Even if Germany's post-war democratic order is not fundamentally threatened, it is still clear that Germany has already begun to follow a quite different path than the one laid out for it after 1945. No short answer to these questions can be both accurate and clear. Along the way we'll also discuss some famous attempts to visualize and embody humanist values in art and architecture. Shakespeare's Romances explore the comedic elements in a very different way, challenging us with different systems of belief, asking us to accept immediately, through faith, the witness of miracle and grace, the world of possibility. The dead do live.
Statues come to life.
That is, of course, the stuff of romance. A shift seems to have occurred from the 17th to the 18th centuries, the central inquiry being no longer so much the nature of things but rather an inquiry into how men know what they know and why they behave as they do as individuals and as members of society. This course will cover the hundred or so years between the end of Reconstruction and the end of the war in Vietnam. When one considers such leit-motifs as peace and war, race relations, and the interacting cycles of liberal reform and conservative consolidation, we might lose track of the importance of people in history. To minimize that possiblility we will read classic works of American autobiography and autobiographical fiction.