COML 3802 - Fantasies of Avant-Gardes

(crosslisted) ENGL 3902, ROMS 3802
(LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

J. Monroe.

What is it to be avant-garde? What do avant-gardes want, and for what purposes? How have desires to be avant-garde changed over time? What does it mean to be avant-garde in the 21st century? Focusing on a range of avant-garde movements in literature and the arts from their beginnings in the mid-19th century, through the historical avant-gardes (futurism, surrealism, constructivism), to the present, this course will explore the ways avant-gardes both respond to and shape aesthetic, ideological, technological, economic and political forces. Along with cinema and other visual media, authors include such figures as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Stein, Marinetti, Pound, Williams, Breton, Benjamin, Brecht, Césaire, Cha, Bolaño, Vicuña, Bernstein, Goldsmith, and Rankine.