FYE 101 - Make it New: Modernism in Literature and the Arts

Do we experience the world as it really is? Do the arts represent the world? Or do they create the world for us to understand? Can we understand the world at all? How about ourselves? These are a few of the questions raised by the artists, musicians, and writers whose ideas became central to early-twentieth century modernism. We will focus especially on German and Austrian figures such as the psychologist Sigmund Freud, the artist Wassily Kandinsky, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, the architect Mies van der Rohe, and the writer Franz Kafka who didn’t just change their disciplines: they radically transformed the ways that humans thought about themselves, their relationships with each other and with society as a whole, and how the arts could be used to explore these new conceptions of the world. By questioning, reformulating, and even destroying 19th-century ideas about art, music, literature, and human nature, modernism paved the way for a new world: one marked by an unceasing critical exploration of nearly every aspect of human culture and society.

Credits 1

Compass Attributes
First Year Experience