Dr. Birdwell

Texts: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

Modris Ecksteins, Rites of Spring

Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s

Selected Literature on reserve in the Library

This course will examine the impact that World War I made on the cultural landscape of the world. While most students are aware of the socio-political fall out of World War I that set the stage for the second world war and the Cold War, few are familiar with its impact on culture.

The course will be divided into three sections. The first section, From Dada to Boogie Woogie Manhattan, will examine the impact of the war on the visual arts. The war killed most of the Futurist painters from Marinetti to Balla, as well as killing cubists, artists from the Viennese Secession, and other movements that were vibrant at the war's beginning. It was the war that pushed Oskar Kokoschka to create the world's first abstract painting, opening the door to a new means of artistic expression. George Grosz responded to the war and its aftermath by creating a series of gross, exaggerated two-dimensional works that focused on the suffering caused by the war. This section of the course will introduce students to a number of artistic movements, including Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and minimalism. Among the artists to be discussed are Egon Schiele, Piet Mondrian, Jan Arp, Salvador Dali, Marc Chagal, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O'Keefe, Jean Cocteau, Leon Bakst, Otto Wagner, Gustav Klimt, Max Ernst, and Wyndham Lewis.

The second section of the course, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Satchmo, Stravinsky, and Friends, will examine the war's impact on music. The war made a significant impact on music. It led to an entire generation of composers who eschewed melody in favor of dissonance. Edgar Varese tried to capture the chaos of war in his orchestral pieces and added sirens, blood curdling screams, and other unexpected sound to his music. Schoenberg developed the twelve tone scale, while Russian composers added a darker shade to their compositions after the death of Lenin. Jazz made an indelible imprint on the musical landscape, effecting popular and serious music. This section of the course will focus on a number of composers and musicians in addition to the four in the section's title, including Erik Satie, Sergei Prokofiev, Vladimir Stokowski, Edgar Varese, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Kurt Weill, Yip Harburg, and Wyndham Lewis.

The third section of the course will focus upon the war's impact upon literature. The war inspired some of the greatest authors of the Twentieth Century. Dozens of writers saw combat (e.g.: Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, e.e. cummings, William March, etc.) while others lost loved ones during the war (e.g.: Willa Cather, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, and Theodore Roosevelt). Many writers, like Erich Maria Remarque, wrote jeremiads condemning war, while others, wrote books celebrating war, the most famous being Storm and Steel. The war gave rise to thousands of memoirs, many still in print. It was the impetus of Bertolt Brecht's best theatrical writings and his most absurd polemics. Long before Catch 22 examined the mind-numbing bureaucracy and illogical machinations of the military, Jaruslav Hasek lampooned them in the dark comic novel The Good Soldier Schvek. Students will be exposed to literature--popular and critically acclaimed--inspired by the war. Among the authors to be discussed will be Irwin Cobb, Floyd Dell, Katherine Anne Porter, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eugene O'Neill, John Reed, Floyd Gibbons, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Anna Akmatova, Nikolai Gogol, Maxim Gorky, and Wyndham Lewis.

Students will be required to conduct research on some aspect of World War I's influence upon culture. The fruits of the research will culminate in a 20-25 page paper (not including notes and bibliography). Grades will be based upon attendance, participation, and the paper. There will be no tests since this is a seminar.