CSLC 106 You Must Change Your Life: Rilke, Brecht, German Modernism
Looking back on the momentous changes and shock experienced by his generation with the advent of the first world war, Walter Benjamin wrote: “A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars found itself under open sky in a landscape in which only the clouds were unchanged and below them…crossed by devastating currents and explosions, stood the tiny, fragile human body.” This course explores the sense of profound change described by the chroniclers of 20th century modernity, and connects it to modernism, that force which sought to disrupt literary and aesthetic tradition and unsettle long-held conceptions of the self, identity, justice, and political authority. Injunctions made to the literary form of the novel are examined through the humorous prose stylings of early modernist Robert Walser, while Brecht’s epic theater serves as a case study in the radical potentials of early 20th century drama. We will also focus on the poetry of Rilke, Bachmann, Celan and others. Finally, the legacy of the crises of modernity (modern warfare, fascism, ecological destruction) and modernism’s responses will be reflected on via a reading of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.