ROMS 4620 - Emerging Modernity - Culture and Politics in Nineteenth Century France

(HB)

Spring. 4 credits.

Co-meets with ROMS 6620.

E. Traverso.

Nineteenth century France is an extraordinarily interesting laboratory of cultural and political modernity. In between 1789 and the Commune of 1871, Paris is a place of revolutions and counter-revolutions – as well as the capital of European exiles, from Germany to Poland – in which the ideas and the utopian imagination of the new century permanently clash with tradition and conservatism. Captured by the myth of Progress and symbolized by the Eiffel Tower, modernity appears as a conflicting landscape in which the dream of a liberated human community and the construction of a colonial empire merge in the framework of an invented Republican nationalism. The seminar will explore these topics analyzing both images and texts.

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