Calamity and Creation

Catalog description

How can creativity flourish under crisis? While wars, natural disasters, and disease outbreaks have devastated global communities over the centuries, they have often led to significant advances in the arts and sciences. Why do crisis, calamity, or suffering lead to creativity and innovation? How can we better understand this paradoxical yet intimate relationship between crisis and creative expression? This course considers how the arts have helped us grapple with crisis, conflict, and catastrophe - whether natural or human-made - and shape our responses to them. While tracing different catastrophic events across space and time, from early creation myths to Covid-19, students will ask how artists have responded to crises and what aesthetic strategies they use. Students will also analyze the role the arts play in the scientific, government, and economic debates surrounding natural and human-made disasters and what such forms of creative expression can tell us about ourselves as humans. Students will read primary historical texts and engage with artistic responses to crisis in literature, painting, cinema, music, and theater, supplemented by psychological and scientific texts.