Power of Ideas: Modernism

Our "modern world" is the creation of an intellectual and artistic revolution that took hold between 1890 and 1930, in such urban centers as New York, Paris, Chicago and Berlin. This course will explore the sources of this world-transforming intellectual movement. It will explore how artists such as Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso escaped traditional conceptions of art and began to re-invent the way we see the world. It will also look at how Freud's concept of the unconscious and William James's and John Dewey's conceptions of American pragmatism re-defined what it means to be a human being and how we should live. And, in the political realm, it will underscore how the modern world has been marked by the paradox of governmental ideologies that promise liberation but have often delivered terror. Here, Lenin's political tracts will provide students a context for reading Kafka's literary parables and Hannah Arendt's classic exploration of Nazism.

The next session begins January 28^th, 2005. Tuition is US$695.

Selected Topics Include

• Introduction: Defining the Modern World
• The Self and the Psyche: Pragmatism
• Freud and Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Cézanne
• The Dissolution of Forms: T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
• The Fate of the State: Lenin, State and Revolution
• Kafka's Literary Parables
• Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

Course Requirements

In this course students will be expected to complete extended readings and to write regular essays. Students will interact with each other and with the instructor via an asynchronous discussion board and synchronous chat sessions.

Prerequisites

The Humanities courses are open to students who are presently Juniors or Seniors in High Schools. Younger students who have successfully completed two EPGY writing courses at the W11 level or higher may also register.