I’m looking at an old photograph of a young man about to board a ship. He’s dressed more formally for the occasion than people dress now, in a suit, and the young woman who is seeing him off is in a suit too. But two other visual elements jar with the look of this moment: an American flag is sticking awkwardly out of the young man’s jacket pocket, and he and his girl are locked in a kiss.
Well, the photograph is archived in the Library of Congress, and there it’s backed up with an explanatory footnote. The ship, it turns out, is a French liner about to leave New York, the young man is a French reservist departing for home, the date is August 5, 1914, and France has now been at war with Germany for two days. What shortly will come to be called the Great War is beginning, and little do they know what’s about to happen to them — this boy in his jaunty checked cap, this girl in her trim little summer gloves.
But some people who did have an idea were the artists. For several years before the great death began, artists with names like Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky and Franz Kafka had been researching new ways of observing the world, and when the world changed, they were ready to file their reports in a new form. A general name for that new form is modernism, and in the course of the first third of the twentieth century it revolutionized visual art and music and language. With the help of some images and some key texts, we’ll tour some of its fields of action.
Texts: The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, volume 1
Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories
Robert Crumb and David Zane Meyerowitz, Kafka
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust
Assignments for the grade: Four five-page papers, midterm and final