COML 4221 - Modern Primitives

(LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Enrollment preference given to: Comparative Literature majors. Enrollment limited to: 15 undergraduate students. Core Course for Comparative Literature majors.

N. Melas.

What is “modern”? What is “primitive”? Through the lens of contemporary debates, this course will examine the complex conjuncture of art, literature, anthropology and colonial racism in the early decades of the twentieth century, from Cubist painting to surrealism. Of central concern will be the figure of the “fetish” in its artifactual, economic and psychic dimensions and also the richly paradoxical position of artists and thinkers of color caught in the nexus of “primitivism” and “modernism.” Authors may include Pablo Picasso, Josephine Baker, Lydia Cabrera, Claude McKay, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, James Clifford, Sigmund Freud, Joseph Conrad, Langston Hughes, Karl Marx, André Breton, Pierre Mabille, Wifredo Lam, Leopold Sédar Senghor.