Special Subjects are grouped into programmes as described below. You can either choose subjects from these programmes or devise subjects of your own. The subjects correspond to areas of particular teaching and research strength in Oxford, but the list is by no means exhaustive and is subject to amendment.
These are the Special Subject options available in 2025-26. These are indicative of the course offerings for the sub-faculty, so applicants should note that not all options will run in all years, and some course content might change.
Medieval German
Women’s Writing in Medieval Germany (Hilary Term)
Convenor: Prof. Henrike Lähnemann
Within a German-speaking context, women's writing happens in a variety of forms and formats: visions and mystical revelations, life writing, religious song and poetry. One of the key works is the C13 'Fließendes Licht der Gottheit' by Mechthild of Magdeburg, but the Special Subject also offers scope to explore life writing (e.g. in the 'Schwesternbücher'), narrative forms, or religious song. The texts represent forms of 'including the excluded', and the course encourages an investigation of gender-specific aspects of female authorship, as well as issues such as the public and private dimensions of literature, the role of the vernacular, the reception of pre-modern writing on modern literature. The focus will be on texts in German, but it is also possible to study this option on the basis of a combination of Latin and German material.
Modern
Jews & Judaism in German Literature from 1740 to the Present (Michaelmas Term)
Convenor: Prof. David Groiser
This course examines the discourses around Jews and Judaism in Germany and Austria against the background of the history of Jewish emancipation, the resurgence of antisemitism, the Holocaust, and recent attempts to confront and comprehend this history. Within this framework, students may wish to give particular attention to one or more of the following: the participation of Jewish writers in the culture of the Enlightenment, as well as the forging of a specific Jewish form of religious Enlightenment in response to the challenges of modernity; the development of a complicated philosemitism within the discourses of emancipation and toleration, and of ant-Jewish and antisemitic images from the Romantics onwards, present within a wide range of texts whose overt ideology was often far more liberal; the complex Jewish identities of such writers as Mendelssohn, Maimon, Heine, Freud, Kafka, Schnitzler, Stefan and Arnold Zweig, Buber, Rosenzweig, Lasker-Schüler, Döblin, Roth or Kraus; the relationship between Jews in eastern and western Europe; attitudes to Hasidism and Kabbalah, neo-orthodoxy and reform; German Jews and the First World War; the ‘renaissance’ of Jewish culture in the Weimar Republic; languages of Judaism, particularly the relationship between German and Yiddish; the emergence of Zionism and Jewish nationalism; and representations of and responses to the Holocaust; conceptions of exile; and the question of whether a Jewish culture exists in present-day Germany and Austria.
Literature and Medicine 1770-1930 (Michaelmas Term)
Convenor: Prof. Barry Murnane
The relationship between literature and medicine is an important source of aesthetic developments in the modern era, helping to shape literary movements as diverse as Empfindsamkeit and Poetic Realism, Romanticism and Naturalism and helping to link writers like Goethe, Novalis, Büchner, Fontane, and Mann. There is no formal prescription and the course will allow you to examine a range of genres and writers including poetry and prose, scientific texts, and encyclopaedic literature, focusing on particular authors, periods, or on historical developments across the period as a whole. Comparative approaches are encouraged, with the opportunity to read developments in German culture alongside other European literatures. There is also opportunity to take a more theoretical focus, looking for example at issues such as affect, corporeality, and aesthetics. Some possible topics for discussion are: how literature deals mimetically with medical matters (death, concepts of illness and wellness, therapy); theories of imagination and feeling around 1800; the co-evolution of psychology in literature and clinical discourse; narrating illness; literature as medicine; depictions of medical practitioners; literature and drugs.
Hölderlin in the World (Michaelmas Term)
Convenor: Prof. Charlie Louth
Hölderlin’s work is both rooted in his native Swabia and unusually receptive to the way the local is bound up in the distant, the removed and the foreign. This goes beyond his deep interest in Ancient Greece and his attempts to see German and Germany in Greek terms. The world of his poems is permeable and full of references to places remote in time and space, including London, Tahiti and the Americas. Hölderlin was fascinated by journeys and the way they connect distant points and allow one to think of them in relation to one another. As well as the many actual journeys made and reflected on in his poems, there are the courses of rivers and mountain ranges, crossing and making borders and readable as signs of how history might develop. He pays particular attention to bird-flight. All these things reveal the world to be deeply interconnected, so that every landscape, real or cultural, is a hybrid landscape, both of its place and elsewhere.
