(from the Director's Letter)
The very notions of modernity and modernism are inseparable from urban experience, and this seminar offers an opportunity to study two defining metropoles of the twentieth-century and their respective variants of modern city culture. Urban modernism entailed a new sensibility involving post-traditional life-styles as well as innovative and adversarial forms of art. As a concept it linked broad cultural questions of modernity to the specific aesthetic features of modern art forms, both defined in relation to the pursuit of the new and a rejection of the past as old-fashioned and constrictive. Such programmatic innovation could thrive especially well in urban settings, and modernism frequently took the metropolis as its topic. More than a period style, urban modernism became a core component of twentieth-century experience.
This seminar takes the urban modernism of Shanghai and Berlin as symptomatic sites of innovation but also as indicators of differences and similarities between China and Germany and between “East” and “West.” While these terms are fraught with potentials for overgeneralization, they were current in the period and still pertain today in discussions of cross-cultural engagement in the context of globalization. The seminar “Shanghai and Berlin” is therefore about two cities, their representations in literature and film and alternative paths through modernization. Conventional approaches to modernism have addressed it primarily within the framework of national literary histories or, at best, as a pan-European or western phenomenon. A goal of the seminar is to foster a comparative and global approach in scholarly investigations of modernism.
Thank you for your interest in the NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers, “Shanghai and Berlin: Cultures of Urban Modernism in Interwar China and Germany.” The seminar will take place at Stanford University between June 27 and August 4, 2011. We are very excited about this seminar and the topic, urban modernism, which we will approach with comparative and cross-cultural frameworks. The experience of Shanghai and Berlin between the world wars highlights many of the features of modernity that still inform the study of culture today. We look forward to assembling a richly interdisciplinary group of scholars to share in the exploration of this complex and promising field.
The very notions of modernity and modernism are inseparable from urban experience, and this seminar offers an opportunity to study two defining metropoles of the twentieth-century and their respective variants of modern city culture. Urban modernism entailed a new sensibility involving post-traditional life-styles as well as innovative and adversarial forms of art. As a concept it linked broad cultural questions of modernity to the specific aesthetic features of modern art forms, both defined in relation to the pursuit of the new and a rejection of the past as old-fashioned and constrictive. Such programmatic innovation could thrive especially well in urban settings, and modernism frequently took the metropolis as its topic. More than a period style, urban modernism became a core component of twentieth-century experience.
This seminar takes the urban modernism of Shanghai and Berlin as symptomatic sites of innovation but also as indicators of differences and similarities between China and Germany and between “East” and “West.” While these terms are fraught with potentials for overgeneralization, they were current in the period and still pertain today in discussions of cross-cultural engagement in the context of globalization. The seminar “Shanghai and Berlin” is therefore about two cities, their representations in literature and film and alternative paths through modernization. Conventional approaches to modernism have addressed it primarily within the framework of national literary histories or, at best, as a pan-European or western phenomenon. A goal of the seminar is to foster a comparative and global approach in scholarly investigations of modernism.
Background readings for the seminar include selections from Leo Lee, Shanghai Modern and Peter Gay, Weimar Culture, as well as some other critical literature. However our main focus will be on narrative fiction and cinema, often pairing comparable texts from the two settings. For example, we will juxtapose Ding Ling’s Shanghai, Spring 1930 with Brecht’s Three Penny Opera: Ding Ling’s narrative of political transformation resembles Brecht’s bohemian radicalism, in which avant-garde aesthetic and vanguardist politics converge. Both authors express a mixture of excitement and cynicism about modern love and life. Similarly we will read Eileen Chang's “Sealed Off” (as well as others of her stories) next to Imgard Keun’s Artificial Silk Girl, two narratives of women facing the reorganization of intimacy associated with the modern metropolis. We’ll also read Brecht’s Measures Taken, an exploration of radicalism and discipline, in conjunction with Chang’s ‘Lust Caution,’ as well as Ang Lee’s filming, as variants on the tension between subjectivism and obligation in modernity.
