First-Year Writing Seminar: The Surreal Revolution

Catalog description

Can art and literature really change how we act and think? How we build and inhabit the world? How we live our lives? Surrealism, arguably the most influential avant-garde movement of the twentieth century, went so far as to declare that art and literature could revolutionize everyday life. In the hopes of liberating existence from technological and scientific domination, surrealist artists and writers sought to question some of the fundamental oppositions at the heart of modernity: imagination and reason, madness and control, freedom and work. They tapped into the unconscious and dreams, experimented with collective forms of making and living, and turned toward the city streets, ruins, and wastelands of history to excavate insurgent possibilities for the chance of an altogether different future. Our aim in this seminar will be to map the wider transatlantic context through which Surrealism developed at the intersection between literature, visual art, music, theory, religion, psychology, sexuality, and politics, emphasizing its cross-cultural mobilization in France before investigating some of its precursors, such Dada and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as its later circulation across the Atlantic, especially in the Caribbean and New York. Writing assignments will focus on close reading, argumentation, creative interpretation, and personal reflection open to a wide array of concentrations.