Jessica Corey
Administrative Aide
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Building
53 Washington Square South, 7th Floor
Phone: (212) 998-8647
Fax: (212) 995-4017
Email: jessica.corey@nyu.edu
If the course requires "Permission from DUGS," contact Maria Montoya (mem22@nyu.edu), the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the History department.
Department Website
http://history.fas.nyu.edu/page/undergrad
Undergraduate Course Offerings
http://history.fas.nyu.edu/object/history.1012.ug.courses
Minor Requirements
http://history.fas.nyu.edu/object/history.ug.minor.html
Special Information
History 101 is now a PREREQUISITE for all history seminars. If history minors are interested in taking any history seminars they must first take History 101 (V57.0101). This prerequisite can also be fulfilled if a history minor has taken V57.0900.
*New Course for Spring 2011*
V57.0136 European Intellectual History, 1805-1914
Prof. Stefanos Geroulanos
Lectures: Tues. and Thurs. 4:55-6:10
Recitations: F11-12:15, M11-12:15, M.2:00-3:15, 3:30-4:45
Course Description
This course offers an advanced introduction to the history of European ideas and culture from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the First World War, or, differently put, from Condorcet and Hegel to Lenin and Freud. The course aims to provide students with an understanding of philosophy in the European nineteenth century, its influence, its political involvements, and its cultural resonance. We will locate some of the most important and influential thinkers—and certain of their arguments—in contexts of cultural history, the history of cultural and political movements, tropes and themes, and also the history of thought and the human sciences. Among the thinkers and authors we will read are G.W.F. Hegel, Mary Shelley, Auguste Comte, Gustave Flaubert, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Hermann von Helmholtz, Richard Wagner, J. S. Mill, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Lenin, Emile Zola and Thomas Mann. Yet the idea is to understand these thinkers within a series of cultural and political transformations: the emergence of modern nations and nationalism; secularization and the “death of God;” the evolution of empires and classes as ideas; scientific positivism; the place of cities in European culture; ways of understanding modernity; wars and revolutions; liberalism, communism, and mass movements; psychiatry and psychoanalysis; technological and scientific theorizations of mankind; musical and literary achievements, the major European avant-gardes, etc.
Requirements
The course is roughly structured around two-period units—usually a Tuesday lecture on the background and significance of a thinker or text and a Thursday lecture centered around a close reading of one or more texts. Recitations aim to give students a chance to carry out further discussions of the texts and relevant contexts. Readings will average 120-150 pages per week. One absence is fine, but further absences will adversely affect your grade. Students are expected to write short response papers and post them on the discussion section of blackboard the night before their recitation; each of these response papers should consist of three paragraph-long questions. There will be also two take-home midterm papers and a final paper. The first midterm will involve a comparison between different authors, the second one will ask for a close reading of a text we have studied; the final will again require students to demonstrate both close reading of specific texts with an understanding of their context and significance. Students are also expected to write two 3-page midterms, due March 1 and April 19 respectively. Finally, there will be an 8-page final paper, due a week after the end of class. Questions for all three papers will be handed out a week in advance by the instructors.
Grade Breakdown: 35% participation, 15% first midterm, 20% second midterm, 40% final paper.
Week-by-Week Breakdown
1. (Jan.25) Introduction
in-class: Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1791)
2. (Jan.27) French Revolution, Enlightenment, Progress, Rights of Man
Marquis de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human
Mind (1793), Introduction and Tenth Age
3. (Feb. 1) Napoleonic Wars and Reconstruction, German Idealism
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) preface, chs.1,2
4. (Feb.3) G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History
5. (Feb.8) Romanticism, Rights of Woman, New Man
Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, introduction, chs.2-3.
Novalis, “Christianity or Europe”
6. (Feb.10) Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, selections.
7. (Feb.15) Industrial and Scientific Revolution, Positivism, Society and Knowledge; Labor
Auguste Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy (1830)
8. (Feb.17) Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Conservation of Force” (1862).
9. (Feb.22) Utopian Socialism, Marxism, Anarchism, Theological Questions
Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles for a Philosophy of the Future (1843)
Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (184?), part I.
10. (Feb.24) Karl Marx, "The Communist Manifesto" (1848)
"The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1851), selections.
Capital, short selections.
11. (Mar.1) The Revolutions of 1848, Realism and Mid-Century Paris (Bohemia and Commerce)
12. (Mar.3) Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (selection)
13. (Mar.8) Wagner, Nationalism, Mythological Romanticism
Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future (1849)
14. (Mar.10) Jules Michelet, The People (1846), short selections
Week of March 14-18 – Spring Break
15. (Mar.22) From “Development” to “Evolution;” Rationalism & Science; Racial Anthropology
16. (Mar.24) Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1870), selections.
17. (Mar.29) Liberalism, Humanism, Empire, Nation
18. (Mar.31) John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1869)
19. (Apr.5) Degeneration, New Men, Philhellenism, Nietzsche
20. (Apr.7) Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals (1888)
21. (Apr.12) The Bourgeois’ Fin de siècle. Also, Vienna.
Arthur Schnitzler, La Ronde (1900)
22. (Apr.14) Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (1879)
23. (Apr.19) Psychiatry and the Birth of Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), selections.
24. (Apr.21) Sigmund Freud, more.
25. (Apr.26) Mass Movements, Revolution, Avant-Garde
Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (1895), selections
Vladimir Lenin, “What is To Be Done” (1902), ch.3.
26. (Apr.28) …and the Dreyfus Affair
Emile Zola, “J’accuse” (1898)
Marcel Proust, selections on the affair from The Guermantes Way (1923) and In
the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919)
Filippo Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909)
27. (May 3) Back to the Science of Society
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), chs.2-3
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), ch.1
28. (May 5) War, and Conclusions
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912), 3-75.
Liberal Arts Core
Humanities
