The academic study
of modernism was for many years confined to the "high arts”.
As a movement, it was commonly thought to begin and end with Picasso
in the visual arts, with Joyce, Woolf, Pound and Eliot in literature,
Stravinsky in music and Le Corbusier in architecture. In this view,
modernism was a term that designated an artistic school, an aesthetic.
As a backdrop to that set of innovative strategies, “modernity”
was understood of as a specific historical period marked by the experience
of rapid industrialization whose consequences were felt most centrally
in the production of goods and the transformation in modes of communication
and travel.
In contrast to this dual vision of modern art and society, more contemporary
scholarship represents these phenomena an imbrication of modernism with
modernity. Scholars address the influence of advertising on the modernist
aesthetic (and vice versa), explore art’s capacity to register
the “shock” of a radically changed temporality produced
by modernity, analyze the psychological and cultural effects of the
new technologies, in general, and any number of other projects that
mark modernism as a set of cultural practices that both articulate and
mediate the experience of modernity. As the editors of the journal Modernism/
Modernity explain, "Modernism was more than a repertory of artistic
styles, more too than an intellectual movement or set of ideas; it initiated
an ongoing transformation in the entire set of relations governing the
production, transmission, and reception of the arts. Modernism has come
to be seen as much more than an artistic movement: rather, it marked
a fundamental change in the way people saw the world.”
This seminar will call on speakers from film studies, literature, and
art history to help us explore how this more capacious sense of modernism
has transformed our understanding of that period, the arts it produced
and our own relation to the recent past. The seminar will explore recent
work in the history of film describing the ways early film registered
and engaged modernity both as object and mode of perception. Literary
and art historians will analyze modernist responses to modernity and
its technological innovations as both resource for and an obstacle to
artistic creativity. Finally, we will ask how this new perspective complicates
and enriches our understanding of modernist ideas on the autonomy of
artistic form and practice.
Speakers on this topic will include Tom Gunning (Film Studies), Miriam
Hansen (Film Studies and English), Joel Snyder (Art History), Yuri Tsivian
(Art History, Film Studies), Robert Von Hallberg (English), Bill Brown(
English).
Program
Schedule Pre-Reading
Guide Paricipant
Interests
BACK
TO MFS MAIN PAGE
University of Chicago