Hölderlin is primarily a poet, and his poetry will form the main focus, but – partly via his friendships with Schelling and Hegel – he was closely involved in the development of post-Kantian philosophy, and his fragmentary philosophical and theoretical writings have also been returned to by many later philosophers. His poetry has drawn a large number of key 20th and 21st century thinkers, from Heidegger onwards, as well as poets from around the world. So this special subject offers an opportunity to read and write about Hölderlin’s work from a variety of perspectives, including comparative ones, noting the multiple relations that traverse it, run out into contemporary preoccupations and continue to make their way in the world today.
Initial reading list:
Theodor Adorno, ‘Parataxis: Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins’, in Noten zur Literatur III (Frankfurt, 1965) and elsewhere
David Constantine, Hölderlin (Oxford, 1988)
Winfried Menninghaus, Hälfte des Lebens: Versuch über Hölderlins Poetik (Frankfurt, 2005)
Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Nature, ed. by Rochelle Tobias (Edinburgh, 2020)
The History of the Future (Michaelmas Term)
Convenor: Prof. Bernhard Malkmus
Many of us regard the human sense of the future as being relatively fixed over the course of history. However, a closer engagement with social and cultural histories shows the degree to which the human understanding of the future has shifted over centuries. Especially since the Enlightenment, the relation between what the historian Reinhart Koselleck calls our ‘space of experience’ and our ‘horizon of expectation’ has changed significantly in European cultures. This development has gathered even more momentum since the end of WWII – the period on which will focus in this seminar. Through close readings of literary texts and cultural theories, we will investigate how concepts of the future have changed in the light of the Great Acceleration, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, digitisation and the unfolding global ecological crisis.
How have these changes shaped our perception of reality our and engagement with the present? How do our imaginaries of the future relate to specific cultures of memory? In what ways does the German intellectual tradition contribute to a deeper understanding of the histories of the future humans narrate to each other in a global context? What kind of role do literature and the arts play in present-day concepts of the future?
We will engage with a selection of modern literature ranging from Friedrich Nietzsche to W.G. Sebald and Iris Wolff, films from Werner Herzog to the Berlin School, cultural theories from Hannah Arendt to Ulrich Beck and Yuval Harari. With the help of these writers and thinkers we are asking ourselves: What kind of future are we as humans imagining in an increasingly humanoid and anthropomorphic world?
Nietzsche and His Impact (Hilary Term)
Convenor: Prof. David Groiser
Though largely ignored during his lifetime, Nietzsche was soon recognised as the philosopher of modernity. More radically, honestly and intelligently than anyone else, he explored the consequences that must follow if traditional religious belief and moral constraints are jettisoned to make way for a view of the universe based on scientific knowledge and the individual will. While his ideas about how to fill the resulting moral vacuum have been controversial, he is widely recognised as one of the most interesting – and entertaining – philosophers and ‘cultural critics’. He is also among the most brilliant of German stylists.
When Nietzsche began to be widely read in the 1890s, his ideas were found stimulating and liberating in the most varied quarters. There were Nietzscheans on the radical right and the revolutionary left, in the women’s movement and among Zionists. He was read avidly, but also critically, by writers as varied as Thomas Mann, Kafka, Rilke, Musil, Gottfried Benn, Alfred Döblin, Hermann Broch and Hermann Hesse, within cinema, as well as by theorists in many fields, from philosophy to political and critical theory, sociology, legal theory, psychoanalysis, literary and cultural theory, classical studies, anthropology, semiotics and even theology. Outside Germany, he was engaged with seriously by Yeats, Lawrence, Joyce, Stevens, Gide, Malraux, Camus, Belyi, Solvyov, D’Annunzio, and many others.
Students will be expected to know the following books by Nietzsche in particular detail: Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872), Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886), and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887), and to have read more widely in Nietzsche’s works. They will also study his reception, looking closely at a text or texts by one or more subsequent writers in relation to Nietzsche.
