Increasing Motivation and Engagement in Advanced Literature Courses: Visions of Home: Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities)

Goethe’s complex novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, with its focus on enhancing the home and its landscape, an activity that ends in chaos and destruction, allows for a problematization of the Enlightenment credo of perfectibility of humanity and its environment. To increase student motivation, I prefer thematic courses instead of relying on survey courses. In particular, I favor topics that lend themselves to comparing and contrasting the students’ contemporary experience with the historical context. Creating a link between the past and the present, thus offering both familiarity and alterity, facilitates access to the respective theme. At the same time, employing typical pedagogies used in the beginning language courses (images, activities beyond questions, worksheets, games) also in the advanced language, literature, and culture courses like the one described here, fosters stronger engagement with the literary text. This fourth-year course, taught in German, meets our “Learning Goals”, emphasizes transferable skills, and contributes to project-based learning.