Course Description
Introduction to Modernism as an interdisciplinary aesthetic movement spanning the 19th and 20th centuries that continues to influence culture today. Examination of the construction of modernism, modernity, and the avant-garde across the arts through the politics of race, gender, nationalism, and colonialism that define the period around the globe.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students will be expected to produce an extensive research paper on specific works or issues related to the field and the methodologies appropriate to the topic under consideration in the course. This paper will be a detailed, in-depth consideration of the student's chosen theme requiring not only a demonstration of advanced research skills (including the ability to read and use material presented in foreign languages), but also an articulation of the student's ability to understand and manipulate the critical apparatus of art history in connection with Modernism.
Athena Title
Interdisciplinary Modernisms
Prerequisite
Two ARHI 3000-level courses and permission of major
Semester Course Offered
Not offered on a regular basis.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
- Students will develop an understanding of the confluent ideas of Modernism, Modernity, and Medium with regard to artistic practice in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Students will identify the historiography, theories, actions, and aesthetic practices of modernism, ideas of modernity, and hierarchies of artistic media.
- By considering the idea of medium in modern art to connote not just the material support of painting and sculpture, but also the means of communication, students will examine correspondences across the disciplines.
- Students will analyze political and aesthetic uses of anti-modernist categories such as subjectivity, bodily experience, and theatricality, as well as artistic interventions like migration, diachronic circulation, afro-fabulation, queer modernism, and provisionality.
- Through these perspectives, students will come to terms with modernism as an art historical category, both its histories and its myths, its errors and its futurity.
- Students will identify key concepts and ideas associated with Modernism, Modernity, and artistic practice during the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Students will develop an understanding of modernism’s intersection with broader cultural, social, and political contexts.
- Students will critically assess the historiography of modernism, recognizing different perspectives and interpretations relative to geographic, temporal, and cultural positioning.
- Students will discover and analyze discrepancies and correspondences, theoretical alignment and contradiction among artistic media and their academic disciplines.
- Students will apply acquired methodological and analytical skills to interpret specific examples of artistic production.
- Students will conduct independent research on a specific aspect of modernism and to present findings effectively in writing and oral presentation.
Topical Outline
- I. The What, Where, When of Modernism
A. Modernity
B. Modernism
C. the Avant-Garde
- II. Ideas of the Modern
A. Myths of Enlightenment, Myths of the Modern
B. Inventing Abstraction
C. Modernist Art and the Critic
- III. Modernism’s Other Media
A. Literature and Form
B. Cinema and Motion
C. Dance and the Body
D. Race, Gender, and Theatricality
E. The Provisional, Ephemeral, and Circulatory
