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Course Of The Month
Bark! the "Germanic" language rings — in this bizarre UNC-Chapel Hill courseOr, I know why the caged dog barks
By Jon SandersJanuary 01, 2004 Dog’s are man’s best friend, it’s said, and deliciously absurd courses are CM’s best friend. And this month’s selection is a vewwy, vewwy good boy, oh wes he is, wes oh wes he is!
It’s a course offered by the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is this:
GER 006: Canine Cultural Studies
Now please understand; CM has limited space in which to try to answer the question, “Just what the crud is ‘Canine Cultural Studies?’” We simply haven’t the space to answer such questions as: “Why does the German Dept. offer Canine Cultural Studies? What, is barking now a Germanic language? Is UNC-CH really pulling our legs?”
According to the course overview, students will “ask such questions as: When in history were dogs treated more as companions than workers and why? How does our representation of the dog relate to how we define our own” — here it comes; you know every course description must include The List — “sexuality, class race, nation, and gender? How does the dog delineate between private and public spaces? ...” (There are many more such questions; you get the idea.)
The web site for the course contains a wealth of material. (Or possibly evidence of an elaborate hoax? We hope.) Here is a small sample of questions the class will ask or items the students will learn:
• “Can a woman’s canine affections break apart normative gender roles?”
• “Talking Dogs: The literary tradition of dogs who talk. How literature articulates the leap of fantasy into a world that seems fuller, more sensuous, and more natural than our own.”
• “Dog Rights and the Pit Bull Debate: The tensions between animal inarticulateness and human morals. The role of the media in sensationalizing the debate and playing up class differences.”
• “the field of Canine Cultural Studies is vast”
• “The Rabies Scare and Sexuality” (class lecture)
• “That He-Dog Look: ‘Turner and Hooch’” (film in class)
• “How does Hooch signify a tough masculinity? How does he then reprogram Turner to be a ‘real’ man?” (assignment)
• “Women and Their Dogs: Dog Love, “Unconditional Lovers” and “Sex and the Single Dog” (class lecture)
• “As you read Sue Coe for the first time, mark an X in the margin at each point where you felt a personal challenge to your attitudes or beliefs. Make a brief note in the margin about what you feel or about what in the text created the challenge. Now look again at the places you marked in the text where you felt personally challenged. Email me what patterns you see.” (assignment, referring to Coe’s book Pit’s Letter, in which, according to Amazon.com, “a hapless canine describes her desolate life”)
Naturally, the course can be turned into “a service component by volunteering at the Orange County Animal Shelter and writing” about it.
*** Update: added February 1, 2004 ***
Last month CM left open the possibility that the UNC-Chapel Hill German Languages course “Canine Cultural Studies” was an elaborate hoax. Now CM is pleased to report that it isn’t. As the professor of the course, Alice Kuzniar, writes on her departmental web page:
Most recently, my teaching and research have taken a new turn! I taught a first year seminar entitled “Canine Cultural Studies.” Those who know me personally also know of my passion for whippets. For this class, in which we studied art, film, and literature on dogs, I also organized an exhibition at the Ackland Art Museum and took my students to the American Kennel Club headquarters in Raleigh NC, where they could discuss canine legislation, breeding practices, and other hotly debated issues with the directors of various department at the AKC. I realized, though, that, despite all the exposure my students had to pets and despite all their enthusiasm for dogs, their vocabulary for discussing them was strictly circumscribed. Their writing was journalistic and would not allow them to explore the complexities in the works of Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, or J.M. Coetzee. I decided then that it was imperative to write about the difficulties of expressing the ineffable communication between dogs and humans-and to see how the literary and visual arts explore this dilemma.
In my forthcoming book Melancholia’s Dog, inspired by debates in animal rights philosophy, I will devote chapters to how various artists address the issues of muteness, intimacy, shame, and death with respect to dogs.
Kuzniar earlier states that “My ongoing captivation with ‘Nekromantik’ has even taken the form of a graduate course on ‘The Undead’” (CM is sad to note that it missed the opportunity to honor that course). Other courses Kuzniar has taught include “The New Queer Cinema,” “Women in German Cinema,” “German Cinema: An (Inter-)national Film History,” and “Postmodernist Aesthetics: Handke and Wenders.”
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