Culture, Art and Technology (CAT) 2

WINTER 2007

Technology and the Sublime, 1869-1945

Room: Time: 8am-9:20am T/Th (note: apologies, but this was not my idea) Instructors: Peter John Office: PCH Rm. 250 email: pjohn@ucsd.edu Office hrs: tba TA(s): (name(s), office, contact, office hours tba)

Texts: The American Technological Sublime (Nye) Days of War, Nights of Love (Crimethinc) Course Reader Assignments: Essay 1 (15%) Essay 2 (20%) Essay 3 (25%) (all essays must include substantial and compelling evidence of revision [i.e.. the writing cycle]) Readings, lectures, discussions 20% Project/final exam 20% Projects: The projects listed below are intended to encourage an extra-linguistic exploration of the idea and experience of the sublime. Choose one of them, or design a project of your own, as long as it is relevant to the course (With your TA’s permission, you may submit a proposal for a group project): God’s I-Pod: what qualities of music or sounds induce in us the experience of the sublime? Are there any qualities common to all human beings (or other forms of life)? Sublime Perspective: what is the most evocative way to visually represent a naturally or technologically sublime phenomenon, be it natural or cultural? Synaesthesia: what combination of somatosensory, motor, and cognitive input might be best for inducing a sublime experience? Social Surgery sans Anaesthetic: what combination of popular images and sounds is most evocative of sublime experience or otherwise communicates the idea of sublime experience?

Part One: The Sublime and Technology Week 1: What is Progress? INTRODUCTORY QUESTIONS: How do we know whether or not we have had a profound or sublime experience? What’s the difference between a pleasurable or thrilling or simply memorable experience and a sublime experience? What are the criteria which distinguish such an experience? How should we describe it? Should we describe it? What should we name it? Are Profound Experiences Adaptive? What are the qualities which distinguish a sublime experience? Are such qualities the same for most human beings, or are there important linguistic or other culturally specific components to our identification and experience of the sublime? Why even think about this?

A. “Brave New World” (Shakespeare, Huxley, Crimethinc): Human Nature, Nature, Technology and the Sublime

B. The Natural Sublime and the Technological Sublime Read: Nye, Introduction and ch. 1; Crimethinc (introduction; and letters A, D, L, S) Possible Viewings: Soylent Green, THX 1138, Gattaca, The Island Week 2: Identifying and Signifying Your Own Experience of the Sublime Introduction: the task of essay composition: Why write an essay? The Idea of an essay: “ Interrogating ones ignorance” (Montaigne). Probing for an understanding of yourself in relation to the world, while resolutely asserting “the right not to know what you do not know.” A: Voyants B. Enquiring into our personal experience of the natural and technological sublime

Read: Reader, Part I (especially, James on Mysticism) Possible Viewing: Haunted Summer, Big Wednesday, Perfect Storm Walkabout, Black Robe Week 3: “The Machine in the Garden” (L. Marx)

A. Technological challenges to traditional notions of the Sublime and its Implications for the invention, perception, and use of technologies In an English garden In an American garden Has the sublime anything to do with gardens?

B. American Technological Sublime (Nye’s thesis)

Read: Nye, ch. 2-3 Possible Viewings: Women In Love, Koyyanisqatsi, 2001, Metropolis

Part Two: Pandemonium: enquiring into the ambiguous relationship between technologies (hard and soft) and our experience of the sublime.

Week 4: Days of War, Nights of Love

A. Fight Clubs (Brother Can you spare a dime?)

B. John Henry (Fare thee well Titanic) Read: Begin part II (first 30 pages) of Reader; Nye, chapters, 4-6 Possible Viewings: Aliens, Terminator; Modern Times, The Fugitive Week 5: From Above and Below A. “Crystal Palace” B. Psyche and City Read: finish Reader, part II; finish Crimethinc Week 6 : “Air-conditioned nightmare” A) Voyeurs, voyants, bohemians, flaneurs, poseurs B) On the Road Read: Nye, chapters 7-8; Part Three: Sublime Apocalypse Week 7: Above It All: A) Literally, an Apocalypse (Malcolm Ball): Thesis about our contemporary experience of the sublime B) “Lilith” (A. Kiefer) Read: Nye, chapters, 9-11; begin Part III of Reader Possible Viewings: “Wings of Desire,” “Triumph of the Will,” “Day After Tomorrow,” “Inconvenient Truth”

