The Modernist Moment: Triumphs and Crises in Paris, Berlin, Munich and NiceUMAIE Course Number: T3916
SAU Course Equivalency: +ENGL 344, Modernism (four credits)
Instructors: Dr. Cecilia Konchar Farr, English and Women's Studies, and Dr. Amy Hamlin, Art and Art History, St. Catherine University, Minnesota
Prerequisites: ENGL 101
Tentative Dates: January 2 -26, 2013. SAU Spring semester begins January 16.
Location: France (Nice and Paris) & German (Berlin and Munich)
Price: $5,935-$6,235 (tentative)
Think of modernism and we think of experimentation and innovation, of breaking with the past and looking to the future, of wild artistic and literary movements and outrageous philosophies. Modernism set the stage for a twentieth century characterized by unprecedented change and enacted the first half of a drama we continue to play out today.
This interdisciplinary, intermediate-level humanities course explores the major ideas of modernism in Paris, Berlin, Munich and Nice, cultural centers of the early twentieth century. Beginning in Paris, we will set the context for our explorations by visiting the cafés, museums, bars and bookstores where the moderns worked and played in Paris. In our study of modernist culture "between the wars" we will take our cues from Americans who came before us, the expatriate writers Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, as well as the artists and thinkers from Europe and Africa who gathered in Paris in the early twentieth century. We will also encounter "the shock of the new" in Modernist art as we move from the traditional Musée Louvre to the inside-out Centre Pompidou.
Moving on to Berlin and Munich, we will delve into the paradox of the modernist moment as it played out in Germany. How could a country that produced great works of modernist art and literature give rise to a fascist political regime bent on the destruction of that culture? To investigate this paradox, we will traverse these two cities that were hotbeds of avant-garde artistic practice, responding to the gesture and color of German expressionist paintings that were inspired by the energy of the cities. We will also take a day trip to the Bauhaus in Dessau to tour the campus of the avant-garde art school that flourished there in the 1920s. Berlin and Munich were also sites of oppression and corrupt political theater under the Nazi regime. We will visit some of these sites, then view Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 propaganda film 'Triumph of the Will' to understand the history and aesthetics of what Susan Sontag called this "fascinating fascism." We will end our time in Germany with a sobering day trip to the Dachau Concentration Camp.
We will complete the course in Nice on the Cote d'Azure, the summer haunt of expatriate writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and modernist artists Matisse, Picasso and Chagall, where, under the famous Mediterranean sun, we will spend a day at local art museums and take a side trip to the Matisse Chapel and Fondation Maeght in nearby Vence.
Priority Deadline: April 13, 2012
Complete the online study abroad application and submit a $500 application deposit to the Center for International Education (300 Ambrose Hall).
Applications will be accepted until October 1.
Students that apply after the April 13 Priority Deadline may find that their desired program is full.
