German/Philosophy 212
Readings in German Intellectual History
Visionaries of Modernity (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud)
Bryn Mawr College, Spring 2002
Prof. Azade Seyhan
Thomas 135, BMC
Office Hours: Tuesdays 11:30-1:30 or by appointment
Texts:
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The
Experience of Modernity
Peter Gay (ed,) The Freud Reader
Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil)
Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spoke Zarathustra)
Robert Tucker (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader
Course Description and Objectives:
This course examines selected writings by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as pre-texts for a critique of cultural reason and underlines heir pedagogical value in terms of their contribution to questions of language, representation, history, and material culture. These three actors of modernity have translated the abstract metaphysics of "the history of the subject" into a concrete analysis of human experience in terms of mind, body, labor, language, knowledge, and power. Through lecture, discussion, and exercises in critical commentary, the course aims to familiarize the student with the history of contemporary paradigms of cultural study. Special attention will be paid to narrative and stylistic strategies of disseminating knowledge (e.g., sermon and myth in Marx, aphorism in Nietzsche, or anecdote, myth, Märchen, case hi/story in Freud). In this context we will also analyze selected fictional works as alternative forms of understanding and clarification.
Requirements: