Coordinates of Modernism

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Modernism can be defined temporally, spanning as little as a few decades or up to 100 years, and spatially, as an international phenomenon. Most of all, however, modernism can be understood as a search for adequate forms that support the interpretative task that an intense period of unprecedented experiences and radical changes imposed on art. The response of literature and visual arts to such experiences was not a mimetic one anymore. Rather, the task of art was to make this new and changing world accessible and understandable by creating literary and visual forms that were able to grasp the new experiences caused by increased industrialization, urbanization and new technologies: new forms of poetry (Trakl, Benn), a new form of the novel (Rilke, Kafka, Döblin), or new forms in filmmaking (Ruttmann, Lang, Pabst). This graduate course focuses on literature and films in German modernism of the early 20th century. After an introduction to modernism and its relationship to the classical avant-garde, including covering the various “isms” at the beginning of the 20th century, we will follow a loose chronological order from 1900 to the 1930s, when we explore modernism via various themes: Sprachkrise, Kunstkrise, Identitätskrise, Bilder des Krieges, Metropolis und Montage, Technologie und Sexualität, Die Neue Frau At the end of the course, we will reflect on the coordinates of modernism by discussing its international traces and by looking both at its starting point in the late-19th century and examining its afterlife in post-war Germany.