GERM 301 Families (Not offered 1999-2000)
The family has traditionally served as the vessel for all sorts of political, social, and philosophical ideals. This course will follow the story-telling about the family that has accompanied the modern bourgeois family from its inception in the mid-eighteenth century to the beginnings of its deterioration in the early-twentieth century. The "burgerliches Trauerspiel" (Lessing, Schiller) presented the Enlightenment ideal of the patriarchal, rationally organized family. Short-lived experiments with an alternative notion of "family" in the Romantic era, revolving around common interests and free love (Schlegel, Caroline von Gunderrode, Bettina von Arnim) gave way to a reactionary retreat into a defensive, insulted idyll in the Biedermeier (Morike, Gotthelf, Keller) and the glorification of Oedipally-tinged historical family struggles (Hebbel). Toward the end of the century, the ideals of the conventional family began to be called into question as the bourgeoisie experienced its first serious social competition (Fontane, Nietzsche, Hauptmann) and women started to rebel against the constraints of the family (Frauenautobiographien). Finally, early in the twentieth century, the disintegration of the intact family paralleled the general social, political, and psychological disorientation that continues into our own time (Schnitzler, Kafka). We will read dramas, novels, letters, essays, and diaries in order to trace the relationship of family concepts to notions of self-definition. Readings in German. Requirements: class participation, a significant oral presentation, one long paper.