AP/CLTR 4851 6.00

Modernism Across The Arts

The underlying project of the course is the analysis of how we make meaning through art forms. More specifically, we will investigate the literary, music, and visual cultures of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to examine what we could call, with hindsight, a burgeoning interdisciplinary and interartistic inclination. The course contextualizes how and why this interdisciplinary impetus occurs during the period, as well as how such crossovers between artistic forms contribute to the generation of new modes of cultural material. Issues to be explored include: questions about visual culture, such as the nature of images and the crucial role that "looking" plays in societies; how the aural provides alternatives to, interacts with, and/or destabilizes the visual; and, how media that combine the visual and aural achieve their efficacy. These concerns will be problematized by overarching questions about gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, and class.