German 360
Music in the German Social Imagination
Full course for one semester. This course will examine the question
of the social content of musical experience as it has been
developed in the German context in a range of genres: literature,
criticism, philosophy, and opera. Is music a public phenomenon,
endowed with a "community-forming power," or is music much rather a
private experience, through which the individual withdraws from
public life? We will discuss the complex interplay between these
contrary attitudes from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth
century, and the special place of this question given the
prevailing conception of the Germans as "the people of music."
Texts by Rousseau, Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist, Grillparzer,
Hegel, A.B. Marx, Mörike, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Th. Mann, Kafka,
Hesse, and Adorno. Operas by Mozart, Wagner, Berg, and Brecht and
Weill. Conducted in English. Students taking the course for German
credit will meet once a week in an extra seminar. Prerequisite:
sophomore standing. Conference. Cross-listed as Literature 360. Not
offered 2005-06.
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