Innovation and Crisis: Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

At the turn of the 20th century, the booming Vienna metropolis was a site of innovation in literature, the arts, and psychology. It was also a moment of crisis, as the traditionally ordered Austro-Hungarian society began the process of upheaval that culminated in World War I. This course explores the ways that modern life reshaped human thought, sensory experience, and sexuality through the examination textual and visual materials by Freud, Hofmannsthal, Loos, Klimt, Musil, Schiele, Schnitzler and others.