In 2024 I attended an exhibit on the history of the Barbie line of dolls and toys. It struck me as an instructive example of consumerism, for good and for bad.
Viewing:

No HW, but come to class having thought a bit about how kids play with Barbie and similar toys. What fantasies do these toys embody? What ideology do they deploy?

Optional Reading:

• George Gordon Byron, selections from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 1815 (link)
• Felicia Hemans, selections from Modern Greece, 1817 (link)
• John Keats, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” 1817 (link)

One of the most talented writers of short fiction working today, George Saunders published “The Semplica Girl Diaries” in The New Yorker in 2012. The story appeared in slightly longer form a few months later in his 2013 collection Tenth of December. Saunders’ fiction blends realism with surrealist touches to comment on contemporary life.

Reading:
George Saunders, “The Semplica Girl Diaries” (Blackboard)

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Saunders’ narrator has a peculiar voice and perspective in this story. Quote a line and use it to comment on what makes the narrator unusual.
2. Should Saunders’ story be classed as Surrealist? Explain your answer briefly by reference to specific details from the story—and perhaps from the Surrealist Movement.

Committed pacifists Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer wrote the screenplay for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in the wake of World War I. The movie reflects the antiwar ethos and Expressionist aesthetic that came to the fore in 1920s Weimar Germany.

Viewing:
Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari available via: Kanopy. Make sure to turn on both the volume (there is music!) and the English subtitles (to accompany the German intertitle cards).

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Point out and comment on a stylistic or thematic pattern in the movie’s visuals.
2. Point out and comment on a moment where the movie challenges authority or the social order.

The Island of Dr. Moreau explores the boundary between civilization and savagery, imagining brutal medical procedures capable of transforming beasts into men. Like the best science fiction, the novel functions as social commentary in addition to being a thought experiment about science’s philosophical consequences.

Reading:
H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Point to a moment when the novel comments on the ideology and practices of the British Empire.
2. Comment on the significance of a key event or detail from the opening chapter for the novel’s larger themes.
3. Comment on the role of pain in transforming beasts into men, as described by Moreau in Chapter XIV.

Surrealism seeks to draw upon the imaginative power of the unconscious mind to challenge received ways of thought and so bring about a revolutionary consciousness. I use the present tense in this sentence because while Surrealism first blossomed in 1920s Paris, the movement still has practitioners working in the present day. It first emerged as an outgrowth from Dada. Artists working under the banner of Dada had sought to tear down meaning, but as Surrealists they came to embrace a communitarian ethos—and they engaged in a long running dalliance with the French Communist Party. In the “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924), Andre Breton theorized imagination, in opposition to the straitjacket of pragmatic utilitarianism, as opening a path to freedom, the first step in reinventing the world order:

Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality. The mere word “freedom” is the only one that still excites me. I deem it capable of indefinitely sustaining the old human fanaticism. It doubtless satisfies my only legitimate aspiration. Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought. It is up to us not to misuse it. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery—even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness—is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be, and this is enough to remove to some slight degree the terrible injunction; enough, too, to allow me to devote myself to it without fear of making a mistake (as though it were possible to make a bigger mistake).

Reading: Strickland, pp 148-51.

Viewing: Surrealist art

• René Magritte, The Double Secret (1927)
• René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1929)
• Man Ray, Black and White (1926)
• Man Ray, Sleeping Woman (1929)
• Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1931)
• Méret Oppenheim, Object (1936)
• Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dali, Lip Dress and Shoe Hat (1937)
• Max Ernst, Europe After the Rain (1942)

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Point to a stylistic or thematic pattern you see in some or all of these artworks.
2. Point to a striking detail in one particular artwork.
3. How does Surrealism compare to Expressionism? Point to a similarity or contrast between specific works.

Expressionism in art is often traced to the influence of Edvard Munch, whose Scream captures the artist’s tortured soul. In the years before the War, Expressionism spread from painting to poetry, drama and film and after the war it came to define the Avant-Garde in Weimar Germany.

Reading: Strickland, pp 123, 142-44.

Viewing: Expressionist art

• Edvard Munch, The Scream (earliest version 1893; this version 1910)
• Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait (1910)
• Otto Dix, Storm Troopers Advance under a Gas Attack (1924)
• Otto Dix, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926)
• Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait with Champagne Glass (1919)
• Max Beckmann, The Actors (1942)

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Point to a stylistic or thematic pattern you see in some or all of these artworks.
2. Point to a striking detail in one particular artwork.
3. Given that “anomie” is defined as the loss of social norms, point to a particular artwork and explain how it challenges or violates the viewer’s normative expectations.

Two years after Hitler seized power, German art critic Walter Benjamin wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” a short but highly influential essay pondering how photographic reproduction challenges the aura of uniqueness that suffuses original artworks. A committed socialist, Benjamin didn’t think this was necessarily a bad thing, since a truly mass medium lends itself to mass participation. In the essay’s final section, Benjamin turns to the politics of mass art, distinguishing between the tendency of Fascists to aestheticize politics and the project of Communists to politicize aesthetics. Benjamin’s essay feels especially resonant today, in the era of the internet and digital photography, when everyone carries a camera in their pocket and where images posted online spread virally.

Benjamin’s essay is short, but dense, so I’m drawing on this YouTube explainer. If you want to read the original, you can find a translation of it here.

The popular movie series, Night at the Museum, imagines displays coming to life after the doors close and the lights go off. This silly premise works, I suspect, because it draws upon something we already believe to be true: that museums are more than just storehouses of dusty relics, that they are staging-grounds where the visitor encounters the “Other”—whether in the form of a long-dead creature, a rare beetle, or a foreign culture.

Reading: as witnesses to this phenomenon, I call to the stand four poets. Each writes in response to a museum artifact, employing ekphrasis to set the artwork before the reader’s eye and (sometimes) apostrophe and prosopopoeia to engage it in conversation:

• Percy Bysshe Shelley “Ozymandias,” 1817 (link)
• John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 1818 (link)
• W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” 1938 (link)
• George the Poet, “The Benin bronze,” 2015 (link)

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Highlight a moment in one of these poems where the object responds to inquiry in an unexpected way, surprising the poet—or teaching the audience something new.
2. All four poems dramatize the poet’s encounter with the past. Focusing on one or two of them, reflect on what they teach us about history and/or the passage of time.

Viewing: Richard Lester, A Hard Day’s Night, available via: Bob. (You may need to return to this page and click the link a second time after logging in.)

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. How does this movie present the Beatles in relation to their fans? To put it another way, what does it say about the experience of celebrity?
2. How does this movie present the Beatles in relation to authority? To put it another way, what does it say about the “generation gap” between youth and responsible adulthood?