Department of History

(Focus: European Culture in the Age of Crisis, 1910-1960)

--also CU-Net--

Prof. Sackett, Department of History

office: COB 2053

office phone: 255-4079

email: rsackett@uccs.edu

---

Course description:

European history, ca. 1910-1960, is a period of extraordinary depth in both the life of the mind and artistic creation. The writers and artists of this era faced political and social turmoil of a kind that defies the imagination-- fascism, communism, two world wars, genocide. This course will examine some of their responses to ideological conflict and horrific events. Yet the period was also one of great innovation in all fields of mental and creative endeavor, such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, painting. New answers were proposed to age-old questions: What is the nature of human life? Of human community? Of gender? Of artistic representation? What sets the present off from the past? The course offers a sample from remarkable works of art, literature and scholarship addressing these and other questions.

---

Course Books:

Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

C.G. Jung, et al., Man and His Symbols

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia

Albert Camus, The Plague

--plus a course packet, including brief excerpts from these authors: John Willett, Thomas Mann, Karl Jaspers, George Grosz, Jay Winter, E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Vladimir Nabokov, D.H. Lawrence (only Willett and Winter are recent scholars, the rest being writers of the period in question)--

---

Music:

Darius Milhaud, La Création du monde

Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time

---

Visual art:

slides of Piet Mondrian, Vassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Fernand Léger, Käthe Kollwitz, Marc Chagall

---

Film:

from Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl)

The Third Man (Carol Reed)

Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir)

---

FOR BASIC CHRONOLOGY AND TERMS, select this link
 

---

Course Requirements:

three brief (3-4pp.) essays* worth 20%, 30%, 40% of the final grade, respectively; class participation worth 10%

-- CU-Net students: only the three essays worth 20%, 40%, 40%--

 

*analytical/interpretive essays on specific topics referring to assigned readings

---

Schedule:

Date:    Topic:                                                                                        Assignment:

1/22      Introduction                                                                               ---

1/27      One Form of Hope: a Modernist Utopia in Architecture &      Le Corbusier, xx-xxviii,

                 Urban Design                                                                            1-126

                  NOTE: two general questions concerning Le Corbusier--

                     how is his proposal a response to issues of the

                     wider society of his day? how does he relate

                     efficiency to beauty?

1/29      Modernist Design/ Modernist Aesthetics                                  Le Corbusier, 159-247,                                                                                                                            291-302

                 NOTE: on modernism in regard to beauty, we will

                     view slides of modernist painting by Léger,

                     Mondrian, Feininger, Kandinsky                     

2/3       More on Art and Social Engagement after First World War     Willett (packet)

                 NOTE: Two chapters from Willett's Art and

                      Politics in the Weimar Period-- do not be

                      put off by names that you may not recognize

                      or by an occasional German phrase, but

                      consider how these postwar artists were

                      acting on the idea of revolution.

2/5       Fascist Film-- Triumph of the Will                                             ---

                (showing arrangements TBA)

2/10     Fascism/Mass Politics-- Views in Literature and Philosophy    Mann & Jaspers, 33-41

                                                                                                                    (packet)

               NOTE: What is "mass-life," according to Jaspers

                  in Man in the Modern Age? How can "Mario

                  and the Magician" serve as a parable of fascist

                  politics?

2/12     Holocaust                                                                                    Levi, 9-86

2/17A   "   "  "                                                                                          Levi, 87-173

2/19     Any Hope among the Ruins?-- The Third Man                          ---

                 (showing arrangements TBA)

2/24     Back to the First World War: Cynicism, Irony in Retrospect     Grosz (packet)

                NOTE: how do text and art reinforce each other's

                     cynical view of the war in Grosz's

                     Autobiography? how does Grosz fit with

                     artists covered in the book by Willett?

2/26     Postwar Mourning: a Tradition of Meaning                               Winter (packet)

                NOTE: it is not a mistake to have read Grosz as

                   a witness to widespread disillusionment

                   after 1918, but alongside disillusionment

                   were efforts to find comfort in traditional

                   forms-- consider the case made by this

                   historian in Sites of Memory, Sites

                   of Mourning.

3/3B     Modernist Music/ Traditional Themes                                        ---

                (works by Milhaud, Messiaen in class)

 

3/5      A War Film-- Grand Illusion                                                       ---

               (showing arrangements TBA)   

3/10    Feminism                                                                                     Woolf

3/12    "  "  "                                                                                               "  "

3/17    The Meaning of Communism in Russia                                      Carr, Deutscher (packet)

               NOTE: we will view slides representing the

                  work of an artist on "the left"-- Käthe

                  Kollwitz-- consider Carr's chapter

                  from The Soviet Impact on the Western

                  World-- what is that "impact"? and where

                  does Isaac Deutscher's sympathy lie in

                  his assessment of "The Moral Dilemmas

                  of Lenin"?

3/19C  The Meaning of Communism in Russia-- viewed from exile      Nabokov (packet)

                NOTE: three very distinctive stories by a superb

                   émigré author

3/24 & 26                 SPRING BREAK                                                    ---

3/31     New Psychology: Archetypes and the Unconscious                    Jung, 1-94

4/2          "                                 "                             "                                   "     "

4/7D       "                                 "                             "                                Jung, 157-254 (Franz)

4/9          "                                 "                             "                                Jung, 255-322 (Jaffé)

4/14     A Painter: Marc Chagall                                                               ---

                NOTE: how should we interpret Chagall?

                   is he like the modernists whose work we

                   have seen? what is the sense of social

                   and political commentary in his work?

                   does his work call for some type of

                   psychological understanding?

4/16      Existential Philosophy                                                                Jaspers, 129-141, 167-189

                                                                                                                     (packet)

                NOTE: from sections of Jaspers' Man in

                   the Modern Age-- wrestle with his notions

                   of the value of "culture," of "human existence,"

                   of the contemporary state of the thought.