| |
| |
|
Social
Science 293
Mon., Wed. 4:00-5:20
FPH 107
|
|
Although
many of us talk readily of "postmodernism,"
how many of us really know what "modernism"
was about? For that matter, how many of us can describe
with any confidence the world that existed even just a
few decades before our own birth? How much more difficult,
then, to imagine how different our world is from that
of a hundred years ago, and at the same time, how much
our world still owes to the earlier one. Never did change
seem to be as dramatic and rapid as in the first half
of the twentieth century. As the Austrian-Jewish writer
Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) put it, his father and grandfather
had lived "life in uniformity," whereas "My
today and each of my yesterdays, my rises and falls, are
so diverse that I sometimes feel as if I had lived not
one, but several exis-tences, each one different from
the others."
Leftists and rightists, avant-gardists and traditionalists
alike came to view the modern era as the age of the masses,
characterized by conscript armies and political mass movements,
mass pro-duction of com-modities, and mass media. In the
late nineteenth century, a handful of European "great
powers" dominated the globe, and war was an accepted
means of implementing foreign policy. By the mid-twentieth
century, World Wars of unprecedented destructiveness devastated
the continent physically and psychologically and weakened
the colonial empires, undermining faith even in progress
itself. The real victors were two rival systems of modernity:
American consumer capitalism and Soviet communism. Although
the age witnessed great violence and despair, it also
brought forth great hopes and achievements in social thought,
the arts, and technology, many of whose effects we are
still pondering.
• A core course for concentrators in history, the
social sciences, and cultural studies. Readings emphasize
close work with primary sources and influential recent
scholar-ship. We will meet occasionally outside class
for screenings of films from and about
the era. |
|
|
|
|
