Constellations: HAA 2400 Special Topics Modern - Modernism
This course examines the key theories, debates, concepts, and critical discussions that accompanied the development of modernist practice between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The course aims to provide in-depth scrutiny of certain crucial discourses that informed the visual arts during one of their most revolutionary periods, and to conceptualize the often complex relations between such theories and material practices in art. Among the concerns on which the course focuses will be definitions of modernity, the concept of the avant-garde, understandings of spectatorship, theories of perception, and forms of interaction between artistic and extra-artistic cultural formations. Although its primary focus will be the visual arts, those aspects of modernist theory on which the course concentrates will also hold interest for students of literature and music, as well as for students of intellectual and cultural history more generally.
