The Modern Revolution
HUM 410
FALL 2016
TUESDAY / THURSDAY 4:10 PM – 5:25 PM in HUM 582
Dr. Robert C. Thomas
E-mail: theory at sfsu dot edu
Office HUM 416 | Office Hour: 2:10 – 3:10 THURSDAY

COURSE DESCRIPTION

The course covers philosophical and cultural issues of modernism/modernity, roughly from 1850 – 1945. We will undertake a careful examination of select primary (modern) theoretical texts (Nietzsche, Benjamin), works of literature (Walser, Kafka), artwork (Duchamp), film (Lumiere, Méliès, Vertov), and secondary engagements with modernism / modernity by Celeste Olalquiaga, Michel Foucualt, and  others.  We will follow the convention of the catalog description in looking at modernisms from, roughly, the mid-19th century to the early/mid 20th century. We will study the history of Dada / Dadaism in relation to the present, watch surprising films like Walter Murch’s 1985 adaptation of the turn of the century work of L. Frank Baum, Return to Oz (which we will read in light of modernity, commodification, and monstrosity, among much else), and study Todd Haynes’ untimely comparison of glam rock with high modernism, Velvet Goldmine. We will study the construction of the modern subject through discursive practices, which Foucault referred to as “technologies of the self”—for example, those on pornography, sexuality, and gender.

How do we think about the modern? Is it the new, the avant-garde, a break with the past, the everyday? What does it mean to think about a peculiarly “modern” life? (Which can be another way of saying, what is the “present” of a particular era.) And what of progress, enlightenment, technology, discipline, acceleration, and the subject? (Which can be another way of saying modernity or, 400+ years of capitalist development.)  This course will think modernism/modernity as a philosophical problem rather than a historical object. We will strive to think modern thought as something immanent to (i.e. not outside) the “presents” it traverses. In this reading, the counter-modern, the a-modern, the alternatives to, and the excluded of modernity will be viewed as fully a part of modern life itself. This is because the problem of modernity is something we are continuing to work through, today.  To paraphrase Michel Foucault, we will ask ourselves what it might mean to think the modern, simultaneously, as a philosophical problem, a relation to life, and a critique of the present.

Required Texts (available at the bookstore)

• Rudolf Kuenzli – Dada
• Celeste Olalquiaga – The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience
• Jessica Ellen Sewell, Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890-1915
• Robert Walser – Jakob von Gunten

Essays (available online)

• Walter Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch” and “Mickey Mouse”
• Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” and “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History‘”
• Walter Benjamin, “The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay”
• Walter Benjamin, “Robert Walser“
• Walter Benjamin, “The Ruin“
• Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (Third Version)
• Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision”
• Michel Foucault, “22 January 1975” (Lecture) from Abnormal
• Michel Foucault, “Introduction” to Herculine Barbin
• Michel Foucault, “The Means of Correct Training” from Discipline and Punish
• Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” from Discipline and Punish
• Douglas Murphy, The Architecture of Failure (selections)
• Nietzsche, The Nietzsche Reader (ed. By Keith Ansell-Pearson) (selections)
• Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (selection)
• Preciado, “The History of Technosexuality
• Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wildwest
• Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye (selections; “We: Variant of a Manifesto,” “The Man With a Movie Camera,” “From the Kino-Eye to the Radio-Eye”)
• Paula K. Kamenish, Mamas of Dada: Women of the European Avant-Garde (selection) (optional)

Short Stories

• Franz Kafka – “Report to an Academy”
• Robert Walser – Short Stories/Prose Pieces (selections handed out in class)

Films (shown in class)

• Richard Fleisher – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (USA, 
• Todd Haynes – Velvet Goldmine (USA, 1998)
• Tsai Ming-Liang – The Hole (Taiwan, 1999)
• Walter Murch – Return to Oz (USA, 1985)
• Brother’s Quay – Institute Benjamenta (UK, 1996)
• Dziga Vertov – Man With a Movie Camera (USSR, 1929)

Early Modern Cinema and Short Films

• Lumiere Brothers (selections) (France, 1899)
• Georges Méliès – Voyage à travers l’impossible (The Impossible Voyage) (France, 1904)
• Georges Méliès – Le Voyage dans la Lune  (A Trip to the Moon) (France, 1902)
• Legar and Murphey “Ballet Mecanique” (USA/France, 1924)
• Jean Painlevé — Science is Fiction (France, 1902-89) (selections)

Additional Reading (optional)

• Michel Foucault – “What is Enlightenment?“
• Brian Eno – “The Studio as Compositional Tool”
• Chris Cutler – “Plunderphonia”
• Cox and Warner – “Music in the Age of Electronic (Re) Production”
• Ray Brassier –  “The Truth of Extinction” 205 – 239 in Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction”
• Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains (selection)
• Franz Kafka – “Before the Law”

For those who wish to do additional research, the journal Modernism/modernity is a good source of recent scholarship in the field.
http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/modernism_modernity/