Literature, Music, and Art in Times of Crisis

Catalog description

The connection between music, art, and literature and historical periods of crisis, tumult, and social destabilization. The course investigates the music, art, and literature produced in contexts of moral, political, financial, ecological, health, bio-technological crises. It also explores psychological and phenomenological crises, such as the crisis of personal boundaries in social media. Moments of crisis beget states of exception: culturally, art forms and genres react to crisis by reinventing themselves for unprecedented times. Exceptionality of form in the 20th and 21st centuries has often resulted in the breakdown of representation, tonality, and humanism. It has also, however, had consequential social effects and generated its own new forms of consolation. The course will likewise explore the phenomenon of late work, crisis work produced by individual artists late in life, as they confront their own mortality.