Thematic and Methodological Areas
At least one seminar must be taken from any three of the following four categories. In rare cases, subject to the approval of the department chair and the Director of Graduate Studies, a course from outside of German might fulfill one of these categories. Course descriptions for each seminar offered in the department will indicate which of these categories is covered in the seminar.
Category I: Translation Studies
Translation theory and practice are central to literary and cultural studies. With its interest in the cross-cultural exchange and circulation of texts, themes, motifs, genres, and ideas, Germanic Languages and Literatures is committed to performing and assessing theoretically the function and value of “translation” in the widest sense of the term, including both interlingual translation and other forms of textual transformation and adaptation.
Category II: Media Studies
Courses in this category facilitate broad, theoretically informed, and historically grounded thinking about the effects of media transformation on cultural production and consumption as well as on the self-conceptions of authors (artists, composers), producers, and consumers (readers/viewers/listeners). They explore how media — including manuscripts, books, periodicals, photography, radio, television, film, digital media, and other forms — not only “mediate” but also structure knowledge, cultural exchange, artistic expression, perception, and indeed experience itself. They also build on the frameworks of media theory, critical theory, and media ecology to ask timely questions about the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of media. Attention may be given to competitions between media; to remediation, intermediality, and the mutual incorporations of media; and to the ways that new media reconfigure the conception, function, and imagined provenance of older media, both in the past and in the 21st century.
Category III: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Race
Courses in this category examine the concepts of nationalism, ethnicity, and race — and, more broadly, historical and contemporary mechanisms, ideologies, and processes of group formation — through the historically contextualized study of literature, film, and other cultural artifacts, agents, and institutions. Perspectives examined could include those of insiders as well as those of outsiders or the deliberately excluded. Courses may focus on historical and contemporary cases and/or on the cultural and aesthetic responses to them. Possible topics include historical and theoretical perspectives on race and ethnicity; the experiences of Jews in German-speaking Europe, including acculturation, antisemitism, and the Shoah; relations between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires; German emigration to the United States and related aesthetic responses; contemporary immigration and immigrant communities in the German-speaking world; and new subcultures, new power relations, and new ideas of citizenship created by patterns of migration.
Category IV: Digital Humanities
Digital humanities is a diverse and evolving field that uses digital tools and computational methods both to answer existing research questions and to generate new questions in humanistic disciplines. Courses in this area may address topics ranging from the construction of digital archives to the analysis of macroscopic trends in cultural change, and they will often employ techniques from the field of data science. Courses in this category may also reflect on the broader impact of information technology on society and culture, including the ways in which new technologies can reshape our conventional understandings of key aesthetic, political, and anthropological categories such as authorship, creativity, privacy, influence, agency, and even the category of the human itself.
Interdisciplinary Studies
Graduate students may wish to take courses in areas other than German. Of special interest are graduate offerings in art history; comparative literature; English; the digital humanities; film and media studies; higher education administration; history; music; philosophy; romance languages; and women, gender, and sexuality studies.
Students interested in completing one of our interdisciplinary certificates are generally required to complete additional seminars.
Foreign Language Requirement
Students planning to work primarily on post-1700 materials must display reading proficiency in at least one language other than German and English. In most cases this language will be French, and the requirement may be satisfied by examination or by enrolling in and successfully completing French 400 and French 401. If a language other than French is particularly relevant to a student's research interests and planned dissertation topic, the foreign language requirement may be fulfilled by the achievement of an equivalent level of reading proficiency in that language, upon approval by the Director of Graduate Studies.
Students planning to work on pre-1700 materials must pass a reading exam in Latin. Reading knowledge of French is also strongly encouraged.
Examinations
Master's Examination
Students who enter with a bachelor's degree must complete an oral and written master's examination at the end of their second year. A student's performance on both the oral and written exams is one important element affecting the faculty's decision about whether the student will receive permission to proceed with their graduate studies.
Qualifying Examinations and Dissertation Prospectus
Students taking qualifying exams should display general knowledge and understanding of the primary materials, historical contexts, scholarly questions and theoretical frameworks that are likely to drive their future dissertations. The qualifying exam is usually taken during the fourth year of study for students entering with a bachelor's degree and during the third year for students entering with a master's degree. The qualifying exam process consists of four phases:
Phase 1: Development of a bibliography for the exams
Phase 2: Preparation for and completion of two exams, each of which consists of a written portion and an oral portion
Phase 3: Creation and defense of a dissertation prospectus
Phase 4: Preparation and circulation of the dissertation abstract; filing of the Research Advisory Committee Form, which must be submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences, no later than the end of the third year of graduate study; and filing of the Title, Scope and Procedure Form, which must be submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies, Arts & Sciences, no later than at the end of the fourth year of graduate study.
For the first exam, the student is required to situate their primary materials and their author(s) in their respective historical contexts and periods with specific points of emphasis to be determined together with the exam committee. The second exam serves to frame the student’s primary materials in theoretical terms; it is meant to discuss in general terms the methodological approaches for the planned dissertation.
Teaching
Doctoral candidates are required to complete a minimum of six semesters (or the equivalent) of mentored teaching experiences (MTEs) within the German department in order to be eligible for the degree; some students may have the opportunity to complete additional MTEs in other departments. Most of our students (particularly students who do not enter with a master's degree in German and with experience teaching German at the university level) will complete eight semesters of MTEs (the maximum allowable number) in order to prepare themselves for the rigorous demands of the job market in German.
For information beyond what is presented here, please contact german@wustl.edu.
