Art and Argument

Catalog description

Works of art might seem to be powerful instruments of personal enlightenment and social change, but are they really? Many would agree that a “good” work of art is neither an argument nor a lecture nor propaganda, and yet who would deny that the experience of art provides us with something more than simple wisdom or passing pleasure? On the other side of the debate, some have argued that the best art exists solely “for art’s sake,” while others hold that the power of art increases with its distance from the fray of society and its distracting arguments. This course will explore both sides of the question through the close examination of a number of short European novels of the late 19th and early 20th Century and with frequent focus on other media--film, poetry, the visual arts, theater and dance—representative of more recent and contemporary creative thought. We will consider how the form and content of particular artworks (ranging from the overtly ideological to those that dramatically represent the formation of thought itself) may direct our attention to new ideas and alter our ways of seeing. The readings will probably include Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, Mann’s Death in Venice, Melville’s Billy Budd, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Wilde’s The Decay of Lying, and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and critical writing by Sartre, Adorno, Baldwin, and others.