Europe, Questions of Identity and Unity

3 units

Nation states and their cultures have been changed by globalization. Within this process, continentalisation has played an important role. The European Union is only half a century old, but continental unity has been discussed and demanded by European writers and thinkers for hundreds of years. We will read essays on Europe (its identity, its cultural diversity and its cultural roots, contemporary problems, and future goals) by writers like Coleridge, Madame de Staël, Novalis, Chateaubriand, Heine, Nerval, Hugo, Thomas Mann, Ernst Jünger, T.S. Eliot, Klaus Mann, de Madariaga, Kundera, Enzensberger, Frischmuth, and Drakulic; we will discuss studies re-inventing Europe by philosophers like the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Ortega y Gasset; we will deal with the mythological figure of Europa and her resurrections in the world of art; we will study the Nazarene painters of the early 19th century in Rome and will discuss portraits of Bonaparte by French painters of the time. CompLit students will meet with the instructor for an additional two hours per month.