Instr:                  Marcus Bullock
Office:               CRT 589,   229-6339, 351-3936 (home)
e-mail:                bullock@uwm.edu
Office hours:    by appointment

Course Information:                   W   4:30-7:10pm  CRT 368
 

Course Description

There's much to be gained from the chance to look back on a century as it sinks into the past while we still recall some parts that have not yet begun to appear in that alien glow we call "history."  The course will take advantage of the unusual moment in which it takes place in order to examine  the process of separation from the past, and consider what impulses go to
work in accomplishing this trick of the light.  Specifically, I want to question what the accretion of ideas about the avant garde has determined how we understand the period immediately preceding the First World War -- the period of five or six years that produced the first abstract painting, atonal music, cubism, futurism, and a variety of innovations that decisively mark off the 19th from the the 20th century.  The materials we will cover expression from the years encompassing the two world wars as an unreliable prism through which to examine that period.  By looking at the aftermath of  this productive moment and the militarization of experience in Western culture as distorting optics, I hope to generate a different forward perspective into the possibilities of the next century.

Consideration of the multiple structuring and restructuring of human experience through its social and bodily basis over the past century should  also make a framework within which we will be able to respond to the current  project pursued by the Center for 20th Century Studies.