Zoom class: Walter Pater and Charles Baudelaire, #walterpater, #charlesbaudelaire

Here is a Zoom class I taught last spring on Walter Pater's preface to his chapter on Giorgione in The Renaissance and on some writings of Charles Baudelaire as well as two poems:  "Correspondences" and "Voyage to Cythera." 

Walter Pater preface and Baudelaire on Wagner

Charles Baudelaire, "Correspondences"

Charles Baudelaire, "A Voyage to Cythera"

Zoom class: "Secular Transcendence in Marcel Proust," #marcelproust, #swannsway

Here is my latest version of the lecture "Secular Transcendence in Marcel Proust: Reading Swann's Way" which I recorded on Zoom for my online class at SVA this semester (Spring 2021).  It includes a PowerPoint that I share with the class and which includes several images related to the text.  An illustrated text version of the lecture with two or three video excerpts of the in-class lecture at Pace University in 2018 can be found if you scroll down further.    

"Secular Transcendence in Marcel Proust: Reading Swann's Way" (Spring 2021)

Some French "Cubist" and Surrealist Poets, #cubist, #surrealist, #poets

Here are some online classes I gave at Pace University last year (Spring 2020) on the poets Pierre Reverdy, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, and Henri Michaux:  

It is Poems by Pierre Reverdy

Paul Eluard, Lady Love

Eluard, Invention

 

Robert Desnos, I Have Dreamed of You So Much

Henri Michaux, I Am Writing You from a Distant Country, 

Parts I & II

Michaux, I Am Writing You from a Distant Country, 

Parts III to end. 

Some American Modernist Poets and Picasso, #gertrudestein, #pablopicasso

Here are some portions of a discussion I had last Spring about Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and William Carlos Williams. 

Stein on Picasso

Some poems from Stein's Tender Buttons

On Wm. Carlos Williams' Spring and All

Modernism/Modernity in Theory, Part 2

Two more books explored as part of the my online discussion of Modernism and the critical analysis and periodization of this cultural phenomenon.  First we examine Poggioli's work on the Avant-garde and its role as the knife edge of Modernism, then moving on to Berman's broader discussion of Modernity as a phenomenon emergent in the 17th and 18th Centuries, achieving maturity in the 19th, and falling into a kind of ossified decadence in the 20th, it's discomforting fatuity in the hands of the Postmodernists at the end of that century.  

  

Modernism/Modernity in Theory, Part 1

In the following undergraduate online discussions I explain a number of essays on Modernism, Modernity, Symbolism and the Avant-garde.  The essays are, first, Edmund Wilson's "Symbolism" from Axel's Castle; then Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane's "The Name and Nature of Modernism" in their anthology entitled just Modernism; then Renato Poggioli's introductory chapters to The Theory of the Avant-Garde; and finally, Marshall Berman's introductory chapter to his book, All That Is Solid Melts into Air.  I cleave pretty closely to the texts for the sake of student comprehension.  The first essay begins with students reading passages that they selected from the Wilson, Bradbury and McFarlane essays.  I've clipped the videos at points where the connection for our online discussion broke down or where we struggled to bring up documents to share.  #EdmundWilson, #RenatoPoggioli, #MarshallBerman, #modernism, #modernity, #thesymbolists, #theavantgarde 

The Shift to Modernism: Modern European Art

As I've had little time to write because of my teaching schedule this year, I've decided to post clips from some of the online lectures I did for my students at Pace University and at SVA this past semester (Spring 2020).   Though the course below is about interdisciplinary writing and research on literature and the the arts, in the following lectures I focus on the "tradition of the new" in painting and the radical shift away from figurative or representational work to the more abstract or dehumanized art of the Twentieth Century.  I've appropriated Robert Hughes's "Shock of the New" phrase as the title of the PowerPoint presented here.  It begins with an impromptu discussion of poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the significance of collage to modern art in the first clip.  Other clips cover works by artists from Delacroix and Manet to Picasso and the Cubists; then from the Futurists, Orphists, and Duchamp to the Dadaists; then from the Surrealists to the Abstract Expressionists.  The connection to the Blackboard server broke off at different points during the lecture, which conveniently provided opportunities to make the following five video clips.