From 2008 Connexions will start introducing
new courses and a series of seminars:
The Explosion of the Modern
THE EXPLOSION OF THE MODERN
FROM MONET TO BRECHT
This course is concerned with the birth of the modern in the arts. It studies the major names and movements between Impressionism and the outbreak of the Second World War, with a look beyond into our own period. To understand one's own period is the most exciting challenge to any art lover. It is not new to us, every age has had to do it, but our task is more complex and more problematic than in other periods. Why? There are four reasons, each of which will form a thread running through this lecture series.
The first is that with what Nietzsche called "the death of God", the dominance of industry and science and the loss of faith in any one set of cultural ideas ours is a fragmented world. This leaves us with the task not only of making sense of the new but also trying to hold contradictory fragments together. The second is our concern with consciousness itself. After Freud we are more than ever aware of the struggle between individual psychology and objective reality. As we struggle with Cézanne, Stravinsky, Bacon or James Joyce we are struggling not only with art but with our own perceptions. Third, we live in a world of increasing speed of travel, change and communication. Never before have new ideas risen and fallen so quickly, leaving us to sift through a mass of poetry, painting, drama and more to try to make sense of what remains and still keep up with what is being made. Finally, globalization has opened art up to a far wider range of influences than ever before. We shall be restricting ourselves largely to the western European and American traditions; but even there it is impossible to ignore the impact of other cultures.
Complex, problematic, challenging and exciting The Explosion of the Modern will take us through some of the major strands and moments of this unfinished adventure.
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