This course aims to explore basic definitions of modernism and questions about its origins in the pre-World War I era. We will explore works leading to and following The Great War in which modernism is born from.

The experience of the modern world evolves rapidly at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. In historical terms, World War I is the major upheaval of societies and their displacement. In scientific terms, the evolution of astronomy, atomic physics, and Einstein’s theory of relativity redefine the parameters of the physical world. In psychological terms, human nature comes to be seen as multi-layered and contradictory in works of Dostoevsky and Freud. In simple terms artistic modernism is the reformation of the forms of art in response to the huge shifts in forms of human experience worldwide. This course looks at the burst of modernist art around and just after World War I, but then asks, “What are the antecedents in art and thought to the modernist revolution?”

Attached please find the tentative course syllabus. You will find that this webpage is not organized according to the syllabus, but instead by each topic that will be addressed within the course. As this course is an overview of the beginnings of Modernism, this site will also aim to provide supplemental and additional materials that cannot be covered within the margins of class time.

*Please note that the copyright of all unpublished material is reserved to Tom Simone