Week 8: “Crimes of Art and Terror

A) Lentriccia/MacAuliffe thesis) B) “Museum of Misshapens” (DeLillo) Read: remainder of Nye; continue Reader, part III Possible Viewings: Atomic Café, Deep Impact, Independence Day, Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds; Silent Running Week 9: Virtually Sublime A. Digitally mediated experiences of the sublime B. Autonomous Technology Read: finish Reader, Part III Possible Viewings: Week 10: Project Presentations

Potential Essay Prompts: Essay One: Integrate into a coherent thesis a healthy cross-section of the following questions: How would you identify and communicate your own most sublime experience(s)? Is the word “sublime” adequate as a referent to such experiences? What qualities distinguish a sublime experience? How are sublime experiences compared to other profound experiences? What evokes such experiences? What qualities distinguish and unite natural and technological sublime experiences? Are our words for describing experiences of the sublime culturally specific? Does the way other cultures may refer to or speak about the sublime, shape the actual experience of the sublime? All essays must substantially consider the following question: do such experiences seem to be adaptive, either for individuals, a group of human beings, or our species as a whole? Essay Two: Offer a thesis on the ambiguous relationship between technologies (hard and soft) and those experiences which we judge to be most profound and the quality of experiences and life we may associate with profound experiences. Some of the questions and task your essay should address: Does the perception of technology discussed by Nye still persist? Is your own experience of technology consistent with Nye’s thesis? Your essay must also include an accurate paraphrase, with examples, of Nye’s thesis, and an analysis of its weaknesses and strengths. Also, consider: Are some modern technologies antipathetic to our nature and our capacity to experience the sublime? Essay Three: explore hypothesis that our contemporary technologically mediated experience of the sublime is essentially apocalyptic. Explore whether or not this is a good thing. Is the cultivation and experience of the “apocalyptic sublime” adaptive for individuals or groups? Final (in-class): Compose an essay to elucidate and defend your Project.

Essay #3 and Manifesto A traditional account of modernization and modernity represents, either implicitly or explicitly, the significant changes in the past 200 years as originating from a Western “core” and emanating out to a non-Western periphery. One criticism of Modernism as an artistic “movement” is that, despite its pretensions to being avant-garde and cosmopolitan, it nonetheless reflects a largely, if not exclusively bourgeois Western viewpoint. Compose an essay that addresses the following question: If a Modernist art were to be created from and for the “periphery,” what would it be? Fundamental to this question are a variety of other questions, such as: Who are the periphery? Who is the core? (Have we a better metaphor?) Is the periphery limited to non-Western cultures, or are sub- or counter-cultures within Western culture equally peripheral? From the perspective of the “periphery” what account ought one to give of modernization and modernity? (25%) Along with your essay, you must create a manifesto; ideally, your manifesto will integrate as many “peripheral” viewpoints as possible, beginning with those provided by your peers in discussion sections. Who, among your peers, is the most peripheral? If you enquire into your respective family backgrounds, whose family’s past is most peripheral to the main trajectory of modernization and modernity? You might attempt to identify and paraphrase historical narratives that challenge the “core-periphery” model of modernity. So too, in conjunction with other members of your section, you might seek to combine counter-narratives into a single, coherent narrative (10%).

Your essay and your manifesto should integrate ideas and arguments put forth in your "Art in Theory" readings (especially, Fanon, Alloway, Burn, Rorty, Wollen, Oguibe, and MacClancy) and by the guest lecturer, Carlos Trilnick.

KEY

Quiz # 1: for 1-8 identify the names of the two artists/authors who are most likely engaged in the conversation (open book, open note: 15 minutes)

1] “The task I serve?” Like Brecht and Rivera, my purpose is “to help the workers to understand their oppression and suffering, force them to admit openly to themselves that they are wretched and enslaved, awaken their self-confidence and stir them to the class war.” I think I can agree with you when you assert: “Art can in no way be a fashion.” But then, would you not agree—as a Socialist (albeit a National Socialist)—that “the task for art” is human freedom? Grosz, Hitler 2] The work of art may indeed now be freed of its “aura,” of its spiritual provenance, and technology may indeed have opened up new creative possibilities; however, our technologies, our multiplying forms of media by which we “amplify and extend ourselves” also amount to a “huge collective surgery carried out on the social body,” a surgery undertaken with almost “complete disregard for antiseptics.”