Those are just examples—the full reading list is included here—but we are looking forward to this opportunity to compare and contrast highpoints of the urban cultures of Shanghai and Berlin, including excerpts from Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s filming of that seminal novel, fiction by Mao Dun, Ding Ling, Shi Zhicun, Wu Tsu-hsiang, and films including Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Wu Yonggang’s, The Goddess, and Xie Jin, Two Stage Sisters. The seminar will conclude with a contrastive examination of three films of cities emerging from the Second World War: Fei Mu, Springtime in a Small Town, Billy Wilder, A Foreign Affair, and Roberto Rossellini, Rome, Open City. These are striking texts in their own right, and we are certain that they will take on added complexity in the cross-cultural setting in which we will study them.
If you have logistical questions, please contact the coordinator of our Research Unit, Diane Jakubowski, at dianejak@stanford.edu or 650-725-8620. For inquiries regarding the substance of the seminar, please explore this website. You may also contact the co-directors at berman@stanford.edu or banwang@stanford.edu
We hope that we have covered all the important points. We believe that “Shanghai and Berlin: Cultures of Urban Modernism in Interwar China and Germany” promises to be an innovative and exciting approach to core questions about modern culture, with historical as well as contemporary ramifications. We are looking forward to your application and to the summer.
Russell A. Berman Ban Wang
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
We welcome applications from prospective participants from a wide range of disciplines. Backgrounds in Chinese or German literature or film studies are of course most pertinent; however we also hope to consider applicants from other fields, such as History, Art History, Architecture, Urban Studies, and Gender Studies. That list is not meant to be exclusive; scholars from other fields are welcome to apply, and we look forward to gathering a talented and disciplinary diverse group for the seminar. All texts will be in English. Knowledge of Chinese or German is not required.
The seminar is intended primarily for teachers of American undergraduate students. Qualified independent scholars and those employed by museums, libraries, historical societies, and other organizations may be eligible to compete provided they can effectively advance the teaching and research goals of the seminar or institute. Applicants must be United States citizens, residents of U.S. jurisdictions, or foreign nationals who have been residing in the United States or its territories for at least the three years immediately preceding the application deadline. Foreign nationals teaching abroad at non-U.S. chartered institutions are not eligible to apply.
An applicant need not have an advanced degree in order to qualify. Adjunct and part-time lecturers are eligible to apply. Individuals may not apply to study with a director of a seminar or institute who is a current colleague or a family member. Individuals must not apply to seminars directed by scholars with whom they have studied. Graduate students in the humanities may apply.
There will be an informal welcome reception Sunday afternoon, June 26, for participants to meet each other. The seminar will begin the next day, meeting every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday for two-hour sessions. Because it is a seminar, we will expect each participant to take responsibility for one of our meetings and to introduce the material for the day. There will be an opportunity for the “presenter” to post on-line comments to the group for consideration in advance of our meeting. During the session, the ‘presenter’ will be responsible for initiating the discussion with some background discussion and by pointing us toward key questions, relating the text to the themes of the class.
Beginning in the third week, one weekly session will be dedicated to seminar participants’ presenting their own projects—whether they are articles or book manuscripts or curricular revisions. For this too, material should be circulated in advance. This opportunity to share your work with colleagues from different disciplines and at different career stages can be extraordinarily helpful, while also enhancing the seminar’s discussion of the broad topic of urban modernism.
The last meeting of the seminar will take place on the afternoon of August 4.
The co-directors will expect each participant to meet with each of them early in the seminar, ideally during the first week, to learn about the participants’ projects and interests. Professors Berman and Wang will otherwise be available in office hours or by appointment. Participants are strongly urged to meet again with at least one of the co-directors to discuss the progress of their work and the ideas and conduct of the seminar.
