Following the definition of 'practice' conceptualised in "After Virtue," the paper argues that literature as creative writing and reading is a MacIntyrean practice. Literature's key internal goods are spelled out: the common aesthetic enjoyment achieved by the writer's ability to create a truthful fictional narrative the reader is drawn…

German colonialism has long been treated as a sort of footnote in the epoch of the Empire due to its relatively short time span. The focus was mostly on the reconstruction of a story of 'white' men -- as the story of pioneers, 'discoverers', missionaries or traders. But how were children included in the colonial project? This article deals with…

Given that societies across the globe are increasingly multicultural and multilingual, the notion of communicative competence grounded in constricting definitions of national cultures and languages reflects neither our instructional realities nor the sociolinguistic reality of the languages and cultures we teach. To foster students' development of…

"Fairy Tales and the Transmission of Prejudice" is a unit in a lecture course on fairy tales that draws on research on anti-Semitism in 18th- and 19th-century German literature and culture, mapping questions raised in 18th- and 19th-century tales onto contemporary issues: The unit traces a trajectory from the Enlightenment to the…

Where are German Studies heading? To answer this, a look backward into the development of German Studies might be useful. Starting with a brief overview, from the establishment of the first chair in 1776 to selected discussions of the curriculum of German Studies in English-speaking countries from the 19th century on, a number of -- at times…

Recent debates about the future of academia have focused primarily on teaching the STEM subjects. This is certainly a valuable call for action, but it also threatens to ignore the significant contributions of the humanities and other fields. This article presents a workable alternative by way of looking at more technical writings by 18th-century…

This paper deals with the question of revolutionary literary texts. It examines the painful, or even brutal, measures that could be taken at times when the revolutionary figures depicted in the literary texts are themselves subject to control by a party line. While this paper shows that the noble intentions would not suffice for conducting…

Italy opened the doors of its universities to female students in 1875. The general view was that very few women were clever enough to obtain a degree, so they would not threaten social stability. Female professors would be even rarer -- a few exceptional "male" women. Access to the professions was impossible in the case of the legal…

This article argues that vital resources for teaching the relationship of German and the global to advanced undergraduate language students can be found in a critical approach to the rich tradition of cosmopolitanism in canonical German-language texts. One especially rich vein of this tradition is the historical depiction of relationships between…

This paper frames the problem underlying the cross-cultural Organizing Curriculum Change (OCC) study of state-based curriculum-making. The paper discusses the increased use by states over the past two decades of the century-old instrument of the state-based curriculum and the tool of the curriculum commission. The paper contrasts the slender…

This article is both an argument for and an example of portraiture, a methodology for conducting and presenting qualitative research which, though familiar to many social scientists and educational researchers, remains relatively unknown within the humanities. The author details one kind of practice within the scholarship of teaching and…