Referat

Today I had my first Referat, or class presentation. Referate vary here, and can last from a short 15 or so minutes to the full 1.5 hour class (my poor nursing student roommate has had two of these in the last semester), depending on the type of class and professor. Fortunately, mine was more on the short side, and I also had two German Referat partners.

The topic of our Text-Analysis Seminar class today was the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler and his short novel Lt. Gustl. It's considered the very first stream-of-consciousness work in German literature.

I have this good sense of accomplishment today, because my part of the Referat was explaining stream-of-consciousness (Bewußtsseinsstrom) as a literary technique and it's role in German literature. I was in jitters preparing for it, but all I did was write down a handful of Schlagwörter ("keywords") on a small note card to glance at while speaking, and in the end I pulled it off with several comments of kudos after class was over. As we went up, one partner of mine introduced who would be presenting Arthur Schnitzler's biography (Katharina), Lt. Gustl (herself), and Stream-of-Consciousness (me). Then the professor laughed and said, "Wow, you guys gave the poor exchange student the hardest part."

So I get rather bothered and bored when presentations are given and the presenters do hardly anything but read from the handout that they prepared and gave to the class. Duh. The class can read that themselves. Even if you just reiterate what's on the page, I feel that it's simply professional... and more bad-ass... to do it largely from memory or with very few prompts. Also... my train of thought went something like, I'm an exchange student. This will be especially lame if I read off the page. If I want any respect or to make an impression, I need to do this like giving a presentation on a complicated topic requiring a vocabulary that I barely half know in German and might not even completely understand in my mother language is my job.

Mission accomplished. (*cue delighted rocking out*.)

Sorry, all this probably means next to nothing for you, but it was kind of big to me and I feel well-accomplished with myself, so I had to get it out somewhere. I'm going to go watch House now... Ironically, I had never seen it in the States when I was there, and I'm currently borrowing the box set from a German friend of mine.