Modern Studies

The term “modern” has been used to express admiration, confusion, or derision in relation to a great range of cultural experiments in literature, art, music, and theater that characterized the period from about 1848 to 1960. The modern artwork was most often marked by stylistic innovations— ruptures in temporal/spatial continuity, the disavowal of narrative, the assertion of the new and the abstract. In both form and content, modern art responded to Arthur Rimbaud’s dictum: “It is necessary to be absolutely modern.” Thus modern artworks and the cult of the avant-garde that grew up around them can also be correlated to the historical changes associated with modernity: the development of capitalism and technology, urban life, world wars, imperialism, democratic movements, and the rise of feminism. This concentration offers students the opportunity to consider modern art and its relationship to the forces which produced it in various countries and at different historical moments.

Curriculum

A minimum of 16 credits is required for the concentration, eight of which must be taken in courses at the 300 level or above. Courses used to fulfill the concentration must be drawn from at least two areas of study (e.g., History and Literature, or Art History and Music, or Art History and French).

Courses

Art History 211 Picasso’s Art: Politics and Sexuality
French 309 Existentialism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Plays and Short Stories
French 321 Modern French Theater
French 328 Modern Novel in France
Literature 228 Modern British Fiction
Literature 231 American Drama: Moderns and Contemporaries
Literature 236 Sacred Dust: Modern and Contemporary Fiction of the American South
Literature 257 From Realism to the Absurd: Modern Drama
Literature 266 Hermann Hesse Seminar
Literature 267m The Stories of Franz Kafka
Literature 268 Postwar German Literature in Translation
Literature 308 Joyce Seminar: Reading Ulysses
Literature 310 Modern Poetry: Major Authors
Literature 311 Making it New: American Modernism
Literature 312 Harlem Renaissance
Literature 314 Disturbing the Peace: Modern American Fiction
Literature 315 Faulkner Seminar: The Sound and the Fury
Literature 318 Writers from Eastern Europe
Literature 319 Theater of the Absurd
Literature 320 History, Politics, and the Novel
Literature 330 The Inklings
Literature 333 Modern French Novel in Translation
Music 120m Charles Ives: Imagining America
Music 217 Music Since World War I
Music 218 CP Jazz: An American Encounter
Music 311 Theory V: Approaches to 20th-Century Music
Spanish 313 CP 20th-Century Latin American Novel
Spanish 315 Modern Latin American Poetry
Studio Art 205m Bauhaus Studio

Recent Senior Theses

Theses that develop from work in this concentration range from studies of particular cultural, historical, theoretical, and political phenomena of the period to creative works inspired by a modernist impulse or in dialogue with modernist ideas. Recent theses in this area include:

Faculty

Asma Abbas, Gabriel Asfar, Edgar Chamorro, Joan DelPlato, Peter Filkins, John Myers, Bernard Rodgers, Patricia Sharpe, Maryann Tebben, Laurence Wallach, Nancy Yanoshak
Faculty Contact: Bernard Rodgers