Courses

The senior seminar will focus on one momentous book:  Thomas Mann’s breakthrough novel Buddenbrooks (1901), which earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.  But we will use this book as a prism to explore German society at the height of its power at the turn of the century:  the rise of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century, capitalism, anti-Semitism, gender relations, Wagner and Wagnerism.  A guiding question will be the relation between storytelling and family life, and to what extent the “decline of a family” implies the demise or even the death of the traditional European realist novel.  In addition to Mann’s novel, students will read short texts by Schopenhauer, Wagner, Freud, Kafka and Rilke.  Readings and discussion in German.