Code 12815
Level of study Third/Final year
Credit value 10
Semester Only available as a full year or 1 option
Pre-requisite modules Advanced German at level B2.2 or above
The course studies the emergence of the first wave of modern German literature at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, relating this phenomenon to socio-historical change and intellectual developments. It considers competing definitions of modernity, contrasting Fontane's "realism" with the more radical "scientific" claims of the Nauralists and examining the variety of non-or anti-Naturalist writing inspired principally by the irrationalism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and by the "crisis of language" to which they contributed. The main authors studied are Fontane, Hauptmann, Nietzsche, Wedekind, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Musil, but these may vary from year to year according to student interest.