The Courses

The foundation of the Holocaust Studies Program at The University of Texas at Dallas is the curriculum offered by the School of Arts and Humanities on the Shoah. Taught by Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, the interdisciplinary structure of the program affords students the opportunity to design their degree plans and undertake subsequent research on the Holocaust from the historical, political, religious, philosophical, socio-cultural, or artistic perspectives. This wide-ranging approach furnishes students with a broad base from which they are able to build their Master's Portfolio and Dissertations in the field of Holocaust Studies.

History of the Holocaust
HUHI 7345

The Holocaust, the annihilation of six million Jews under the Nazis, looms large as one of the major cataclysms of history. It involves both a monumental assault against millions of defenseless people and a brutally imposed process which reduced the victims into matter while they were still alive. It also signifies the destruction of the age-old East- European Jewish culture. Although the killing stopped after the Third Reich was defeated, this destruction process has not ceased to put pressure on our contemporary world and cast a shadow on the modern Western consciousness. Challenging our fundamental assumptions and values, it raises questions of enormous significance: "How was it possible for a state to systematize, mechanize, and socially organize the Shoah?" "How could the Nazis in 12 short years unhinge the basic structure of Western civilization?" And "How could European societies, including their moral and academic institutions, fail to defeat and protest against Nazi ideology before the destruction of European Jewry?"

This course searches for answers to these questions and raises many others. It locates and studies the roots of the "final solution" by analyzing the shapes and forms of some of the earlier persecutions. Using a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach, including films and works of art, it ponders the circumstances and causes of the Holocaust and considers the psychological, social, moral, theological, and aesthetic dilemmas it has continued to raise.

Course Syllabus.


The Holocaust in Literature
HUSL 6378

The enormous pressure the Holocaust exerts on our contemporary world manifests itself in a variety of ways, among them, in our persistent efforts to evoke, define, and explain this cataclysmic event, and to incorporate it into our creative imagination. Besides ongoing evaluation and re-evaluation of the Shoah in the fields of historical research, moral philosophy, and social studies, there is a massive body of literature and art that has arisen in its wake, ranging from eyewitness accounts to novels, short stories, and poetry; from music to painting, sculpture, and film. The purpose of this seminar is to consider some of these artistic endeavors and the psychological, moral, and aesthetic tensions the Holocaust has imposed upon our contemporary consciousness, and the role it plays in the late twentieth-century literary imagination.

Course Syllabus..


Between Tradition and Modernity:
The Literature of Weimar Germany
HUSL 6370

This course examines some of the most significant literary works written in the period of the Weiman Republic (1918-1933). But it also pays attention to the cultural-political forces that shaped the artistic imagination of the time as well as the formative influences of the era that preceded it. This study centers mostly on primary sources -novels, short stories, poems, plays, and essays, including confessions, and statements of creative writers, artists, and critics of art. Our approach provides insight into the artistic and intellectual achievement that characterized the literature and culture of the Weimar Republic, but also into the cultural and intellectual tensions and transitions making themselves felt in Germany before and during World War I, into the disillusionment following the war, and the polarization of the country's culture, including the major social, political, and ideological upheavals during the 1920's and 1930's.


The German Mind: From Lessing to Nietzsche
HUSL 6309

Literary history has only rarely experienced such concentration of emotional and intellectual energies as those manifesting themselves in Germany between 1750-1875. Indeed, the artistic output of this period appears to be on such scale and of such stature that it demands to be discussed on terms no other than those of the Attic tragedy or the Homeric epic. Also, to study this German intellectual and artistic output means to explore the cultural forces that have at once appropriated the rich lineage of the European tradition and anticipated most major artistic movements of the nineteenth- and twentieth- century. The focus of this course is on the writings of such dramatists, writers, and poets as Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, Kleist, Hölderlin, Novalis, Eichendorff, Graf von Platen, Heine, and Büchner and of such philosophers as Kant, Winckelmann, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Nietzsche.