F1411 Modernism in Literature, Art and Music: Europe and the United States
Sweeney Eileen C.
This course is an interdisciplinary look at literature, art and music of the modernist period from the late 19th century to the last half of the 20th century. We will consider modernism in three geographical areas: France, Germany/Austria and the United States, making use of the collection of Modern/Modernist works in the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. Readings will include Baudelaire's essay, "The Painter of Modern Life," and selected poetry, music of Debussy and Stravinsky, and French Impressionism and Post Impressionism (Manet to Picasso and Gauguin, as well as Duchamp, Mondrian). For Germany and Eastern Europe, we will take readings from Freud, Kafka and Wittgenstein, and art works by Kandinsky, Klimt, and Ernst, along with the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. The American scene will be considered through readings from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story, “The Rich Boy,” art works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and Alfred Dove, and American jazz in the work of Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. We will conclude with a discussion of important art movements developing out of Modernism and represented in the Peggy Guggenheim Museum: futurism, surrealism, Dadaism, and abstract expressionism. We will spend the first three classes considering the background to Modernism, using selected readings from Madame Bovary, works by the French painter Courbet and the music of Wagner (after some background in earlier classical and romantic composers).
Our aim in this course will be to learn to think in an interdisciplinary way about literature, art and music. Students will learn to write about music and art, not just literature, and be able to connect the themes across different disciplines and media in the Modernist period. When we reach the most difficult artists in the visual arts and in fully atonal music, students should be able to understand and appreciate how Western art in the 20th century arrived at these radical responses to the tradition. For Modernist writers and artists, art replaces religion and politics as expressing and providing meaning and direction for human life. We will explore the Modernist theory of art and its importance for creating meaning, and the understanding of the art of this period will serve to illuminate the role of art in human life not just in but beyond this period.
REQUIRED TEXTS: available on line or in PDF; posted to viublogs.org during the term.
Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary (selections)
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” and selected poetry from Les Fleurs du Mal
Sigmund Freud, Civilizations and its Discontents
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (selections)
Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy”
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Futurist Manifesto
Surrealist Manifesto
Evaluation
Readings