Stanford will provide participants in the seminar with access to the Stanford computing network. Participants who arrange with us to stay on campus will have internet connections in their rooms. Photocopying facilities will be available. While there is access to computer printing, participants in previous seminars who could bring their own printer found that to be convenient.
The seminar participants will be able to draw on the rich collections of the Stanford University Libraries and the Hoover Institution. The Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford’s main research library, houses nearly three million volumes, as well as 6,500 current periodicals and 350 current newspapers. The Stanford East Asia Library includes a Chinese collection with some 350,000 volumes and 28,300 reels of microfilm. The Hoover Library and Archive, with collections particularly focused on twentieth-century political developments is a major resource. The library holds 1.6 million volumes, and the archive contains sixty million documents. The collections of the East Asia Library and the Hoover Institution are particularly strong in material from the history of Republican China and the Communist Movement, both of which are relevant to the concerns of the seminar. Green Library and the Hoover Institution have robust collections relevant to modern Germany. Whether seminar participants focus on China or on Germany in their own work, they will be well served by the available resources.
Green Library summer hours are Monday-Thursday 8 AM- 9PM; Friday 8 AM-6 PM; Saturday 9 AM- 5PM; and Sunday 1 PM- 9 PM. The Hoover library summer hours are Monday – Friday 8 AM – 5 PM. The East Asia Library is open 9 AM – 5 PM. Further information about the Stanford University Libraries is available at http://www-sul.stanford.edu/. The resources of the Hoover Institution are described at http://www.hoover.org/library-and-archives. The East Asian Library is at http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/asrg/
Seminar participants may rent from Stanford, or they may make their own arrangements privately. Studio units on campus in a graduate student housing area will be available for rent from Stanford Conference Services. The cost will be about $90/night, which will include linen and housekeeping service, and there will be an additional charge for participation in a meal plan. These units are a twenty-minute walk to the library and the seminar location; there is however also a campus bus system, and bicycles are popular. Living on campus would be very convenient. Since housing in the vicinity of Stanford can be costly, the price for the campus rental is not unreasonable. Participants may however choose to live elsewhere and make their own arrangements.
Participants in this six-week seminar receive a stipend of $4,500. Stipends are intended to help cover travel expenses to and from the project location, books and other research expenses, and living expenses for the duration of the period spent in residence. Stipends are taxable. Applicants should note that supplements will not be given in cases where the stipend is insufficient to cover all expenses. Whether one rents from Stanford or makes other accommodations, the cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area is high. Participants may find that they may have to draw on their own resources to supplement the stipend..
Seminar participants are required to attend all meetings and to engage fully in the work of the project. During the project's tenure, they may not undertake teaching assignments or any other professional activities unrelated to their participation in the project. Participants who, for any reason, do not complete the full tenure of the project must refund a pro-rata portion of the stipend.
Seminar participants will be given “Visiting Scholar” status. (The status is dependant on having completed a Ph.D., which is typically the case in NEH seminars; different arrangements would have to be made for an “ABD” participant). Visiting Scholars are entitled to make use of many university facilities; the status does not, however, provide for telephone privileges or individual photocopying needs. Access to the Stanford computing network will be provided; you are strongly urged to bring your own computer, however, as well as your own printer. Please note: while some Visiting Scholar privileges are extended to their spouses, this is not the case for unmarried partners.
Stanford University is located next to Palo Alto, California, with easy train connections to San Francisco and San Jose, and their rich offerings of museums, recreation, and restaurants. In addition, cultural events take place on campus, including theater and concerts. Participants should also plan on visiting Stanford’s Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, the university’s art museum with a spectacular Rodin sculpture garden.
The San Francisco Bay Area provides numerous opportunities for biking and hiking. A drive to the ocean can take 40 minutes to spectacular scenery (but the water is too cold for swimming). The campus provides numerous athletic opportunities. The summer weather at Stanford is often hot during the day, but it cools off in the evening; San Francisco can be notoriously chilly in the summer.
