GERST 6230 - [Aesthetic Turns: The Fin-de-Siecle]

Fall or Spring. Next Offered: 2019-2020. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Anchor Course.

E. Siegel.

This anchor seminar offers an interdisciplinary examination of the fin-de-siècle as a crucial turning point in literature, art (painting, music, theater), architecture, psychoanalysis as well as literary and cultural criticism. We will focus particularly on the “Wiener Moderne” as a laboratory for the negotiation of the relationship between tradition and innovation (“decadence”), between art and life (“aestheticism”). This entails an exploration of experiments with literary language and form (short prose, essay, interior monologue) and of crucial concepts at the threshold of modernity: Sexuality and gender, history and myth, representation and the limits thereof, and, as the central, precarious and ‘nervous’ center: the decentered subject. “Viennese modernism” (including current critical standpoints) will be supplemented by the investigation of modernisms at the periphery of the Austrian Empire, i.e. Prague and Budapest, and of the so-called “Berliner Moderne. Authors include Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Bahr, Mach, Broch, Musil, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Loos, Altenberg, Kraus, Kokoschka, Andreas-Salomé, Kafka, Lukacs, Mayreder.