McCluhan, Benjamin 3] While I am in fact a doctor, you don’t actually need a doctor to tell you you’re screwed, to tell you that your civilized condition is in fact anathema to your nature, your modern metropolis (as so cogently explained by Herr Simmel), a self-made instrument for your own repression. Despite your best experiments at derive and detournement, there will in fact be no “relaxation of censorship.” You know what Orwell will say, a few decades hence, “if you want to imagine the future, think of a boot stomping on the human face, forever.” Freud, Debord 4] Flags, flashflights…? You would seem to have successfully “deepen[ed] the game.”. Bacon, Johns 5] You bring to my mind the wit of my contemporary, John Cleese: “`That’s the sort of philistine pig-ignorance I’ve come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome spotty behinds, squeezing blackheads, not giving a tinker’s cuss for the struggling artist. You excrement. You whining, hypocritical toady…” raving about `decadent art’ and trying make everybody think alike through the imposition of power and authority, but all the while achieving nothing lasting; while artists such as myself use piss-paint, soup cans, and Marilyn Monroe-- whatever it takes-- to make us all more alike, to make “everybody like everybody.” Warhol, Hitler 6] I don’t think I want to be agreeing with you, but I seem to: our art has “died of senility”; Picasso is “hideous,” Dali indeed “a terrible ugliness”; there is, as you say, no “self-evidently necessary” art. But what am I to do “to give vent to rage”? If Faustian man is dead, the Faustian bargain broken, who then am I, what am I to do, what unhappy game are we playing? Bataille, Spengler 7] We invent new forms, not so much to reveal what is new, but rather to expose the inadequacy of the old, to de-familiarize, to—how will that Gaul put it, “de-construct”? You do not seem to agree, however. You think that a “new art form” is not so much about revealing the limitations of the old, but for opening up the possibilities for the representation and expression of the new? While I might agree with you that traditional

art media, canvass painting for instance, “simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience,” you seem to have great faith in the artistic possibilities of our new media technologies to achieve such things. Schlovsky, Benjamin 8] We are an accident, wholly “futile beings,” and there is therefore no reason why art need have a “revolutionary spirit” or any other type of spirit or power, save perhaps the power to “beguile.” Bacon, Rivera (or Grosz or Brecht) 9} 2 Questions: a] from what technology did the poet Coleridge distribute his political pamphlets? b] what instrument did the actor (Bunuel) wield in the film “Un Chien Andalous”? Balloon, razor 10] 2 Questions: a] what was written on the piece of paper that the young girl showed to the young boy at the beginning of “Waking Life”? b] what did Jim Morisson say in response to his fellow students criticism of his film for his UCLA film course? “Dream is destiny”; “I quit” Readings for week 7-8: Meier-Grafe, 51 Read, 510 Fanon, 710 Alloway, 715 Greenberg, 773 Adorno 779 Aftforum, 922 Burn, 935 Mendieta, 1064 Rorty, 1090 Wollen, 1105 Oguibe, 1170 MacClancy (see WebCt) Readings for week 9: Chirico, 58 Marc, 93

Jung, 378 Matisse, 383 Dali, 486 Rothko, 571 Newman, 574 Artaud, 608 Picasso, 648 Moore, 677 Cage, 734 Serra, 1096 Judd, 1139

Culture, Art and Technology (CAT) 2

WINTER 2006

POETS and PUNKS: Artists in an `Age of Mechanical Reproduction’

Culture, Art and Technology (CAT) 2

WINTER 2006

Room: CENTR 113 Time: TuTh 9:30a - 10:50a Instructors: Peter John; Linda Strauss Office: PCH Rm. 250

email: pjohn@ucsd.edu; lstrauss@ucsd.edu Office hrs: tba TA(s): (name(s), office, contact, office hours tba) “Mutants! Know now that you Exist!//They have hid you in cities//And clothed you in fools’ clothes.//Know now that you are free!//Their graves have time payment//Opened for you for centuries.//Now you will show them//How to keep the graves//closed forever!//They used your brains//To build burping missiles--//Now you will open your//Powerful eyes and penetrate//The Star and the Atom//And grow the new crops!//Bringers of darkness//Look to the newly awakened!//Dancers of the NOW//Look to the humming//Machine of light.” Manifesto for Mutants, Ted Berk (ca. 1960) “Child of Light! Thy limbs are burning//Through the vest which seems to hide them;//As the radiant lines of morning//Through the clouds ere they divide them;//And this atmosphere divinest//Shrouds thee wheresoe’er thou shinest.” Prometheus Unbound, Percy Bysshe Shelley (ca. 1820) Texts: Art In Theory, 1900-2000 Days of War, Nights of Love

