Humanities 250/English 230

Nihilism, Modernism, Uncertainty

Professor Harold Schweizer
Professor Katherine Faull

Fall 2001

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition No. 8

Course Description

Virginia Woolf once wrote that "in or about December,1910, human nature changed." This seminar will explore the pervasive sense in Western culture that fundamental shifts in cultural patterns and paradigms are taking place, changing not only our relationship with tradition and with the physical world, but even the ways we think and feel about ourselves and about each other. Although these changes have been profoundly destabilizing, this cultural destabilization has been viewed as threatening by some and as potentially liberating by others. Certainly, many of the most influential modern artists and thinkers have questioned how or even whether value and belief can be sustained in a culture undergoing such rapid changes. We will trace the development of this sense of modernity by looking at selected texts that reflect or directly address this sense of cultural destabilization and transformation, with a primary emphasis on our own century. Many of the primary texts for the class will model this anxious sense of social and cultural shift by concerning themselves with a sense of transformation and destabilization in various fields, including philosophy, literature, psychology, music, art, and the natural sciences.

Readings from Nietzsche, Freud, DuBois, Woolf, Sartre, and others will illuminate our discussions of philosophy, music, film, and literary texts, and criticism. Like HU 098 and 150, the course is interdisciplinary in nature, and seeks to explore connections between different areas of human endeavor as a way to understand the tension between reason and uncertainty that has become characteristic of the twentieth century.

Each week of study will include a two hour evening lecture and discussion in which all sections of the course will participate in common, plus two one-hour daytime meetings in smaller sections.

Texts

Coursepack: available through e-reserve

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Anchor Books)

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and other Poems (Harvest/ HBJ)

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (Norton)

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and other Stories (Dover Thrift)

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Vintage)

Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (Carol)

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harvest/HBJ)

Requirements

Attendance and participation, including attendance at film screenings

Two papers, 6-8 pages in length and one prepared presentation (Powerpoint) 15-20 minutes

Grading

Papers and presentation 75%(3x25%)

Participation 25%

Film Screenings

There will be two film screenings in the course of the semester. Attendance at these screenings is required. The first will be a screening of the film “Shoah”. Each film will be shown twice, at 4.30pm and 8pm, location TBA.

Note on Reading Assignments: you are expected to complete the reading for a given week prior to the Wednesday lecture for that week.

SCHEDULE OF LECTURES AND FILM SCREENINGS

August 29 Introduction, Walter Benjamin “The Work of Art at the time of its mechanical reproducibility” and Barthes, “The Death of the Author” one-reserve by Professor Schweizer

Sept. 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and The Gay Science (e-reserve) byProfessor Gary Steiner

Sept. 12 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents by Professor John Rickard

Sept. 19 W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks (e-reserve) by Prof. Glyne Griffith

Sept. 26 Modern Art (e-reserve: Gabo, Tzara, Kandinsky, Picasso, Futurist manifestos) by Prof. Mary Brantl

Pablo Picasso, Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

First paper due

Oct. 3 Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”, “In the Penal Colony” by Professor Katherine Faull

Oct. 10 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by Professor Harold Schweizer

Oct. 17 New Physics (e-reserve essays by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) by Professor Tom Solomon

Oct. 24 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway by Professor Pauline Fletcher

Oct. 31 The Holocaust (e-reserve Borowski “This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen” and Celan , “Death Fugue”) by Professor Jack Kolbert

Second paper due

Sisyphus and the rock…

Nov. 7 Existentialism: Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions and Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (e-reserve) By Professor John Westbrook

Nov. 14 Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (e-reserve) by Professor Ghislaine McDayter

Nov. 28 Twentieth Century Music (e-reserve: Crawford, “Twentieth Century Expressionism: Its Nature, Background, and Language” and “Edgard Varese: The Liberation of Sound”) by Professor James Romig

Third paper due

Dec. 5 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart by Professor S. Ekeme Agbaw, Bloomsburg University

Mask (of his mother), by Koffi Alany (ca. 1940s, Coted’Ivoire)