Vienna and the Avant-Gardes: Innovation and Crisis

This course immerses students in the art and culture of early twentieth-century Vienna, a center of radical experimentation across literature, philosophy, and the arts. Through select readings and site visits, we will explore how writers like Schnitzler and Musil traced the dynamics of consciousness, how Freud revealed instinctual forces beneath the rational self, and how painters like Klimt and Schiele captured these forces on canvas. We will also survey Vienna's formative influence on modern philosophy (Wittgenstein) and music (Schönberg), and study how these movements both arose from and contended with the city's turbulent history.