Assignments: Essay One 15% Essay Two 20% Essay Three 25% Manifesto 10% Participation (reading, discussion) 20% Final 10%

IDEA OF COURSE: A primary goal of CAT I was to cultivate your awareness that we are all swimming in the medium we call “culture,” a medium that shapes, whether or not we realize it, what we think and believe, and how we behave. The purpose in CAT II is to explore in greater depth one particular culture. In this CAT track we will explore the artistic cultures associated with the word “modernism.” Fundamental to our task will be to seek a clear and useful conception of what we mean by “Modernism,” and its various cognates such as “modernization,” “modernity,” and, naturally, “modern.” An unhelpful starting point would be to define “modern” as “the way we live now”; this, of course, only begs the questions we will be trying to answer: How do we live now? What are the significant qualities or characteristics of modern life? Are our arts and

technologies adequate for our needs? Under the conditions of modernity—or, if you prefer, “late”-modernity—what indeed are our needs, as individuals and as a species? “Modernism” refers to artistic responses to modernity; modernity refers to the cultural response to modernization; modernization refers to many, many things. Among the many forces associated with modernization, three, arguably, have been fundamental in shaping modern culture (i.e., “modernity”): first, the technological and economic transformations arising from the on-going industrial “revolutions” of the last several centuries; second, the unremitting sequence of challenges to traditional explanations of the universe and of “man’s place in nature,” challenges arising from the work of, among others, Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, Heisenberg, and Hubble; third, dramatic demographic changes, most conspicuously, exponential increases in the human population and the concentration of people into cities. While a bold over-simplification, one might understand the first two forces in terms of the third: our urbanized “mass” culture, with its energetic regularities and its institutions largely indifferent to the spiritual demands of the individual, may be looked upon as the ultimate manifestation of the rationalization (in Max Weber’s sense of behavior directed toward a specific goal) of mechanized modes of production and consumption we associate with the Industrial Revolution, on the one hand, and, on the other, the evident occlusion of belief systems that have traditionally served as a common a guide for purposeful human behavior. This peculiar admixture of hyper-rationalization without apparent over-arching purpose is one characteristic quality of modernity, a quality to which Modernism has sought various creative responses. One way we will search for an understanding of Modernism is by looking at how artists have given creative expression to their experience of modernity, and how these expressions have been represented and mis-represented through the medium of film. Innovation in visual media is one of the more notable features of modernization. Indeed, our conception of the modern world may be said to be increasingly indistinguishable from our visually mediated representations of it. One challenge in this class is to attempt to distinguish representations of modernity from the actual experience of it. You will be asked to examine film and documentary depictions of the lives of certain individuals whose works epitomize creative attempts to make sense of modern culture. Also, while Modernism is associated with “artists” in the traditional sense--by which is usually meant painters, musicians, and writers--we will ask to what extent it makes sense to extend the ambit of “modernism” to cover other creative endeavors, including perhaps science and engineering. Our course begins with an overview of the forces we associate with modernization and how they gave rise to the range of thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, creations, customs, and so forth that we associate with modernity. Part I: Modernization, Modernity, and Manifestos Week 1: Introduction: Change and Adaptation A. Things Fall Apart (and then fall together in new and wholly unanticipated forms).

