JAN 311 - How Modernism Made Our World

Instructor(s):  Arnold, Chad
Email:  carnold@stmarys-ca.edu

The serious upheavals in what would become evolutionary biology, psychology, cosmology, and global finance remarkably ushered in a whole host of artistic movements that arose in their wake in the early 20th century and it is this connective tissue that this course concerns itself with. 
 
 Furthermore, this aesthetic understanding and rendering of life has had a significant and lasting influence on our lives in the 21st century. This is what is now known as modernism. But what is ‘modernism’? Aren’t all ages and all times, modern? Yes, all ages are, in some sense, modern, and yet there is this period - roughly the years from 1880 to 1930 that was uniquely modern because it was a distinct break from all that came before. In other words, the age I am referring to was distinct from all other times because it took culture on a series of new courses and was not merely so because it was current. 
 
 This is an art class, and a class in culture, and a class in the history of ideas as they wiggle down through history. We will be watching some films and visiting SFMoMA and having conversations about the books for the course. The cultural shifts between 1880-1930 were seismic and continue to inform our age. And while this course will focus primarily on the artists and artworks of the early 20th century, we will also talk about how the notion of modernism has been carried forth. We will also discuss the cultural and intellectual aspects of the shifts they birthed. 
 
We will also read some work from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including an essay (The White Album, by Joan Didion, 1979) and a short story (Elliott Spencer, by George Saunders, 2019), and conclude the course by reading a play by the father of modernism, Euripides (Hecuba, 424 BCE). Among the central figures that initiated the shifts are Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Charles Darwin. 
 
The artistic results of all this change, as we move into the modern sensibility is the primary focus of this course. We will be discussing films and poems and paintings and poetry. We will talk about architecture and music. We will be examining the influence of these and other thinkers and the influence they had on specific recent art works by figures like Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, and Wallace Stevens. If you are interested in understanding where and when our century, with all its multitudes of cultural currents, got its start, and having some fun doing it, take this course.
 

Prerequisites & Notes
None

Credits: 3-CU