The Modernist Movement, 1900-1925

Line is a Force.
Henri Van de Velde (1902)

This course considers modernism as a collective enterprise in the earlier part of the 20th century, an enterprise that took various forms in art, literature, music, architecture, philosophy, psychology, photography, film and science, an undertaking that reorganized the experience of narrative time and visual space in important ways that still demand our attention. The intention of the course, however, is not only to pursue those critical influential relationships which seem to abet the notion of an historical modernism as a European movement both cosmopolitan and international, but to look synchronically at modernism as undertaken in diverse forms in diverse disciplines. Our task is thus both comparative and interdisciplinary. To that end, we concentrate upon the idea of abstraction as a semiotic coding for the alientation of the aesthetic object from historical circumstance or the aestheticizing of diverse experience in the specialized experience of the aesthetic object. We will want, of course, to look at the cultural crisis that precipitated such a turn to abstraction, suggesting that this radical modernity is paradoxically a covert conservatism, and the problems it raises for the discovery of meaning. Works studied in the course will be diverse: in addition to various literary works and important theoretical considerations of modernity, we will also look at the work of Cezanne and the Cubists; architecture from the English Arts and Crofts movement (“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” William Morris, 1882) to Art Nouveau and to the Bauhaus; the Futurist movement and the idea of the avant garde; Freud and the beginnings of psychoanalytic literature; German Expressionist film; Duchamp, Breton and Surrealism. The purpose of the course is thus twofold: to establish an interdisciplinary narrative of modernism, and to introduce students the practice of interdisciplinarity. The course begins with Beckett’s landmark of modernity in the temporal and spatial axis of the theater, Waiting for Godot, and asks by what history did we arrive at this seeming abstraction, inversely and paradoxically still embedded in time, language and images now iconic.

Readings:
Introduction: Modernity/The Eiffel Tower (1889)
Week 1: Beckett, “Waiting for Godot” (1953)
Week 2: The English Aesthetic Movment and the beginnings of Art Nouveau
Gaultier, “Preface” to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834)
Pater, “Conclusion” to The Renaissance (1873) Nietzsche, from The Gay Science (1887)
Wilde, from The Decay of Lying (1891)
Mallarmé, “Un Coup de Des” (1897)
Week 3-7: Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
Week 8-9: Picasso, Braque and Cubism
Week 10: Futurism and the Idea of the Avant Garde: Manifestos (1909-18)
Week 11-12: Gropius and the Bauhaus
Ruskin, “Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884)
F. L. Wright, “The Art and Craft of the Machine” (1904)
Loos, “Ornament and Crime” (1908)
Gropius, “Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus” (1923)
Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow (1929)
Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle (1932)
Week 13: German Expressionist Film
Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919)
Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)
Lang, Metropolis (1925)
Week 14: Duchamp, The Large Glass, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors Even” (1915-23); Etants Donnés (1946-66)
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)

Course Requirements: 2 essays (6-8 pages); 1 longer final essay (8-10 pages); 3 brief readings (Ulysses, Cubism, Bauhaus architecture); class participation