1. The ways things were (material and mental conditions, ex. Martin Guerre). 2. The way things became (material and mental conditions, ex. Kern)

B. Modernity: One long historical moment

“The desire beneath many romantic literary visions is for a terrifying awakening that would undo the West’s economic and cultural order, whose origin was the Industrial Revolution and whose goal is global saturation, the obliteration of difference. It is also the desire, of course, of what is called terrorism.” - Lentricchia and McAuliffe, Crimes of Art and Terror (2003)

1. Prelude: Enclosure and transportation 2. Demographics, Urbanization, Industrialization, Capitalism. 3. One long historical moment: some theories

Model of our synchronic moment: (L/M; Clark) Other historical “moments” (e.g., Classical, Christian)

• Theories about the diachronic dimension: Progressive, circular, regressive • Lentricchia and McAuliffe’s thesis • Precedents for this interpretation: Lord Clark “illusions of hope”; Robert Pattison, “triumph of

vulgarity”; Sayre and Lowy: a rejection of capitalism in the “name of precapitalist values”. • Explaining the Diachronic in terms of the Synchronic • Disputing Facts and Competing Theories about the synchronic dimension • Marx, Gramsci (hegemony) • Scott (“domination and the arts of resistance”) • Goffman (self-mortification)

Readings: “Modernity” (IIA); begin “Days of War, Nights of Love” Week 2: Machines and Manifestos A. Capitalism and the “Wrecking Ball” of Modernity

Communist and Capitalist Manifestos: from Smith to Marx to the Unabomber

B. The political nature of artist manifestos

1. Communist, Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, White, Pandaemonium, so on. 2. Situationists (hegemony revisited)

Readings: Manifestos (Art in Theory); and IV A-D Week 3: Fight Clubs, past and present “Imitation is the sincerest of flattery” Charles Colton “Murder is the sincerest form of criticism” Oscar Wilde A. Louder than words: Luddites, and other robust critiques (saboteurs, terrorists, anarcho-syndicalists, wobblies)

B. Disposable Batteries (Matrix)

1. How to behave when you’re Bestand: “The first rule of fight club” 2. Job Interviews (E. Kline; Office Space) 3. “Nickled and Dimed” (Ehrenreich) 4. Happy little proles (`Whistle While [they] Work’) 5. “The Edukators”

Readings: Complete “Days of War, Nights of Love”: also, “Art and Modern Life” (VIA) Part II: The Soul of the Artist Under Modernism Week 4: Lives of the Modern Artists: Sub-cultural and counter-cultural responses to Modern conditions since the mid-19th century A. Fundamental question: since the mid-19th century, are there predictable patterns or, at least, recurrent themes, discernable in the response of artists to modern conditions? (Culture as solution and problem briefly revisited (Hutchins, Geertz) Technology as a Problem; Art as attempted Solution ( artists seeking solutions more adaptive to the needs of human beings that the patterns imposed by modern technologies, be they “hard” or “soft” technologies, mechanical (IR), economic (capitalistic), social (urban), or political). B. Our focus: counter- and sub-cultural responses to modern conditions

1. Hoffmann on Prometheus 2. The variety and over-lapping qualities of counter-cultural response: violence, voyants,

manifestos Readings: Art in Theory, I A-B Week 5: The “rejection of capitalism in the name pre-capitalist values” A. Appalled Romantics: A brief 200 year retrospective (From William Wordsworth to William Morris to Morrison and Morrisey; including glimpses of Beethoven, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Chateaubriand, de Musset, Baudelaire, Wilde, Kerouac, and others). B.. Arts and Crafts, and Art Nouveau ( Morris, Ruskin) Readings: AiT, IIB; and III B

Week 6: Voyants, or “figures of romantic anti-capitalism” A. “When you look into the abyss…” Artisitic creation and other forms of transcendence (Nietzsche, Emerson Wilde, Pater, Monte Veritas) B. “Live fast, die young, make a nice corpse” Rimbaud, Morisson, Basquiat, Mishima) Readings: Art in Theory, V A-C, esp. “The American Avant-Garde” Part III: Core and Periphery Week 7: Gesamtkunstwerk A. From total art to Total War to Total Art . 1. Wagner 2. “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (Wilde)

3. Adas, “Machines as the Measure of Man”; Kern, “Culture of Time and Space”; Shock of the New (Hughes); Metropolis (Lang); metropolis (Simmel)

4. Total War 5. “Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin)

B. “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefensthal” Readings: III A-D “Rationalization and Transformation” Week 8: Core and Periphery A. A problematic and controversial metaphor B. Art In Theory in the mid-20th century Readings: VIA-B; VIIA-D Week 9: Rebel Consumers

