ENG 495: Mongrel Modernism, 1890-1940

NOTE: This course can be used to satify the Film Minor's HUM 320 requirement or be used as an elective for the Film Minor

Description: Sitting in moving picture palaces and on psychiatrists' couches, pondering the cubist paintings of Picasso and the imagism of Pound and H.D., dealing with the devistation of war and an international influenza epidemic. These diverse experiences characterize the period known as Modernism, a time of radical social and cultural unrest and equally radical artistic movements. This course will introduce students to a "mongrel" Modernism by considering the wide range of scientific, cultural, social, and political discourses that influenced modernist aesthetics. Class discussions and lectures will explore a wide a range of topics that may include Imagism, Futurism, Participatory Journalism, Urbanism, Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, Criminology, Cubism, War, and the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to reading key literary texts from a variety of genres, we will view a range of films and visual art that defined Modernism.

Films: Edmond T. Gréville's Princess Tam Tam (1935); Dudley Murphy's The Emperor Jones (1933); R. H. Burnside's Manhattan (1924); Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1920); D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915); Kenneth MacPherson's Borderline (1930); Roy Del Ruth's The Maltese Falcon (1931) Dudley Murphy & Fernand Leger's Ballet Mechanique (1924); Buster Keaton's The Electric House (1922) and The General (1927); Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926)

Texts: Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925); Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1920); Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Sophie Treadwell's Machinal (1928); Parker Tyler and Henri Ford's The Young and Evil (1933); Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928); Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930); Gertrude Stein's Picasso (1909) and Tender Buttons (1915); Sigmund Freud's Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905)

For more information about the Film Studies program at the University of Northern Colorado, please contact April Miller

Office: Ross Hall 1180D Phone: (970) 351-2851

Site last updated on October 12, 2007