MLU
Seminar: American Modernism - Vertiefungsmodul - Details
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General information

Course name Seminar: American Modernism - Vertiefungsmodul
Course number ANG.04629.02
Semester WS 2021/22
Current number of participants 11
maximum number of participants 30
Home institute Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Courses type Seminar in category Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
First date Tuesday, 12.10.2021 10:30 - 12:00, Room: Seminarraum 3 [AKStr.35] (Angl.)
Studiengänge (für) ANG.04629.02 für LA Gym, Sek Englisch (2012+2015)/ LA Förder (Sekundar) Englisch (2012+2015) / MA Engl. Spr. u Lit 45/75 LP (2015) / MA Angloam. Lit., Spr u Kult. 120 LP (2015)
SWS 2

Module assignments

Comment/Description

In the much-admired study on modern culture, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982), Marshall Berman defines modernity as the experience of incessant metamorphosis: “To be modern,” he states, “is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air” (345). Berman draws a dialectical relationship between the unfolding modernization (“progress”) of a primarily urban environment and the development of modernist art and thought. He claims that the greatest accomplishment of modernist artists was to make the vital interplay between opposing values such as permanence and perpetual change visible in their experimental work.
In this course, we will approach the daunting topic from a cultural-historical perspective before delving into examples from American modernist literature. Our starting point for nearly every session will be Tim Armstrong’s classic study Modernism: A Cultural History (2005), which provides an excellent overview of cultural developments in ‘modern’ America (and Europe), before we will explore an astonishing variety of innovative and highly experimental art and reflect on the relationship between the modern era and the form of modern art. What does it mean to be ‘modern’? What is a ‘modern’ experience of time? Why do modern artworks look like they do? Our journey into American modernism will cover different media (film, photography, music, and fiction) and genres (e.g., short stories by Hemingway, poetry by T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and Amy Lowell, and jazz). It also includes a side trip to mass culture and the emergence of comic art.

Required texts (please purchase the following book):
- Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.

- Additional course material will be made available on the ILIAS platform.

Admission settings

The course is part of admission "Beschränkte Teilnehmendenanzahl: American Modernism - Vertiefungsmodul".
The following rules apply for the admission:
  • A defined number of seats will be assigned to these courses.
    The seats will be assigned in order of enrolment.
  • The enrolment is possible from 20.09.2021, 01:00 to 31.10.2021, 23:00.