Department of English

This new course is designed for students of literature, landscape architecture and urban planning, and cultural history in general. It will explore the ideas of, and attitudes towards, landscape in selected works by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and consider his own considerable practical involvement in reshaping the town and gardens of Weimar. The course will provide the larger context of German literature, aesthetics and landscape taste, and politics of the later 18th and early 19th centuries. We will consider the development of new gardens and parks in a "new" style (e.g. Wörlitz); they were regarded to be less formal and more "natural" than their French predecessors. We will study the English models for this movement, and offer and particular attention to the major German theorist, C.C.L. Hirschfeld, who would soon become famous outside Germany as well.
 
Readings and Discussion in English