CMLT 370 - The Modern Temper

This course is an exploration of human subjectivity as it is revealed in modernist literature, music, art, and film. Investigation begins with brief readings of Darwin, Wagner, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud-thinkers who shaped the intellectual climate in which modernism took root and flourished. We turn then to aesthetic modernism, including works by Charles Baudelaire (The Flowers of Evil), Arnold Schoenberg (Pierrot Lunaire), Pablo Picasso, the Surrealists, Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis), T.S. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), Alain Robbe-Grillet (The Voyeur), the abstract expressionists, Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho), and Don DeLillo (Point Omega). Special attention will be given to the major modernist themes of alienation, experimentation, relativism, fragmentation of the subject, rebellion against tradition, and the quest for new meaning. (Group III) (Writing Option)