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 2026-27. 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
Middle High German Courtly Literature (Hilary Term)
Convenor: Prof. Annette Volfing
Courtly literature in medieval German spans the period from Lambrecht’s Alexander c. 1160 to the Minnesang of the later 13th and early fourteenth century. The course centres around Veldeke’s Eneide, the romances of Hartmann, Wolfram and Gottfried with the option to look also at poetry and at post-classical romance. Students are encouraged to tackle new texts not covered in their earlier studies, and to approach the texts with a diversity of methods ranging from more traditional literary approaches to gender issues and cultural history.
Modern
Nietzsche and his Impact (Michaelmas 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.
The Bildungsroman (Michaelmas Term)
Convenor: Dr. Alexandra Hertlein
The Bildungsroman, the novel centring on its protagonist’s development from youth to adulthood, has been widely considered the characteristically German form of the novel, thanks largely to the cultural prestige of its chief exemplar, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-6). The genre can, however, be followed back to Wieland’s witty philosophical novel Agathon (1766-7) and Moritz’s searching psychological and autobiographical novel Anton Reiser (1785-90); and it runs forward through the Romantics (Novalis, Brentano, Eichendorff), who combined homage with criticism in their reception of Goethe, through the qualified realism of Mörike, Stifter and Keller. The genre was also adapted for the purposes of feminism (Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie, 1895) and Jewish emancipation (Franzos’s Der Pojaz, 1905), while in the twentieth century it has been modified or parodied by such writers as Rilke, Hesse, Thomas Mann and Günter Grass, and in the twenty-first century by Christian Kracht.
By studying a selection from this corpus, candidates will appreciate the range and continuity of German fiction, and its ability to address in literary form some of the central problems of modern culture.
Writing Rivers: National Identities, Transnational Contexts, and the Environment (Michaelmas Term)
Convenor: Dr. Joanna Neilly
This subject analyses multiple literary and cultural significances of rivers. It takes a cross-temporal approach, comparing Romantic-era aesthetics with contemporary responses and theories from the Environmental Humanities.
The main focus is German-language representations of rivers in literature, although the double nature of rivers ? as territorial borders and natural phenomena that cross borders ? means that comparative approaches are encouraged. In the Romantic era, rivers took on special significance: Friedrich Schlegel’s Rheinfahrt and the invention of the Lorelei legend might be linked back to Georg Forster’s Ansichten vom Niederrhein but also forwards, to Heine’s Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen. If Heine and Wilhelm Müller are more ambivalent about the mythology of rivers, it holds strong in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. This period also presents an opportunity to interrogate scientific travel writing as a cultural product of empire – Alexander von Humboldt’s writings about the Orinoco are important here.
Students are encouraged, if interested, to bring in comparative readings from the 20th-century or contemporary literary landscape. A striking example is Bachmann’s Malina, in which the Danube is a landscape of violence in the context of the Holocaust. Jelinek likewise questions the aestheticization of rivers in her experimental Winterreise, as part of her longstanding engagement with Austrian Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Yet the Romantic connection between rivers and wanderers survives in a new form, for example in Esther Kinsky’s Am Fluss, which investigates urban riverscapes and subjectivity, or in Christian Petzold’s film Undine with its urban reworking of the Romantic myth.
In the seminars you can expect to discuss poems by Friedrich Hölderlin and Wilhelm Müller, Romantic fairy tales with riverine settings such as Hoffmann’s ‘Der goldene Topf’ and Goethe’s ‘Märchen’, and imperial-era travel writing, as well as recent developments in environmental approaches. You are encouraged to develop your own ideas and independent reading for the portfolio submission.
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)
Walter Benjamin and Dora Sophie Kellner: Weimar Journalism in Context (Hilary Term)
Convenor: Prof. Carolin Duttlinger
Walter Benjamin is one of the most prolific and versatile writers of the Weimar Republic, and the legacy of his theoretical and literary works continues into the present day. Given the breadth of Benjamin’s oeuvre, we will focus on one particular aspect of his texts: his role as a commentator on and critic of the Weimar Republic, its cultural life, technological innovations and social dynamics, as it manifests itself through his journalism. The seminars will focus on select texts which illustrate Benjamin’s roles as a literary critic, as a radio presenter and journalist, a media theorist and political commentator. Benjamin’s writings will be studied alongside those of his (ex-)wife Dora Sophie Kellner, herself a prolific journalist, editor and translator, who writes on a range of issues, such as gender, body culture, travel and food.
German Nature Writing: Engaging with Reality in the Age of AI (Hilary Term)
Convenor: Prof. Bernhard Malkmus
Nature Writing encompasses a diverse range of literary genres that reflect on the reality of nature and the concept of ‘nature’ alike. In an age of perpetual environmental crisis, it is a particularly powerful medium for challenging hidden assumptions of how we conceive of reality and the human condition in present-day culture.
Nature Writing often dramatizes human engagement with the land and modes of place-making; it also offers an imaginative space for human encounters with other-than-human lifeforms. It is a cultural practice of resonance that seeks to take readers outside their anthropocentric mould and to facilitate imaginative contact with realities often marginalised in industrial societies. Part of that practice is also the experience of embodiment that is rooted in a sharpening of the human senses and an awareness of human creatureliness.
In an age of AI, nature writing inadvertently becomes a form of political resistance, that questions the predominant culture of surveillance and extraction. Within the production-oriented paradigm of the present-day university, nature writing is an invitation to practice ‘slow reading’ and pay attention to rhythms of life beyond the doctrine of ‘work hard, play hard’. Literary authors discussed in this seminar include J.W. Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Lehmann, Esther Kinsky, Friedericke Mayröcker, Daniela Danz.
To fully appreciate the power of nature writing in our time and age, the seminar will engage with readings of the analytic philosophers Stanley Cavell and Ernst Tugendhat, who reflected on the role of a language that is attentive to realities “beyond the human” (Paul Celan) for democracy. This will be embedded within wider reflections on the cultural history and cognitive science of reading (Jürgen Habermas, Byung-Chul Han, Maryanne Wolff).
The seminar will end with a nature writing practice in the Oxford Botanical Gardens.
Translation: Theory and Practice (German into English) (Hilary Term)
Convenor: Prof. Karen Leeder
This is a hands-on paper for those with native or near native English and 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. An essay 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 1: 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.