Cinema in a Cultural Context: German Film from 1930–2020 (Hilary Term)
Convenor: Prof. Ben Morgan
The course has two possible points of focus. The first is the study of German cinema between the coming of sound and the arrival of New German Cinema: 1930-1970 (the first German talkie was made in 1929; by 1970, Fassbinder had already made 4 feature films). The second is the cinema of the Berlin Republic, with a particular focus on the films of the Berlin School.
Topics for the period 1930-1970 will include propaganda and entertainment films in the Third Reich, the realism of the Rubble Films of the late 1940s, the different strategies for remembering and coming to terms with the past in the popular films of the 1950s and 1960s. German films of the period will be put in dialogue with relevant Hollywood productions of the period. The period includes the political ruptures of 1933, 1945, 1968, and the aesthetic ‘new beginning’ of the Oberhausen manifesto in 1962. But the focus of the course will be the continuities that can be observed in film style, narrative techniques and in the way film is used as a medium for reflecting on everyday problems during the period.
The Berlin School is the name given to a group of film makers who mostly studied at the Deutsche Film- und Ferhsehakademie Berlin with the filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944-2014) and who came to prominence at the start of the new millennium. Key figures include Thomas, Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Christian Petzold, Christoph Hochhäusler, and Maren Ade. Arslan first gained recognition with his migrant trilogy Geschwister-Kardesler (1997), Dealer (1999), and Der schöne Tag (2001). But like many other Berlin School filmmakers he is also interested in productive interrogations of genre film, such as the gangster film Im Schatten (2010) and the film Gold (2013), starring Nina Hoss, which re-imagines the Western. Nina Hoss is a recurring figure in the films in which Petzold explores the social landscape of a globalised world, and re-visits key moments from the recent past in search of counterfactual alternatives. Hoss features in Petzold’s Jerichow (2008), a re-making of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) which adapts the conventions of film noir for a 21st-century globalised capitalism. Other films to be studied would include Schanelec’s Marseille (2004) and Orly (2010); the tv-trilogy Dreileben (2011) which Hochhäusler made with Petzold and Dominik Graf (b. 1952) as part of an exchange between the three filmmakers about the uses of genre cinema; Maren Ade’s Alle Anderen (2009) and Toni Erdmann (2016); Petzold’s films for cinema, such as Die Innere Sicherheit (2000), Barbara (2012), Phoenix (2014), Transit (2018), Undine (2020), but also his work for tv, such as Toter Mann (2001), and the episodes he directed for the police procedural Polizeiruf 110. Films are available on dvd and many can also be viewed on streaming services. The films are largely available with English subtitles, so this Special Subject is also suitable for students interested in cultural studies or film studies. Over the 4 sessions, the aim would be to cover 4 or 5 films each time, focusing on a range of filmmakers and issues.
You can start familiarizing yourself with the vocabulary of film studies by reading David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction, currently in its 12th edition (you can read any edition). Otherwise, the best thing to do is to start watching films. For the 1930-1970 strand: You can work by director (e.g. Käutner, Harlan, Sierck), but it is often more productive to watch films with the same star (e.g. Heinz Rühman, Hans Albers, Ilse Werner, Zarah Leander), or from the same year, to get a clearer sense of continuities in style and approach. Similarly, for the Berlin School: watch as many of the films as you can but watch also films with the stars the directors regularly work with (e.g. Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Matthias Brandt, Paula Beer), or films made in same year as Berlin School productions.
Translation: Theory and Practice (German into English) (Hilary Term)
Convenor: Prof. Karen Leeder
This is a hands-on paper for those with a degree-level or native understanding of German, which asks students to work on the theory of translation, to reflect critically on existing translations from German, but also to offer a substantial translation they themselves have done and to reflect on their critical practice. The way the term is organised will depend on numbers subscribing and interests and will either be done in 4 or 6 sessions. A basic model might be something like this:
1. One or two essays on an issue of translation studies: e.g. Untranslatability; domestication/ foreignization; gender and translation; invisibility of the translator; prismatic translation; genre and translation etc.
2. Critical Comparison of translations. In this/these session(s) students would write a critical commentary on a translation or a comparative commentary.
3. Practical Translation: students would translate a short piece and offer an Introduction/Reflection on critical practice that engages with theoretical and practical issues.
4. Practical Translation 2: Students would submit two short pieces or one longer piece in any of these modes up to the normal word limit of the special subject. Those interested would ideally need to start keeping an eye out for possible translation material they might wish to work with.