Program Overview

University Programs

The following programs are offered at Humboldt-Universit酹 zu Berlin:

Nature Writing from Goethe to the Present

Course Description

Germany is well-known for its discourses on nature if we look at philosophy or if we think of environmental politics. But is there also a significant tradition of Nature Writing in the literary field (like there is in English language literature)? For a long time, scholars would have denied this and would have argued about the reasons for this phenomenon. Not until recently there have been new academic and publishing endeavors to identify a broken tradition of Nature Writing in German language literature and also to acknowledge innovative contributions to the Genre in contemporary writing. In this course we will read and discuss different concepts and different examples of Nature Writing from the time of Romanticism until today.

Course Details

• Lecturer: Dr. Marita Meyer
• Language requirements: English B2
• Place: Humboldt-Universit酹 zu Berlin, Room t.b.a.
• Time: t.b.a.

History as Progress? A Critical Genealogy of Western Modernity from 1784 to the Present

Course Description

This course traces the evolution of the twin discourse of history and progress in philosophy between 1784 and the present. We examine how the competing versions of this discourse created a powerful conceptual medium for western modernity to understand, experience, affirm, and criticize itself in exclusively temporal terms. By reading selections from Kant, Hegel, Marx/Engels, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Arendt, Fanon, Foucault, Habermas, and others, we critically explore a set of interconnected questions:

• Is history identical with progress?
• Does history, understood as progress, still condition the global realities of our Anthropocene present?
• Do history and progress designate universal processes of continuous social and technological emancipation or do they serve to justify oppression, violence, disruption, and loss?
• If we can learn from history, what does it teach us, not least for political action?
• How do we preserve and tell the stories of social groups and individuals that were marginalized, muted, or victimized by the twin discourse of history and progress?
• Are canon and tradition still valid notions for the humanities and beyond? For our critical genealogy, we also explore Berlin's urban space itself as the political and cultural arena in which some of the key thinkers of the twin discourse of history and progress lived and thought.

Course Details

• Lecturer: Dr. Christian Wollin
• Language requirements: English B2
• Place: Humboldt-Universit酹 zu Berlin, Room t.b.a.
• Time: t.b.a.