"Language Trailer Courses Broaden Opportunities for German Language Students
Seemingly far from the hustle and bustle of a rainy January afternoon on the Seattle campus, graduate teaching assistant Lena Heilmann leads advanced language students in a discussion of the intricacies of German Romanticism. The course is one in a series of language trailers offered in conjunction with the Center for West European Studies that give students proficient in German the opportunity to use their language skills to complement coursework in International Studies.
Lena’s trailer, “Topics in German Romanticism,” parallels the topics and themes of Professor Sabine Wilke’s English-language “European Romanticism” course, which is required for all European Studies majors regardless of their chosen language concentration. In addition to the readings, lectures and discussions in Prof. Wilke’s course, the trailer students engage challenging and obscure German language texts addressing Romantic philosophy, fairy tales, art, and nature. But instead of a course of sixty, the trailer allows students a more intimate forum in which to discuss the texts entirely in German. Mark Donahue, a European Studies and History major enrolled in both courses, notes, “I think that language trailers help to supplement larger courses...Looking at examples of Kunstmärchen and the philosophy behind Romanticism really helps me to further appreciate what is going on in the European Romanticism course.” Political Science major Erich Jena adds, “Being part of a language trailer gives us the opportunity to examine texts presented in their original form and provides us a different set of skills than the other students in the partner course, which affords us a much richer knowledge of the materials presented.” Bobby Hines, a European Studies major, observes, “The language trailer gives us an opportunity to focus on specific aspects of German Romanticism...It’s a great way to develop our conversational German, but it also gives us an edge over those enrolled only in the European Romanticism course.""

Reflektiert Lessings Trauerspiel Miss Sara Sampson (1755) die so genannte 'anthropologische Wende' des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts? Eine hermeneutisch-kritische Lesart von Saras Traum als Schlüsselerlebnis menschlicher Erfahrung legt eine Kritik Lessings an der Anthropologie als Wissenschaft im frühen 18. Jahrhundert nahe--so meine These im Folgenden.

The modeling of thermal residual stresses generated in TaC/stellite and TiC/stellite composite surface layers produced by the oscillating electron beam remelting on low alloys steel is presented. The homogenization method is applied to analyze the real composite microstructures by utilizing the digital image-based (DIB) geometric modeling technique. Two scales of elastic stress analysis are studied: macroscopic one referring to the global structure of composite layer produced over the substrate of low alloy steel and microscopic, comprising the selected unit cell of composite microstructure. The results of the analysis show the microscopic stress to be few times higher than the macroscopic one with stress level much above the elastic limit of matrix material, which implies the development of plastic field around the inclusions. The ceramic inclusions within the unit cell are found to be under high compressive stresses. Also, the composite surface layer stays in compression, mainly by the influence of the stress component parallel to the layer/ substrate interface. The effect of hardphase volume fraction is examined and it is found that for a small volume fractions the macro and micro stress does not differ substantially between composites with TaC and TiC hardphases despite their mismatch in thermophysical properties. Also, the stress modeling is presented for the composite containing other inclusions and the problem of the selection between 2D and 3D model for the stress analysis is discussed.

Especially in the migrations, explosions, expansions, and contractions of species assembled under the term "biological invasion," the very proliferation of the biophysical world is increasingly perceived and conceived in ecological and economic arenas as the unmitigated disaster of the 21st century. This paper looks at the turbulent outbreak of undomesticated species from established frontiers in order to demonstrate the astonishing capacity of nonhuman life to opportunistically appropriate the space-time compression called globalization for their own proliferation. What is known as "bioinvasion" or "species invasion" is reevaluated as an invasion of monstrous nonspecies into the biological, glossed by Derrida as “the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.”

The law of literary work in Robert Walser, its ergo-nomos, develops out of a neglect of ergonomic principles in the office workspace. In this respect Walser’s work could be characterized as a poetics of useless furniture. His stories take shape on writing desks that do not fit their figures, and his narrators become unemployed in order to take a stand against unusable furniture. According to Walser’s ergonomics, they work while taking a break from work: in an interval of not working and not writing, in an interval of walking.

Das Formgesetz der Literatur Robert Walsers, sein Ergo-Nomos, lässt sich auf ergonomische Prinzipien beziehen, im Falle Walsers ihre Vernachlässigung im Büro. Die Figuren seiner Geschichten arbeiten zumeist an Schreibpulten, an denen sie sich krumm machen müssen, um überhaupt schreiben zu können. Um zu sich selbst Stellung beziehen zu können, müssen sie zunächst stellenlos werden. Walsers Ergonomie entsprechend arbeiten sie, während sie von der Arbeit pausieren: in einem Intervall des Nicht-Arbeitens und Nichts- Schreibens, einem Intervall des Gehens.

Die schweigsame, steinerne Dauer, die Stifters Granit zu verkörpern scheint, beginnt bei genauem Lesen – zwischen den verschiedenen Fassungen des Textes, aber auch in der Bildlichkeit des Steins selbst – zu bröckeln: Als könne sich auch der härteste Stein nicht einem Bedeuten entziehen, das ihn mit feinen Rissen durchzieht, nicht um artikulierte Zeichen, sondern um Schutt, Schotter und Er- schütterungen zu produzieren.

Literary writing has operated as a space of inquiry unsettling the literal and figurative ground on which thinking takes place. From Hölderlin’s invocations to the ether, to Walter Benjamin’s characterization of Baudelaire’s poetry as unfathomable, a certain tradition of writing, particularly in German letters, takes shape around a critique of gravity. Against the background of a geopoetics, I propose to turn to the question of an inconstant and inconsistent ground in Paul Celan’s ‘geological lyric’ by explicating the relationship in his writing between the earth and its unthought other: air. This reading has as its object of inquiry what I am calling Celan’s aerography, which is doubly articulated in the turn to aerial space in his poetry and in his articulation of the work of air in those terrestrial landscapes formed and deformed by aeolian processes. I argue that the radically dissipative geographies evoked in his poems could extend critical geographic inquiry into a multiple and turbulent materiality; however, the sheer spectrality of the material world in Celan’s poetry seems to require an (a)material criticism, that is, a materiality without matter.