HSS 260 Czech Culture in Film and Literature

This course aims at exploring modern Czech culture through studies in film and literature with a special focus on Swejkian and Kafkaesque features of 20th century culture, and literature. It also introduces the Czech New Wave, which attracted immense international attention to the country in the 1960s. It was showing an immense diversity and creative capital of Czech society, that was not damaged by war or the communist horrors of the 1950s, and it followed up on the democratic and worldly interwar avant-garde. This course covers the study of 20th Century culture via films and literature, and it is an active probe into Czech and Central European studies; it provides great exposure to the Czech cultural environment while examining important authors, texts, images and films. Students are expected to utilize their acquired comprehensive skills, and employ critical thinking concerning wide variety of topics concerning Czech and Central European culture. Relevant cultural, historical, and theoretical contexts will be provided, explored and discussed; essays will be read. The course is also a journey into the Czech and Central European consciousness, soul and values; it focuses on topics, themes and popular imagination of 20C as reflected in Czech literature, art, films and culture.