Unit name | Prague: A Tale of Three Cities |
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Unit code | MODL30017 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | H/6 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
Unit director | Dr. Chitnis |
Open unit status | Open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | School of Modern Languages |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
In folk etymology, Prague is the ‘city of the threshold’, where peoples, stories and histories meet, collide and overlap and where contradictory accounts can both be true. This unit will explore, through a series of case studies, how Czechs, Germans and Jews have shaped the identity of Prague from the tenth century to the end of the Second World War. Through examples like Rudolf II and his support of art, science, alchemy, astrology and the occult, and the Jewish Golem legend, we will discover ‘magic Prague’. The Prague of political and cultural conflict will be revealed through the study of defenestrations, Prague’s role in the Thirty Years War, competing Czech and German nationalist revisions of Prague’s history in the nineteenth century, and the 1939-45 Occupation and its aftermath, which effectively ended the ‘tale of three cities’. And Prague, the ‘forgotten capital’ of European Modernism, will be remembered through the study of writers like Kafka and Meyrink and the inter-war Avant-garde. Throughout, our focus will fall simultaneously on the historical figures/episode/period and their subsequent historiographical reinterpretation and cultural representation by different Prague communities.
The unit aims:
Students will be able to
a) Demonstrate, to a standard appropriate to level H, a knowledge of the history and culture of Prague, and an understanding of a city as a set of cultural expressions;
b) Deploy an appropriate range of theories and methodologies through which to explain such expressions and interpret the city’s multi-cultural, multi-lingual past;
c) Articulate an advanced understanding of the development of narratives and myths through the historiographical and cultural reinterpretation of figures, episodes and periods;
d) Analyse in close detail examples of such reinterpretation in primary and secondary literature, including memoir, literary texts and film;
e) Independently identify and analyse patterns in this process of reinterpretation over a longer historical period and/or a range of distinct genres;
f) Present independent judgements in writing in an appropriate style and at a high level of complexity.
Two-hour seminars
3000-word essay (60%, ILOs a, b, c, e, f)
2000-word commentary (40%, ILOs a, b, c, d, f)