“Give me convenience or Give me death” Dead Kennedys “I don’t know what’s gonna happen man, but I’m gonna have my kicks before the whole shit-house goes up in flames” J. Morrison A. Art, Avant garde merchandising and mass consumption

1. “Merchants of Cool” 2. “Hip: A History” (Leland)

B. “Days of War, Nights of Love” revisited Readings: VIIIA-C Week 10: “Crimes of Art and Terror”? A. Lentricchia and McAuliiffe; Sayre and Loewy; Clark; Pattison; Hoffman; DeLillo. B. Were we ever modern? (Latour) Essay #1: The text “Days of War, Night of Love” may be read as a manifesto about how we ought to respond to modernization and modernity. While it was written at the start of the 21st century, this “manifesto” is explicitly concerned with issues and ideas that have prevailed since the 19th century. Using evidence and examples from lectures, discussions, and readings, offer a thesis on the following question: Is Crimethinc’s “manifesto” consistent with the ideas expressed in the majority of Modernist manifestos published between 1900 and 1950 CE (see “Art in Theory, 1900-2000”)? Your consideration of manifestos should address the fact that modern art has generally been concerned as much with politics as aesthetics (for instance, as Benjamin notes (AiT, 520-527), fascists have tended to aestheticize politics, while communists have tended to politicize art). In this regard, consider whether modern art is or ought to be exclusively “artistic” (“art for art’s sake”) or expressly political. Or does modern art, as revealed in its manifestos, envision perhaps a “third way,” one that combines traditional notions of art with politics? Other issues you might address in the course of your essay include: What are the most significant characteristics of modernity? What connections, if any, exist between the forces of modernization (especially the Industrial Revolutions) and the behavior, sensibilities, and worldviews we associate with the idea of modernity? A better than average essay will also probably take a stand on whether Crimethinc’s manifesto is at all warranted. (15%)

Essay #2: On the representations of modern artists in film and documentary: Take as your subject two artists—one 19th century and one 20th century-- whose work and life epitomize creative responses to the conditions of modernity, and whose work displays some continuity with respect to its attempts to address solutions to the problems arising from modern culture. Working in groups of up to 3 people, learn about the artists and their world. Be prepared to present your preliminary findings in discussion section Present a thesis on two issues: 1) the extent to which the artists’ were facing similar challenges in similar ways, and 2) the extent to which the film or documentary accurately (through its manipulation of such basic techniques as editing, framing, and soundtrack) displays the artist and the artist’s world (20%). A list of possible Artist Subjects for your Second Essay: The list is, of course, in no way exhaustive of possibilities; the primary purpose of the list is merely to suggest the potential range of possibilities (i.e., from architects to musicians, taggers to film makers, sculptors to performance artists, poets to punks). Almost any individual or group discussed in your Art in Theory text is probable subject. Percy Shelley Arthur Rimbaud Antonin Artaud

Eisenstein William Burroughs

Mary Shelley The Brontes Dickens

Vincent van Gogh Charles Baudelaire Walt Whitman Herman Melville Henry Thoreau Charles Fourier Robert Owen

Kurosawa Samuel Beckett James Joyce Zora Neale Hurston Monte Veritas Shakers Oneida

Miles Davis John Coltrane Billy Holiday Louis Armstrong Leonard Cohen Amiri Baraka Gil Scott Heron

Samuel Coleridge Oscar Wilde Fritz Lang Olaf Stapledon H.G. Wells B.F. Skinner Buckminster Fuller Yvgeni Zamiatin

Bob Dylan William Gibson Phillip K. Dick Don Delillo Aldous Huxley Ursula K. LeGuin

Richard Wagner Albert Speer Jim Morrison Lord Byron Ludwig Beethoven Caspar Frederic

Virginia Woolf Frank Lloyd Wright Woody Guthrie Diane diPrima Che Guevara Lou Reed

Marc Bolan Chuck D Tupac Shakur Lenny Bruce Joe Orton John Lennon

William Wordsworth Pablo Neruda Antonin Artaud Jimi Hendrix George Sand Leni Riefensthal David Bowie George Eliot Salvador Dali Frida Kahlo Trent Reznor Frederic Chopin Pablo Picasso Georgia O’Keefe Jackson Pollock Eugene Delacroix Anais Nin Allen Ginsberg Andy Warhol Camille Claudel Henry Miller Jack Kerouac Yukio Mishima August Rodin John Steinbeck Patti Smith Jean Michel Basquiat

