This course surveys the major socio-historical and cultural influences that have engendered the Central European individual and collective experience from the period of late antiquity of the Roman Empire down to the present. Through the mechanism of multidisciplinary readings in the domains of autobiography, of historiography, of literature/literary criticism, of philosophy, of psychoanalysis and of social theory, students will acquire a conceptual framework for understanding how culture and history have intersected and inter-animated one another to spawn Central Europe's distinguishing features and rich history as a shared locus of major moment.
