Cosmopolitanism
and the Avant-garde, 1900-1939
H620 (also H645, H680, H745, CULS C701)
Graduate Colloquium in European History
Professor
Marci Shore
spring semester 2003-2004
Wednesdays, 7-9pm, Ballantine Hall 742
office
Ballantine 833; tel. 855-8036
mshore@indiana.edu
office hours Thursdays 9-11
This course will explore European cultural and intellectual history from the fin-de-siècle through the interwar years. The primary focus will be East-Central Europe, although there will be readings on Western Europe and the Russian empire/Soviet Union as well. Topics include Isaac Deutscher’s notion of the “non-Jewish Jew;” tensions between cosmopolitanism and national identity; literary and linguistic avant-garde movements including formalism, structuralism, dada, futurism, semiotics, "trans-sense" poetry; and the avant-gardists' respective ideological, aesthetic, and linguistic programs as they responded to a polarizing political spectrum and a perceived crisis of modernity, to a sense of Europe at the brink of both catastrophe and infinite possibilities, to the Russian Revolution and the rise of fascism, to nihilism and revolution. Can be taken for seminar credit with the permission of the instructor.
course requirements: Participation in class discussion (obviously); two book reviews (one in Slavic Review style, one in Times Literary Supplement style); one final paper dealing with the literature we’ve read (the exact topic can be chosen by you, but this should be a literature/historiographical review, not a research paper—with the exception of those of you who are taking the course for seminar credit). Students will also be assigned oral presentations on the readings. You can choose any two books you like for the book reviews, but you must turn in the review in class on the day we are discussing that book. Final papers are due
books ordered:
Schorske, Fin-de-siècle
Vienna
Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation
John Lukacs, Budapest 1900
Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
Oleh Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism: 1914-1930: A Historical and Critical
Study
Jeff Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish
Theater
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926
Roman Jakobson, My Futurist Years
Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia
Jindrich Toman, The Magic of a Common
Language
January 14: Cosmopolitanism
Isaac Deutscher, “The Non-Jewish Jew”
January 21: The imperial capital
Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna
January 28: Zeitgeist of the fin-de-siècle
John Lukacs, Budapest 1900
February 4: coming to Marxism
Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation
February 11: Mayakovsky and his circle
Roman Jakobson, My Futurist Years
February 18: Czech structuralism
Jindrich Toman, The Magic of a Common Language
February 25: Manifesto as genre
F.T. Marinetti, “Destruction
of Syntax-Imagination Without Strings—Words-in-Freedom”
F.T. Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”
Mayakovsky, et al, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”
Guillaume Apollinaire, “The New Spirit and the Poets”
Oswald Spengler, from The Decline of the
West
Alexei Kruchenykh, excerpts from Our Arrival: From the History of Russian
Futurism
Peter Nichollls, “A Metaphysics of Modernity: Marinetti and Italian Futurism”
in Modernisms: A Literary Guide
March 3: Aleksander Wat and Polish futurism
Aleksander Wat, “The Eternally Wandering Jew”
Aleksander Wat, My Century
Tomas Venclova, chapter on Piecyk
Bogdana Carpenter, excerpt from The Poetic Avant-garde in
March 10: Futurism in
Oleh Ilnytzkyj, Ukrainian Futurism: 1914-1930: A Historical and Critical Study
March 17: no class, spring break
March 24: Theories of utopia
Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia
March 31: Zeitgeist of the interwar years
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926
April 7: Decadence and alienation
Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider
April 14: The Yiddish avant-garde
Hillel Kazovsky, The Artists
of the Kultur-Lige
Seth Wolitz, “The Jewish National Art Renaissance in
The Dybbuk (film?)
April 21: The avant-garde and Soviet culture
Jeff Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater
April 28: presentations on final papers
final papers are due Monday May 3rd