Essay #3 and Manifesto A traditional account of modernization and modernity represents, either implicitly or explicitly, the significant changes in the past 200 years as originating from a Western “core” and emanating out to a non-Western periphery. One criticism of Modernism as an artistic “movement” is that, despite its pretensions to being avant-garde and cosmopolitan, it nonetheless reflects a largely, if not exclusively bourgeoise Western viewpoint. Compose an essay that addresses the following question: If a Modernist art were to be created from and for the “periphery,” what would it be? Fundamental to this question are a host of other questions, such as: Who are the periphery? Who is the core? (Have we a better metaphor?) Is the periphery limited to non-Western cultures, or are sub- or counter-cultures within Western culture equally peripheral? from the perspective of the “periphery” what account ought one to give of modernization and modernity? (25%) Along with your essay, you must compose a manifesto; ideally, your manifesto will integrate as many “peripheral” viewpoints as possible, beginning with those provided by your peers in discussion sections. Who, among your peers, is the most peripheral? If you enquire into your respective family backgrounds, whose family’s past is most peripheral to the main trajectory of modernization and modernity? You might attempt to identify and paraphrase historical narratives that challenge the “core-periphery” model of modernity. So too, in conjunction with other members of your section, you might seek to combine counter-narratives into a single, coherent narrative (10%). Final exam: Revisit the argument of your first essay and offer a thesis on whether it is warranted in view of what you have studied since you wrote it. Also, analyze the rhetorical merits of your first essay. Include an analysis of your first essay’s strengths and weaknesses, considering such matters as grammar, punctuation, diction, paragraph structure, transitions, and overall clarity and persuasiveness. COURSE REQUIREMENTS: Please note: For the year 2005-2006, UCSD is requiring every first-year student to maintain a portfolio containing copies of all completed written assignments (in every course: not just writing courses) that have been commented on and/ or graded and returned by instructors or TAs. The portfolio would not include exams except for essay exams. Students must have portfolios complete and available for selection by the Writing Director of their respective colleges at the end of the academic year. If selected, the work in these portfolios will not be returned; keep copies for your personal files separately. IMPORTANT NOTES re GRADES

Policy on missed exams and late assignments • Unexcused late assignments will be docked 1/3 (one-third) of a letter grade for each day late (e.g. A becomes A- the first day late, B+ the second day late, etc.). • Make-up exams must be arranged as soon as possible after illness, injury, or family emergency. • The policy on make-up finals follows UCSD policy, since there are strict calendar deadlines established by the University for the submission of grades at the end of a quarter. • Sudden long-term illness, injury, or family emergency may necessitate an incomplete for the course, or withdrawal from it. Excuses and incompletes must be negotiated with your TA and the course instructor(s) prior to the final exam. ACADEMIC INTEGRITY UCSD has a university-wide Policy on Integrity of Scholarship, published annually in the Catalog (pp. 62-64 for 2005-6), online at http://registrar.ucsd.edu/records/grdbk3.html. All students must read and be familiar with this Policy. Receipt of this syllabus constitutes an acknowledgment that you are responsible for understanding and acting in accordance with UCSD guidelines on academic integrity. Academic stealing refers to the theft of exams or exam answers, of papers or take-home exams composed by others, and of research notes, computer files, or data collected by others. Academic cheating, collusion, and fraud refer to having others do your schoolwork or allowing them to present your work as their own; using unauthorized materials during exams; inventing data or bibliography to support a paper, project, or exam; purchasing tests, answers, or papers from any source whatsoever; submitting (nearly) identical papers to two classes. Plagiarism refers to the use of another’s work without full acknowledgment, whether by suppressing the reference, neglecting to identify direct quotations, paraphrasing closely or at length without citing sources, spuriously identifying quotations or data, or cutting and pasting the work of several (usually unidentified) authors into a single undifferentiated whole. Students with special needs Students with physical or learning disabilities should first work with UCSD’s Office for Students with Disabilities to obtain current documentation, then contact instructor and TA’s to arrange appropriate academic accommodations. This should be accomplished as soon in the quarter as possible. To be fair to all students, no individual accommodations will be made unless the student first presents the proper documentation.