GERM-395 Seminar: Vienna Around 1900 - Literature, the Arts, and the Fashioning of Self

Schneider, Helmut

Seminar Dates: Feb 9-Apr 22

Viennese culture around the last-but-one turn of the century represents an explosion of modernism – not just in the German-speaking countries, but in Europe and the West at large - in many ways: in literature and the arts, in architecture and city planning, in fashion, in philosophy and psychology, even in politics (anti-Semitism, socialism and pre-fascism).

This course is designed to introduce some of the most important writers and intellectuals as well as artists of the epoch: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Ernst Mach, Weininger, Karl Kraus, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, Richard Strauss. – Central topics, among others, will be: the demise of the liberal bourgeois notion of the “subject”; eroticism, hysteria and the rise of the unconscious; the city and the flaneur (Spaziergänger); the culture of the theater and the theatricality of public life; the Jewish heritage; Adolf Hitler’s Viennese experience.

Suggested introductory reading: Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Arts and Culture

Requirements:

• intensive class participation
• two short formal oral presentations on selected texts/works
• two short papers
• final paper

Credits: 3

Prerequisites: None

Other academic years
There is information about this course number in other academic years:

• 2004-2005 Fall and Spring
• 2009-2010 Fall and Spring
• 2011-2012 Fall and Spring

More information
Look for this course in the schedule of classes.

The academic department web site for this program may provide other details about this course.