Italy's roles in German culture have been many: harmonious classical model, sensuous “other” of the inhibited (but “developing”) Northern European, and dream of a past that implicitly challenges modern societies to reinvent their history. The course traces the phases of this cultural relationship primarily through German texts of the 18 th , 19 th and 20 th centuries: by Goethe ( Italian Journey ), ETA Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Heine ( Florentine Nights ), culminating in several stories by Thomas Mann, including Death in Venice and Mario and the Magician.

In the 20 th century the tradition of the Northern gaze upon the South was turned into a ghastly travesty by the horrors of World War Two. We will read a major Italian text of the 1950s that confronts and derides the German story: Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz . Yet a famous novel of the era (Lampedusa's The Leopard , set in 1960s Sicily) reclaims the tradition's structuring of subjective and familial development. Finally we engage a German retrospect on World War Two (Koeppen's Death in Rome ) and the new Euro-cosmopolitanism of Elsa Morante's Arturo's Island.

Evaluation
The class is a seminar, with student class participation essential. Writing expectations: a midterm essay (4-5 pp) analyzing a single work; and a final paper (10-12 pp) comparing at least 2 historically diverse texts. No exams.

James L. Rolleston BA in French and German (Cambridge), MA in German (Minnesota), PhD in German (Yale). Professor of German Literature at Duke. Member of the editorial board of the “German Quaterly”. Taught at Yale University. Was president of the Kafka Society of America and of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. He is author of, among other things: Rilke in Transition: An Exploration of His Earliest Poetry, Yale University Press 1970 ; Kafka's Narrative Theater , Pennsylvania State University Press 1974 ; Narratives of Ecstasy: Romantic Temporality in Modern German Poetry, Wayne State University Press 1987. Edited Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Trial, Prentice-Hall 1976 ; Contemporary German Poetry , special issue of “Studies in Twentieth Century Literature”, Vol. 21, no. 1 (Winter 1997); A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka , Camden House 2002. Translated: Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography , by Bernd Witte. Wayne State University Press 1991; The New Trial , by Peter Weiss. Duke University Press 2001.