ModernismWhat is it?

Why did it happen?Why does it matter?

Super Brief History of Thought

• Greeks and Romans

• Middle Ages: church power and the plague

• Renaissance: humanism and exploration

• Protestant Reformation

• Scientific Revolution & Enlightenment: empiricism

What is modernism?“At the start of the 20th c., continuity snapped”

• radical shift in art, literature and philosophy

• influenced by scientific developments and global events

• themes

• what do we truly know?

What do you see?

What do you see?

How many legs do you see?

Are the horizontal lines parallel or do they slope?

Count the black dots

What’s happening?

Which line is longer?

Modernism in Action

• Significance of images

• Literature

• Art

Modernism--LiteratureKafka’s The Metamorphosis

reality vs perception

stream of consciousness

non-linear time

William Butler Yeats“The Second Coming”

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned...”

Modernism-ArtWhat is the perception of normalcy?

abstract: cubism and surrealism

linear perspective is out

Picasso’s Cubism

“Landscape with Bridge” (1909)

“The Guitar Player”

Surrealism: Salvador Dali’s “Persistence of Time (1931)”

Dali’s “Face of War” (1940)

Fragmentation

M.C. Escher’s “Bond of Union” (1953)

M.C. Escher’s “Reptiles” (1943)

What is real?

Everything is relative

M.C. Escher’s “Relativity” (1953)

Why did Modernism Happen?

• Global Events

• Developments in the “hard” sciences

• Developments in the social sciences

http://www.richthofen.com/france_at_war/premiereligne.jpg

Impact of World War I

Why did I survive? Dehumanization

Mechanized Death

Disillusion

Albert Einstein

• theory of relativity (1920)• space and time relationship

• highway example

Uncovering the subatomic world

• Marie Curie• atoms are divisible

• radioactivity• two Nobel Prizes

conditional vs innate reflexes

no natural laws

sane vs psychotic

Ivan Pavlov

Development of Psychology• “father of modern

psychology” • controversial ideas

• humans are irrational

Sigmund Freud

behavior is rooted in the unconscious (id)

mind is fragmented into three parts: id, superego and ego

The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

competing drives of eros and thanatos

Freud’s Four Important Ideas

• Contradicted parts of the Scientific Revolution

• New round: What is human nature?

• Where do we fit in the universe?

• What do I know? Is it possible to know anything?

Why does it matter?