ENGL 352
Anticolonial Avant Gardes: Literature, Film, Theory Fall 2017
Division I Exploring Diversity Initiative
Cross-listed COMP 353
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, artists, and filmmakers like Jean Toomer, G.V. Desani, Amos Tutuola, Émile Habiby, Jean Genet, Aimé Césaire, Haroun Farocki, Patrick Chamoiseau, Claire Denis, and Antjie Krog 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 how power and resistance inflected the avant grade strains of modernist expression.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 25
Expected: 25
Class#: 1863
Grading: no pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: class participation; one short 2- to 3-page provocation paper to be revised into a formal 5- to 6-page essay; presentation; final 10- to 12-page research paper
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis
Prerequisites: a 100-level ENGL course, or a score of 5 on the AP English Literature exam, or a score of 6 or 7 on the Higher Level IB English exam
Enrollment Preferences: English majors
Distributions: Division I Exploring Diversity Initiative
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ENGL 352 Division I COMP 353 Division I

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