Fin-de-siecle_Europe

This reading-intense seminar will explore key primary sources and historiography of the period 1880-1910: decades of cultural transition and innovation; décadence and modernism; beginnings and 'fins,’ explorations into the subconscious and mass behaviors. Simultaneity and duality will be our guiding concepts. We will focus on Paris as an epicenter of artistic exchange, Vienna as a cultural heartland of fin-de-siècle Europe, and Eastern Europe as a hotbed of radical mass politics. We will investigate key philosophical, social and political phenomena of an epoch described as “the crucible of modernity:” shifting ways of seeing, working and consuming; an era of sexual experimentation (bachelor, dandy, New Woman); conceptions of the self (Freud’s concept of the subconscious) and the society (crowd, mass politics, revolution, empire, nation-building). We will work with a premise that culture and politics should be studied in a transnational context (i.e. 19th century forms of statehood and economic life) and in a cross-disciplinary way, considering how literary texts were shaped alongside works in other spheres: visual arts, architecture, science, philosophy, early cinema, sexuality, social and political life. By underscoring the overarching themes of decline and rebirth, this course engages with shifting ways of thinking about the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.