Topic: Alienation, Community, and Redemption in Early 20th Century European
Culture and Jewish Thought

Note: This section is a COAS Intensive Writing Section and also requires
registration in COAS W333.

This course will deal with a number of important themes that emerge in European
culture and Jewish thought in the early decades of this century.  These themes
include alienation and the crisis of culture; mysticism and the desire for unity;
soul, form, and life; history and eternity; community and modes of human
intimacy; cultural crisis and redemption; revelation and religious experience.  We
shall explore how these themes interact in the work of a number of intellectuals
who themselves respond to the emergence of modern urban life, advanced
industrial growth, new inventions, new art forms and developments in media and
the traumas of war.  We will look at the historical growth of the great cities of
Europe, including Prague, Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest, and the crisis of culture
during the First World War and its aftermath, especially the emergence of
Weimar Germany.  But the focus of the course will be selections from the writings
of figures like George Simmel, Martin Buber, George Lukacs, Franz Kafka, Franz
Rosenzweig, Robert Musil, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Karl Barth, Paul
Tillich, and S.Y. Agnon.

The ideas of revelation, faith, and redemption have been central to postwar
Jewish thought in America.  Contemporary thinkers have returned to the work of
Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and others to recover these ideas and out
understanding of them.  This course is an attempt to clarify this "discourse of
redemption" as it developed in European culture before and after World War I.
The figures who contributed to this "discourse" were philosophers and novelists,
poets and literary critics, historians and theologians, sociologists and political
theorists.  We will therefore be reading works of very diverse kinds, and as we
do, we will see develop a way of understanding the crisis facing Western culture
and a set of strategies for dealing with that crisis.  To these figures, history is the
domain of that crisis, and eternity is associate with the resolution of it.  Hence, a
central theme will be the interplay between history and eternity or time and
transcendence in the thought of the period.

Members of the class will write four short papers and a term essay.  There will be
no examinations.

This section carries culture studies credit.