Modernism

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Some of the most intriguing German novels are written in an epoch which we have come to call ‘modernism’. Modernist literature has been understood as a response to a social and cultural crisis. As most accounts of literary history state: The rapid urbanization of Germany, the advent of new media, and the repercussions of World War I were echoed by often fragmented and distorted texts which experimented with new literary forms. Rather than following this widespread narrative, the course investigates the discourses from which modernist cultural criticism drew. Most importantly, we ask how modernism understood modernity itself: How did literary texts in the first decades of the 20th century represent modern culture and society? The seminar surveys some of the most important modernist literary texts. Apart from Bertolt Brecht’s Mann ist Mann and short prose by Siegfried Kracauer and Franz Kafka, the seminar focuses on the following novels: Hermann Broch: Die Schlafwandler. Eine Romantrilogie (Suhrkamp; ISBN-13: 9783518388631) [We only read the first novel] Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz. Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf (Fischer Taschenbuch; ISBN-13: 9783596904587) Irmgard Keun: Das kunstseidene Mädchen (List Taschenbuch Verlag; ISBN-13: 9783548600857) Thomas Mann: Der Tod in Venedig (Fischer Taschenbuch; ISBN-13: 9783596112661)