European Thought and Culture in the 20th Century

As a sequel to European Thought and Culture in the 19th Century, Professor Kramer tackles the major intellectual themes and debates that decisively shaped 20th-century European culture. These 24 lectures cover an amazingly wide range of thinkers and writers, the key historical circumstances and challenges they faced, and the fascinating and subtle ways in which their works relate to one another and to the larger story of modern European culture. You'll look at influential writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Joseph Conrad, Henrik Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, and Primo Levi; important painters such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Wassily Kandinsky; philosophers and theorists such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jürgen Habermas; and other key figures in the human and social scientists, including Émile Durkheim, John Maynard Keynes, Hannah Arendt, and Carl Jung.

With a focus on context, cultural innovations, and responses to World War I and World War II, Professor Kramer lends coherence and liveliness to what might otherwise seem a bewildering gathering of intellectuals. But by learning about their lives, their works, and the connections between their ideas, you'll gain a keener insight into a host of movements and trends in the modern intellectual life-including positivism, literary modernism, feminism, structuralism, and Cubism and Abstract Expressionism in painting.