Course Description
A social and cultural history of the European city from 1848 to 1933. Intellectual experiment, commercial capitalism, class conflict, and bohemian culture produced new forms of modern experience and self. Works by scientists, artists, political radicals, and filmmakers together support interpretation of dramatic historical rupture opening up a new era.
Athena Title
Metropolis & Modernity
Pre or Corequisite
One course in HIST or ITAL or ROML or FREN or GRMN or HIST 2312H or third- or fourth-year student standing
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
- Students will develop skills for cogent, analytic, concrete writing.
- Students will develop poise and control in speaking, engagement, articulation of thought.
- Students will refine the critical and analytic approach to the human past transferable to other topics.
- Students will refine the distinction between interpretive, imaginative, critical understanding—of humanistic knowledge—and information or data.
- Students will develop time-management and organizational skills necessary to realize longer-term projects.
- Students will have insight into urban studies, concepts of culture, the relationship of social and economic history to culture, and the origins or artistic Modernism.
Topical Outline
- Concepts of the Modern and Modernity
- Money, Capital, Speculation
- The City & Consumer Culture
- Commodification of Culture
- History of Experience and Sensation
- Railroad as Experience
- Social Conflict & Revolution
- Gender in Paris
- Bohemian Paris
- Classicism and Experimentation in Viennese Architecture
- Freud in Vienna: Psychoanalysis & the Unconscious
- Sexuality and the Modern Self in the Visual Arts
- Artistic Modernism & the Berlin Avant-garde
- Rise of the New Woman
- Political Radicalism & Culture
- Modernity as Crisis
