COMP 351
The Global Avant Garde in Literature and Film Spring 2014
Division I Exploring Diversity Initiative
Cross-listed ENGL 352
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

Chic, sophisticated, experimental, bohemian, radical: the words we think of when we think of the “avant garde” call to mind the great cities of Europe and America in the early decades of the twentieth century. The usual suspects hail from Paris, London, Moscow, Rome, and New York, but many of them claimed to be mining the ¿naïve arts¿ and primitive energies of the “uncivilized societies” in Africa, Asia, and beyond. Can we recover these Others, these understudied but essential artists, as more than unconscious transmitters of unfamiliar cultures, and locate in their work a distinct set of aesthetic and political practices? Can we trace the global vectors of a representational strategy that is not Euro-American but is nevertheless politically and formally radical? Writers and directors like Jean Toomer, G.V. Desani, Amos Tutuola, Émile Habiby, Jean Genet, Aimé Césaire, Haroun Farocki, Patrick Chamoiseau, Claire Denis, and Andrea Arnold will help us locate and consider the explosive diversity of a broader avant garde¿s experiments with image, sound, and language, as well as how these texts have contributed to and put pressure on more traditionally Western modernisms. In posing a question about the geographical and cultural purview of the Avant Garde around the time of the world wars, this class encourages students to interrogate the transmissibility of aesthetic practice in an age of global upheaval. We will look to writers and artists working in a variety of traditions and, equally importantly, against those traditions, in order to examine the vectors of power and resistance that inflect a particular form of modernist expression.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 25
Expected: 25
Class#: 3906
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: weekly discussion questions, one short provocation paper of 2-3 pages or a creative project, presentation, and a research paper of 10-12 pages
Prerequisites: a 100 level English course, or a score of 5 on the AP Exam in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
Enrollment Preferences: English majors
Distributions: Division I Exploring Diversity Initiative
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
COMP 351 Division I ENGL 352 Division I
Attributes: ASAM Related Courses
ENGL Literary Histories C

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