Literature and Culture: Modernism

Catalog description

The 19th century, often described as a period of rapid industrial change and urbanization, and famously characterized as a century of becoming, so altered the experience of being in the western world that it eventually led to the major shift in western intellectual and cultural history known as Modernism, that extraordinary period from the late-19th century to the beginning of World War II that produced radical new conceptions of human subjectivity and radical new ways of representing humans and their experience of the world, as well as new ways of making meaning in such a world. This course will consider the cultural forces and the set of ideas that led to Modernism and will examine the major features of Modernist production itself. With a focus on the literature and the art of the periodand with steadfast attention to wider intellectual and cultural contexts this course will address the modernist themes of subjectivism, perception, impressionism, self-consciousness, stream-of-consciousness, the unconscious, representation, experimentation, alterity, myth, alienation, colonization, globalization, mass culture, materiality, social life, gender and sexuality, movement, being in time, as well as the new role of art itself in the constitution of meaning. The course will examine the works of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Conrad, Kakfa, Joyce, Woolf, Yeats, Ford, Eliot, Hemingway, Stein, Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Saussure, Bergson, and/or others. Fulfills Core Requirements: Visual and Performing Arts (VPA).