COLLEGE 125: Modern Europe: Self, Society, and the Liberal Order

Course Description

Focus in on works of literature that shaped modern Europe, from 1900 to the present. We examine how thinkers, writers, and artists responded to war, dictatorship, technological change, and shifting ideas of selfhood. Readings include Freud, Pessoa, Woolf, Kafka, Camus, Levi, Celan, Milosz, Kundera, Tarkovsky, Reza, and Han. Across philosophy, novels, poetry, film, and theater, we ask: How does Europe (and the West) imagine freedom and constraint, memory and forgetting, resilience and despair? How are we to make use of this tradition as we look to the future?