A completed application consists of three copies of the following collated items:
In addition, it must include two letters of recommendation as described below.
Note: The application cover sheet must be filled out online at http://www.neh.gov/online/education/participants
When you are finished, be sure to click the ‘submit’ button. You must also print out the cover sheet to include with the application package. Note that filling out a cover sheet is not the same as applying, so there is no penalty for changing your mind and filling out cover sheets for several projects.
In addition to the cover sheet, your application must include:
You should be sure to discuss any independent study project that is proposed beyond the common work of the seminar.
The two referees may be from inside or outside your home institution. They should be familiar with your professional accomplishments or promise, teaching and/or research interests, and ability to contribute to and benefit from participation in the seminar. Referees should be provided with the director's description of the seminar and your essay. Applicants who are current graduate students should secure a letter from a professor or advisor. Please ask each of your referees to sign their name across the seal on the back of the envelope containing their letter, and enclose the letters with your application.
The application itself must be sent to Stanford (not to the NEH!) with a postmark deadline of March 1, 2011. Please send the collated material (three copies) and the two confidential letters of recommendation to:
Russell A. Berman
Department of Comparative Literature
Building 260, Room 209
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2031
A faculty selection committee will review the applicants. Decisions will be announced on April 1, 2011, and those selected have until April 5 to accept or decline. If you will not be home during the notification period, you are advised to provide an address and phone number where you can be reached. No information on the status of applications will be available prior to the official notification period.
If you have logistical questions, please contact the coordinator of our Research Unit, Diane Jakubowski, at dianejak@stanford.edu or 650-725-8620. For inquiries regarding the substance of the seminar, you may contact the co-directors at berman@stanford.edu or banwang@stanford.edu
We hope that we have covered all the important points. We believe that “Shanghai and Berlin: Cultures of Urban Modernism in Interwar China and Germany” promises to be an innovative and exciting approach to core questions about modern culture, with historical as well as contemporary ramifications. We are looking forward to your application and to the summer.
June 27: Introduction: Looking for Urban Modernism.
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” in llluminations
Carl E. Schorske, “The Ringstrasse,” in Fin de Siecle Vienna
Meng Yue, "The Rise of an Entertainment Cosmopolitanism," in Shanghai And the Edges of Empire
June 28: Kristine Harris, “The Goddess: Fallen Woman of Shanghai,” in
Chris Berry, ed. Chinese Films in Focus II
Film: Wu Yonggang, The Goddess (1934)
June 30: Andreas Huyssen, “The Vamp and the Machine” in After the
Great Divide
Film: Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927)
The first week begins with a foundational discussion of modern urban culture before proceeding directly into the material of Shanghai and Berlin. Benjamin’s essay addresses the transformation in sensibility in nineteenth-century Paris, the epitome of the modern metropolis, and its traces in the poetry of Baudelaire. Schorske’s volume on Vienna around 1900 is the paradigmatic treatment of modernism in the city, and the Ringstrasse chapter describes the remapping of modern urban space. In the two films, gender is the site of urban cultural conflict. The Goddess, a classic of the Chinese silent film, shows the quandaries of a Shanghai prostitute, while Lang’s Metropolis displays the convergence of utopian aspirations with anxieties about technology, both projected onto female figures.
Film: Ruttman, Berlin, Symphony of a City
July 6: Ding Ling, Shanghai, Spring 1930 (1930)
July 7: Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl (1932)
Ailing Zhang, “Sealed Off” (1943)
Brecht’s Three Penny Opera is a clear expression of Berlin cynicism and a view of urban human nature in which criminality and critical sensibility intertwine. Although placed in early modern London, it is a thinly veiled allegory of modernist Berlin, and it became the signature piece of Brechtian theater’s comment on the culture of the German capital. As a modern dismantling of romantic illusions, Brecht’s play resembles Ding Ling’s Shanghai, Spring 1930, which depicts how petty bourgeois individuals engage in romantic love and modern literature but quickly run into a dead end: in contrast, an enlightened housewife becomes aware of socio-economic problems and joins a workers association. Ding Ling’s celebration of political transformation echoes the bohemian radicalism of Brecht, in which avant-garde aesthetic and vanguardist politics converge. Both authors express a mixture of excitement and cynicism about modern love and life.
