The 20th Century and the Tradition I: Modernism

Wednesday, 4.00-6.15 pm

Honors Library

J. A. Appleyard, S.J.

Office: Rahner House (96 College Road)

Tel. 552-1603

e-mail: <joseph.appleyard@bc.edu>
 
 

This course will deal with the unfinished work of the Western Cultural Tradition course, that is, with what happened to the tradition in the 20th century, how it got criticized, rethought, and how it absorbed new forms of knowledge and new points of view.

In a sense, of course, this is how the tradition got formed in the first place and how it got transmitted from classical and biblical times to the present. The course title, therefore, is somewhat misleading in suggesting that there was a single "tradition" to which the 20^th century has reacted. But the 20th century has been much more self-conscious than previous period in its attacks on the tradition and indeed on the very idea of a tradition. Thus, much of the energy of early 20th c. culture came from a consciously cultivated conviction among writers and artists that "modernity" was something new and different from the tradition that supposedly had formed the continuous center of European culture.

Understanding the residue of these intellectual currents in our own time will tell us something about who we are and how we view the world as we move towards the 21st century.

The course will focus on some key topics in 20th-century culture, their roots in the tradition, and the directions they point out as likely paths for the development of our thinking. The two semesters deal roughly with the movements called modernism and post-modernism. The topics we shall try to elucidate are: the changing representation of human beings and the world in visual art and literature; quantum theory and new scientific paradigms of the world; the hopes and disappointments occasioned by socialism; the menacing undercurrents in European culture that erupted in two World Wars and the Holocaust; the varieties of existentialism; feminism, minorities, the "other," and what's been left out of the tradition; structuralism and post-structuralism and their consequences; globalism and the political and economic quest for just communities; the crisis of religious belief and the search for transcendence.
 
 

F 99 Schedule

Sept 8 Introduction: Ideas of Modernity

Read: Hughes, "The Mechanical Paradise"

15 Eliot, "Preludes," "Prufrock," "The Waste Land"

22 " " " " "

29 Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Oct 6 " " "

1. Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond(selections)

Hemingway, "The Anarchist"

Odets, "Waiting for Lefty"

Read: Hughes, "The Faces of Power"

27

Nov 3 Forster, A Passage To India

Read: Hughes, "Trouble in Utopia

Nov 10 Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle (selections)

Read: Hughes, "View from the Edge"

17 Heidegger (selections)

Percy, The Moviegoer

Dec 1 Eliot, Four Quartets

8 Conclusion
 
 

Class meetings

This is a course that works by discussion. You are far more likely to learn from trying to formulate your own ideas, and from thinking about others' insights, than from listening to me lecture. This is why class attendance and participation are indispensable. I expect you to be in class, having read and thought about the assigned text, and prepared to contribute to discussion. Class participation will count for 50% of the course grade.

For each class I will ask you to prepare a one-page written assignment. This might be an answer to a question distributed ahead of time, a reflection on something we are reading, etc. These written assignments will count as part of the class-participation grade. It will not be possible to hand these in after the class meeting.

Class participation means more than showing up, with the written assignment; it means having some thoughtful things to contribute to discussion. I will do my best to make the class atmosphere conducive to discussion, but if your style of class attendance is to sit quietly and reflect in private on what is being said by others, perhaps this is not the course for you.

Paper

There will be one paper, due during the exam period, on a date to be assigned. 50% of the semester grade will be based on this paper.