Handbook

This course introduces you to the wave of experimentation in the arts that we have come to call modernism. During the first forty or so years of the twentieth century, traditional art forms underwent an unprecedented process of revolution and innovation, as artists and writers sought radically new ways to express the experience of modernity. We will consider the works of a range of individual European and North American modernist writers and film-makers, as well as examining some of the many collective movements, groupuscules and “isms” that sprang up during this period. A touchstone of our inquiry will be the vexed relationship between “modernity” as a historical condition and “modernism” as a cultural movement. What does it mean to be modern? What happens to art when traditional beliefs and ways of life enter a period of permanent crisis – a period, that is, when “all that is solid melts into air”? And does modernist culture teach us ways to feel at home in modernity, or does it remind us of our alienation?