Inventing Modernity II:Realism and Resistance

Catalog description

The pessimistic turn of Western art and philosophy in the second half of the 19th Century stands in sharp contrast to the progressive rhetoric of that era. European and American newspapers, serving the interests of nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism, trumpeted modernity as an Age of Progress. Mechanical marvels (cameras, electricity, railroads, telephones) and political emancipations (the end of monarchies and abolition of slavery and serfdom) were seen as signs of new and better ways of life for all. The novelists, playwrights, and theorists we will read in this class, on the other hand, tended to see things differently (although not always unanimously among themselves). Committed to a kind of whistle-blowing that was either a mode of representation (“realism”), an intellectual disposition, a moral commitment, or all the above, many of our authors conveyed some version of an idea expressed by the defense at Baudelaire’s obscenity trial in the late 1850’s: the point of art in the modern world is “to expose frank, unidealized, and unpleasant realities.” The most conspicuous “’unpleasant realities’” revealed in our readings cast doubt on philosophical and religious certainty, the sanctity of marriage and family, and the stability of identity and personality. While the general direction of our readings is toward what Weber called “disenchantment” and Freud called “discontent,” it should be noted that most of our readings include a surprising and comforting amount of comedy and wit. Readings will include: Dickens’s Great Expectations, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, James’s The Bostonians, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and The Decay of Lying, and selections from Baudelaire on modernity and Mill on feminism.