FYS 56 The Project of Selfhood: German Romanticism and the Birth of Modernity
One of the unique characteristics of modernity is the belief that the meaning of our lives is not given to us, pre-determined by race, class, gender or familial inheritance, but something that each individual must determine for themselves. To be a self in modernity, in other words, is to be a living project, a project in which we each determine the meaning of our lives by virtue of the paths we take, the passions we pursue, and the actions we choose. This idea, however, is neither acultural nor atemporal, but largely the historical inheritance of the ground breaking philosophical, literary, and artistic movement that occurred in Germany around 1800 known as German Romanticism. Within European history, it was this Romantic movement which first developed the idea that became so central to modernity that each human being is thrown out onto a path, on a search for meaning in a world in which no absolute meaning can be given. This course will investigate this problem by engaging with some of the central works of German Romanticism as well as the artistic and intellectual movements that it inspired such as American Transcendentalism and Existentialism. We will investigate these themes in an interdisciplinary way by reading works of literature, philosophy, and music as well as looking at works of art and film both historical and contemporary.
Reading may include: Novalis, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hermann Hesse, Carl Gustav Jung, Albert Camus, Sartre, J.D. Salinger, Jackon Pollock, Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath and James Baldwin.