Urban modernism described a sensibility in which nothing changed more than representations of gender roles. The anonymity of the cities combined with new economic forces and a reorganization of work to allow for a critical distance from traditional role structures, as the literature and the films of the era record. Zhang’s short story “Sealed Off” recounts how a man and a woman are thrown into a close encounter during an air raid in Shanghai. and their conversation explores their frustration with conventions as their intimacy grows. In Keun’s novel, The Artifical Silk Girl, the heroine leaves the German provinces to arrive in Berlin, where she navigates between the opportunities of new found freedom and structures of patriarchy resistant to change. The heroine is the emancipated new woman, facing the enduring power of the city.
July 11: Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) (excerpts)
July 12: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) (excerpts)
Xie Jin Two Stage Sisters (1964).
Gina Marchetti, ‘Two Stage Sisters: The Blossoming of a Revolutionary
Aesthetic,” in Sheldon Lu, ed. Transnational Chinese Cinema
July 14: Project Presentations
Döblin, whose earlier novel, the Three Leaps of Wang-Lun (1915) had treated political unrest in premodern China, presents a classically modernist treatment of metropolitan life in Berlin Alexanderplatz. Combining montage structures, stream-of-consciousness, multiple discourses, and colloquial language, it has been compared to aspects of the novels of Joyce, Céline and Dos Passos. The city and the masses are as much central figures as is the ex-convict, Franz Biberkopf, who tries but cannot overcome the forces that beat him down: Döblin deploys the modernist novel to provide an anatomy of subjectivity in the modern city. Some fifty years later, the premier director of the New German Cinema, directed a sixteen-hour filming of the novel for West German television. Fassbinder’s retrospective account of Döblin’s Weimar Berlin cites the novel’s modernism from a later vantage point, marking a historic distance to urban modernism, but also taming it. Two Stage Sisters provides a similarly retrospective treatment of interwar modernism.. A comparison of the cities of Fassbinder and Xie is as much about different national cinemas as it is about the changing memory of the interwar period: Fassbinder invoked Weimar Germany in 1980 in the midst of the Cold War and a still divided country, while Xie explored the interplay of theater and crime on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. With the third session of this week, the seminar commences regular presentations of participant projects.
July 18: Shi Zhicun, “One Evening in the Rainy Season” (1929)
Wu Tsu-hsiang “Young Master Gets His Tonic” (1932)
July 19: Mao Dun, Rainbow (1929)
July 21: Project Presentations
Urban modernism is not only about excitement, velocity and freedom: it also involves loneliness, alienation and constraint. The seminar examines literature and film that record this darker side of modernism. Thus,in Shi Zhicun’s “One Evening in the Rainy Season,” a flash romance in Shanghai streets vanishes when the time comes to return to reality. In addition in Wu Tsu-hsiang’s “Young Master Gets His Tonic,” the grown-up son of the gentry landlord enjoys both traditional and modern privileges in Shanghai and literarily sucks milk and blood from the downtrodden. Cao Yu's drama Sunrise depicts the interplay of economic corruption and personal degradation, in ways comparable to Three Penny Opera.
