GRM 257 - Freud’s Vienna

1 course unit

Using Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-de-Siecle Vienna as a starting point, this course will explore the literature, art, architecture, and social sciences as indicators of social and cultural transformation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Vienna. After beginning with a brief historical and cultural overview of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the course will focus on the progression from Austrian liberalism to modernism. Some of the topics to be investigated are the Ringstrasse and the modern architecture of Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos; the failure of liberalism and the resulting political and artistic secessions, such as Theodor Herzl’s Zionism as a reaction to Austrian anti-Semitism and the Secession artists such as Gustav Klimt and their interrelationship with the Wiener Werkstatte arts and crafts movement; the new paradigms by Freud and Mach for understanding reality and how instinct, the irrational, and empiriocriticism are presented in the literary works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler (Freud considered Schnitzler his Doppelganger, whose novellas and dramas present the same problems that the former had diagnosed in his patients and his time period); expressionism in art (Schiele and Kokoschka). These social and artistic strands will be synthesized to produce a richer understanding of the dynamic relationship between the arts and social sciences. This course covers some literary works, artworks, and films that deal with mature subject matter, such as human sexuality. Students will be expected to study and discuss these works in a mature manner.
Meets general academic requirement HU and is a cluster course and a linked (IL) course.