Graduate Courses

The UCLA Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies offers a variety of graduate courses. Please see the Schedule of Classes on the Registrar’s Website for language courses. For a complete listing and description of department courses visit the UCLA General Catalog.

Below is a list of graduate courses taught under the ELTS banner. Students are encouraged to privilege these courses (200-level) as they make their course selections.

In certain cases, graduate students may enroll in upper-division undergraduate courses for graduate credit. Before you make a final decision about an undergraduate course (100-level), consult Professor Murat and the instructor of record.

Winter 2023

ELTS 202: Studies in History: Arendt’s Solidarity

The aim of this seminar is to introduce students to Hannah Arendt’s vexing conception of solidarity. Within different historical contexts of the Anglo-European world, she wondered how solidarity posed a political challenge of the first order, bringing the dissolution of contemporary sensus communis into much sharper relief. Students will examine her lifelong inquiries into solidarity across the Atlantic, including her repeated failures to stand with fellow Jews, German exiles or African and Native Americans in the United States. They will analyze Arendt’s major publications, unpublished archival records, and hardly known essays to investigate one of the most challenging political concepts in modernity. Other writers and thinkers whose works play prominent roles in this seminar include, among others, Augustine, Machiavelli, Tocqueville, Marx, Heidegger, Jaspers, Benjamin, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Gershom Scholem, and Hermann Broch.

ELTS 204: Translation Studies

This will be a workshop in translation accompanied by weekly readings in translation theory, from St. Jerome to Walter Benjamin, George Steiner and beyond. Most will be taken from Laurence Venuti’s anthology, The Translation Studies Reader, 4^th edition (2021). The course is open to all literarily oriented graduate students with competence in one of the following: Italian, French, Spanish, German, or Turkish. We will spend part of each class assessing a key essay in translation theory, and the rest critically examining several student renditions of texts (poetic or in short narrative), chosen in consultation with the instructor and distributed to participants in advance. The seminar will culminate in the submission of a publication prospectus, an aim that should be pondered as early in the quarter as possible. We all wish to learn from one another in this course.

German 265: Genealogies of Freedom: A Transcultural Prospective

The concept of freedom and its associated practices remain essential to the self-definition of modern individuals and communities, but freedom has recently found a peculiar fate: it is no longer considered one social value among several, such as democracy, equality, justice, and “domestic tranquility,” but has become for many the only value: an individual’s life is better the “freer” it is, and a community is better the more it fosters individual freedom, irrespective of all else. Ghere is a nest of confusions here, and in order to deal with we must first understand the nature of freedom itself. The times thus cry out for what Eric Foner claims America never produced: a theoretical account of freedom such as John Stuart Mill produced for Britain in his “On Liberty.” But Mills’ approach, which is to assumes a particular definition of freedom and attempt to draw its limits, will not suffice here, for how freedom is to be defined is precisely the issue at stake. Since, as philosophers like Kant, Plato, and Spinoza tell us, there are no uncontroversial examples of freedom, we must turn to thought about freedom, as deposited in intellectual history. This course will therefore adopt a “genealogical” approach, selectively tracing what Nietzsche calls “the descent of our moral prejudices” regarding freedom from the Greeks on. This investigation will be pluralistic in a Foucaldian sense, examining how the current situation of freedom arose transculturally, over millennia, from developments in several different fields: everyday life, religion, politics, and philosophical reflection. Course work may be done in English, French, or German. Readings and class discussion will be in English.

Requirements: one class presentation, the format of which will be discussed at the first session; final paper. Auditors will be required to do a presentation.