounting the plot. These were incorporated into their listening worksheets and discussed as a class.

Below is the video for Der Sandmann (Source: Sommers Weltliteratur to go).

reading comprehension

Nonetheless, the reading was fairly difficult, even for students at the third and fourth year level of the German language sequence. In addition to thematizing this (how does / should one read a text in which not every word is familiar?), I scaffolded toward lengthier writing assignments through regularly distributing both Verständnisfragen and Diskussionsfragen. The former were first done solo, then compared with classmates and reported; the latter intended as small group work. Below are sample questions from meeting 1 of Werther and meeting 2 of Der Sandmann.

scaffolding writing

One of the major objectives of the course was to improve students' analytic reading and writing skills. However, I also wanted to transmit basic formal techniques for literary studies. As a result, essay topics were conceived as further developments of class discussions and smaller group writing assignments, meaning that students from different levels and backgrounds did not feel overwhelmed.

For the final exam, I wanted to allow students a bit more freedom, and gave them the opportunity either to return to texts they had not already written about, to engage in multi-medial comparisons (film and literary beginnings of Die Blechtrommel), or to pursue formalistic or philosophical concerns about beginning. Nonetheless, in each case, they were invited to expand upon themes we had already developed in our class discussions.

Sample student work

Below are four essays submitted by students during the class. For each writing assignment, students submitted three drafts: a first rough or "zero" draft, self-corrected into a proper first draft. They received a first grade for this along with minor grammar corrections from me or questions regarding their argument; they then submit for the next class meeting a second draft, for which they receive a final grade for content and for corrections. These essays are a mixture of first and second drafts.

I also included some creative writing assignments among the course work. Because an important aspect of the class was to develop some understanding of major German literary movements, texts were selected with an eye toward their status as paradigmatic period representatives and we spent course time talking about questions of signature styles. One task required students to write an essay in the 'style' of Werther's first letter, with attention both toward the plot dynamics and thematic issues raised in that first letter as well as stylistic tics (and their broader implications) of Sturm und Drang.

One of the four essays below is a creative piece; the other three are analytic (two are final papers). None of these students are primarily literature majors; at least two of the four (Kafka, Hoffmann) expressed their anxieties, at the beginning of the quarter, about the fact that they had no experience studying literature. Although there are (of course) minor errors in their essays (particularly the two longer ones, which were first drafts) I was quite impressed by the quality of the work these students produced.

Evaluations

Because this was (for me) a new and somewhat experimental model for a course, I was eager to see how students would respond. I generally do at least one round of anonymous mid-quarter reviews in my classes, which allows me to get a sense of how the class looks from the students' perspective. The idea is not so much that their feedback is immediately implementable (as most who have done this know--"I think I learn German best through music videos" was a memorable comment) as that these reviews provide an opportunity to explain course goals and aims to students once they've become a little bit more familiar with the material and me as an instructor. Here is some of the feedback: