鈥淔rom the modernism you chose you get the postmodernism you deserve.鈥澨� David Antin
鈥淚f it is art, it is not popular.听 And if it is popular, it is not art.鈥澨� Arnold Schoenberg.
罢别虫迟蝉:听In Search of Lost Time鈥�Marcel Proust,听
The Complete Stories鈥�Franz Kafka.
In addition to these primary texts, I will also email assorted essays, including 鈥淭he Dehumanization of Art鈥� by Jose Ortega Y Gasset, 鈥淐reative Writers and Daydreaming,鈥� by Sigmund Freud, 鈥淭he Ideology of Marxism鈥� by Georg Lukacs and 鈥淭he Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,鈥� by Walter Benjamin.听听 We will also screen Carl Theodor Dreyer鈥檚听Le Passion de Jeanne D鈥橝rc, and listen to excerpts from the work of Arnold Schoenberg.听听
To begin to discuss even a few of the aesthetic concerns of the period known as Modernism in a single semester is a fool鈥檚 game.听 With such an explosion of radical formal and intellectual innovation and experimentation, the best we can hope for is to carve out a somewhat manageable slice of pie.听听By necessity, we are forced to bracket, defer and ignore some of the most important texts, movements, authors, ideas, experiments, ideologies, technologies, developments, historical happenings etc etc etc of the time.听 We are leaving out听much听more than we are including.听 With these discussions, it is highly doubtful we will come to any sort of consensus or resting point.听 We will not master these texts as much as try to intelligently submit to them.