Studies 20C: Modernism

The
era that historians sometimes call “the long nineteenth century” began with the
outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and ended with the outbreak of World
War I in 1914. The period between those two cataclysms was the greatest epoch
of material progress in the history of the world, before or since. It began
under the flickering light of candles, with horses clopping along the dirt road
outside the sickroom where doctors were treating George Washington’s case of
flu by bleeding him to death; it ended in a blaze of electricity, with
airplanes rising in the sky and doctors beginning to apply a new technology
called chemotherapy.

 

Toward
the end of the epoch, artists began catching up with the change. In Italy, a
group of painters and writers, feeling oppressed by the heavy weight of their
national past, began trying to create what they called an art of the future –
an art made out of neon signs and speeding cars. In Russia, a painter named
Vasily Kandinsky began realizing that after photography entered an artist’s
repertoire there was no longer any need to think of a painting or a drawing as having
to be a picture of – that is, of anything
at all except itself. And in Paris on May 29, 1913, a Russian composer named
Igor Stravinsky and a Russian choreographer named Vaslav Nijinsky managed to
provoke a full-scale riot at the premiere of a ballet based on the idea that it
might be interesting to experiment with new ways of moving.

That
collective artistic response is called modernism. We’ll be focusing generally
but not exclusively on its literary aspect. And you’ll see: what the long
nineteenth century was to technology, the short modernist era was to the arts.
Amazing changes took place; deeply moving changes, beautiful changes. We’re
still living gratefully in their afterglow.

 

Assignments for the grade: four five-page papers,
midterm and final.

 

Required texts: The Longman Anthology of British Literature, fourth edition, volume
2C

American Poetry: The
Twentieth Century
, volume 1

Franz
Kafka, The Complete Stories

R.
Crumb, Kafka