July 25: Brecht, Measures Taken (1930)
Film: Brecht, Kuhle Wampe
July 26: Zhang, Lust Caution (1950)
Ang Lee, Lust Caution (1995)
July 28: Project Presentations
Urtban modernism emancipates subjective desire, but it also involves the decline of subjectivity through political engagement and revolutionary parties that emphasize duty. Yet acts of betrayal often accompany revolutionary parties, a conflict of duty and desire. Brecht’s play and Zhang’s s novella both signal the end of the moment of urban modernism: Measures Taken explores the demise of individual sentiment within the Communist revolution—it involves Russian agents carrying out propaganda in China-- while Lust Caution treats the conflict between love and politics in the resistance against the Japanese invasion. In both, individuality disappears beneath the force of political power and obligation. Lee’s filming of Zhang’s narrative adds an additional historical layer to the reflection on the culture of Shanghai in the 1930s, and its lush sensuousness and deceptive playfulness stand in stark contrast to ascetic discipline of Brecht's cadre.
August 1: Project Presentations
August 2: Friedrich Georg Jünger, The Failure of Technology (1939), excerpt
Film: Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will (excerpt)
Mao Tun, “Spring Silkworms”; Ding Ling, “When I was in Hsia Village”
August 4: Urban Modernism in Cinematic Retrospect:
Fei Mu, Springtime in a Small Town (1948)
Billy Wilder, A Foreign Affair (1948)
This week begins with the final project presentations and then proceeds to material evidence of the end of the era or urban modernism. As much as urban modernism celebrated itself, it also elicited opposition: anxieties about metropolitan disorder, appeals for a return to nature, and fear of technology. In Germany, in addition to celebrations of rural life, a philosophical critique of technology, as in Jünger's 1939 treatise. The stories by Mao Tun and Ding Ling articulate the emergent ruralist sensibility as a critique of urban modernism. The seminar then concludes with discussions of two films that mark the end of urban modernism. Springtime in a Small Village stages the conflict between city and country in the context of post-war, pre-revolutionary China. In A Foreign Affair, Austrian exile director Wilder looks at post-war Berlin, the devastation of the bombing (an allusion to Riefentstahl’s Triumph of the Will) and an evaluation of the modernism embodied in a classic performance by Marlene Dietrich. Both films tilt toward a valorization of national and rural identity, laying the groundwork for a new post-urban sensibility.
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The directors are both members of the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford—Russell Berman is also in German Studies, and Ban Wang is in Asian Languages. We share many interests in literature and cultural theory, particularly involving critical approaches to modernism and “Critical Theory,” broadly understood. However we have focused on different cultures with contrasting historical experiences, which leads us to approach texts from different perspectives.
Professor Berman’s work treats questions of modernism and modernity, with particular attention to critics of modernity within the German tradition. His Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (1986) includes an extensive discussion of Max Weber, a foundational thinker for any discussion of cultural modernization and on Alfred Döblin, whose Berlin Alexanderplatz, is the emblematic modernist novel of Berlin. He has pursued debates over modernity in Modern Culture and Critical Theory (1989) and in Cultural Studies of Modern Germany (1993). His Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (1998) is especially pertinent to the seminar by raising questions of the spatial displacement of culture from the European “center,” and the relationship between modernization and imperialism. His Fiction Sets You Free (2007) reflects on the complex relationship of literature, literacy and democracy. He has published numerous essays on German modernism, including figures important to the seminar, such as Bertolt Brecht, and on filmmakers Pabst and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Professor Wang’s scholarship is centrally involved with questions of cultural modernity in China. Examining modern aesthetic innovations in relation to political modernity in the East and West, he has published The Sublime Figure of History (1997), a widely influential book on aesthetics and politics in modern Chinese political culture. He served as co-editor and translator of the Chinese edition of Walter Benjamin’s seminal volume Illuminations, which is foundational to discussions of cultural modernity, especially with regard to the role of cinema. He has addressed questions of cross-cultural modernity frequently, including in Narrative Perspective and Irony in Chinese and American Fiction (2002) and in Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China(2004) Professor Wang and Professor Berman are collaborating on a special issue of the journal Telos that will treat Çhina and Critical Theory.
Seminar participants, please login to access the readings below.