In the spring semester of 2013, Professor Kruse will teach:

German 389: Seminar: Topic for 2012-13: Kafka’s 1914
One year before the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the catastrophic Great War (World War I) we will examine 1914 from the perspective of Franz Kafka’s life and writings.  We will read everything he wrote during this year (fiction, diaries, letters, work-related documents).  We will examine all aspects of his familial, cultural, geographic, and historical context: what he read, with whom he talked, where he traveled, the daily newspaper he read.  We will thus gain a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of a year that was fateful for Europe and the world and
for Kafka personally.

Professor Kruse teaches the following courses with regularity:

GER 101-102 Beginning German

An introduction to contemporary German with emphasis on communicative fluency. Extensive practice in all four skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Videos and Web-based activities introduce the student to topics from contemporary culture in German-speaking countries.

GER 239 Germany and Austria Today: Advanced Conversation and Composition

Intensive practice in oral and written communication and presentation; introduction to rhetorical strategies of conversation and discussion; introduction to elements of German prose style; practice of various forms of writing. Review of selected grammar topics. On the basis of newspaper and magazine articles, essays and stories, television news, film clips, and website materials, we will discuss and write about current events and issues in Germany and Austria.

GER 275: World War II and its Aftermath in German Literature

Sixty years after the end of World War II, Germans have begun the problematic task of remembering their recent history not only as perpetrators of the war and the Holocaust but also as the warʼs eventual victims. This course will examine representative examples of the literature memorializing World War II and its aftermath in their historical and cultural context. Texts read will include novels and novellas, essays, historical accounts, and memoirs. Authors represented will include Böll, Grass, Sebald, Nossack, Treitel, Timm and others.

GER 276/GER 376: Franz Kafka (276 in English / 376 in German)

276: All aspects of Kafka’s works and life will be explored in the historical and social context of early twentieth-century Central Europe. We will read a wide selection from his novels, short stories, parables and aphorisms; diaries and letters. We will discuss the delight and difficulty of reading Kafka, his posthumous reception as a world author, and his importance as a cultural icon in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

376: Additional readings in German, plus an additional weekly class meeting taught in German with discussions in German.

GER 325: Goethe

Texts from all phases of Goethe’s literary career will be studied in their cultural and sociohistorical context. Readings will include examples from Goethe's poetry, dramatic and narrative works as well as texts by some of Goethe's contemporary critics (i.e. Kleist and Heine).

GER 329 Men Writing Women? Readings in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-
Century Literature

This course introduces themes and issues of the German Enlightenment, Storm and Stress, Classicism, and Early Romanticism. Texts by Gellert, Lessing, Wagner, Schiller, Goethe, and Kleist.

Prerequisite: Two units taught in German above 202.

Professor Kruse also taught the following course in the Comparative Literature interdisciplinary program.

CPLT 254: Imaginary Crimes and Courts: The Law in Literature

Both in literature and in law, language shapes rhetorical worlds which seek to represent, constitute, interpret and criticize the world created and inhabited by human beings. From its beginnings through the twentieth century, imaginative literature, in turn, has embodied critical depictions of the law in the lives of individuals and societies. In our course, we will examine texts from classical Greek to contemporary literature in order to trace the ways in which issues of law and justice have been treated in dramatic and narrative literature. How do these texts present the role(s) of the law, its institutions, agents, and participants in their respective societies? What is the relationship of the law to other central values and institutions of these societies: justice, love, honor, religion, family, the state, etc. How is the imaginative treatment of the law embedded in and related to the other major themes of these texts? These are some examples of the kinds of questions we will pursue and discuss.