COML537 - Topics in Cultural Hist: Making & Marking Time

Topic for Fall 2021: Making and Marking Time. What is time? In the late 19th century, the questions of how to define time, how to slow down time, and, above all, how to accelerate movement have become a focus of the work by many European philosophers who have tried to come to terms with what is now termed as the Industrial Revolution, and the idea of "progress." And can time be understood as something continuous, or is it fragmented, proceeding in fits and burst? Such contemplations on time have deeply influenced writers and visual artists alike. Marcel Proust was a reader of Henri Bergson and translated his theories of time into a concept of memory. Impressionist painters insisted on picturing fleeting moments, and composers experimented with temporal sequences. Thomas Mann has tried to navigate timelessness in a novel set on a "Magic Mountain." Virginia Woolf and James Joyce have pictured an entire universe in a single day (Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses). Early 20th century Italian Futurists made the contemplation of time part of their manifestoes, and expressionist writers and artists, as well as the supporters of the DADA movement in Germany or elsewhere in Europe were theorizing about time as well. This would influence their choice of genre and form, their writerly practice and technique. Pictures were set into motion in scholarly studies by photographer Eadweard Muybridge and finally in the new medium film. We may be able to understand a reconsideration of time as driving force for the modern movement, or simply "modernity." In this seminar, we will study a selection of literary texts of the late 19th century and the modernist movement, consider the philosophical background and changes in historiography, and consider the development in the visual arts at this time, in particular painting and the new media of photography and film.