09:30A-10:45A TR (30) 3 cr.
British and Irish modernism revolutionized the ways in which we understand not only art and literature, but also gender, class, history, and society. First and foremost, these artists and writers challenged the ideals and norms of nineteenth-century art, transforming the very nature of painting, sculpture, poetry, and fiction. Arguing that new art should reflect and respond to modern life, they experimented with their work by borrowing both the forms and content of a growing industrial world - from machines, from science, from war, from advertising. But, as importantly, modernists valued art for its ability to influence or transform the social landscape of their time. Their artistic innovations were explicitly aligned with the feminist, nationalist, and labor movements of the period. The revolutionary energy of their work pulsed with the hopes of both world wars as well as with the political movements that inspired those conflicts. This class, then, will discuss and debate the modernist "project," its aesthetic as well as social aspirations, and assess the relative goals and successes of some of its major works. We will attempt to define the categories by which the modernists understood and argued about their culture and the impact that those categories have had on our world today.
Discussions and writings will likely focus on Wyndham Lewis's Blast, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno; poetry by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Mina Loy, H.D., Wilfred Owen, and Rupert Brooke. As these writers often collaborated with painters, we will also be looking closely at paintings and sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, F.T. Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and Vanessa Bell.
This is a discussion-based course, so both attendance and participation are mandatory. You will be assigned frequent written responses to the readings, two formal papers, and a final exam.