SEMINAR PROFILE

H17 -
Dare I Eat the Peach?: Existential and Artistic Puzzles of the (Post)Modern World

If the world you thought you inhabited had been blown to bits, how would you proceed? What procedures might help you make sense of the senseless? T. S. Eliot's famous question from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock casts in relief the difficulty of acting with conviction in a world that has lost its moorings. The anxiety of a culture adrift had been gathering for decades only to explode in the devastating horror of World War I. Fifteen million dead. An entire generation lost. In the aftermath, people labored to find order amidst the chaos. This struggle to define and cope with the dislocations of modernity was acutely felt by early 20th century writers like Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett. In this three-day seminar, we will explore Beckett's call "to find a form that accommodates the mess" and we will consider Hemingway's search for "how to live in it" as we investigate the accelerating changes that frame our experience of the modern world. One change we will examine closely is the crisis of representation. We will trace the move away from linear perspective inaugurated by Manet, developed by Picasso and Braque, and taken to its abstract extreme by Kandinsky, Pollock and Rothko; we will consider the plasticity of space-time according to special relativity by Einstein; and we will discuss the deployment of stream of consciousness by Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner all as means to articulate new modes of representing a world in flux. Our texts include The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway), Waiting For Godot (Beckett), and Stranger Than Fiction (Forster).

Scholar:

Andrew Crick

Location:

Harvard Hillel

Dates:

5/6/2015, 5/12/2015, 5/19/2015

H17 -	Dare I Eat the Peach?: Existential and Artistic Puzzles of the (Post)Modern World

	If the world you thought you inhabited had been blown to bits, how would you proceed? What procedures might help you make sense of the senseless? T. S. Eliot's famous question from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock casts in relief the difficulty of acting with conviction in a world that has lost its moorings. The anxiety of a culture adrift had been gathering for decades only to explode in the devastating horror of World War I. Fifteen million dead. An entire generation lost. In the aftermath, people labored to find order amidst the chaos. This struggle to define and cope with the dislocations of modernity was acutely felt by early 20th century writers like Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett. In this three-day seminar, we will explore Beckett's call "to find a form that accommodates the mess" and we will consider Hemingway's search for "how to live in it" as we investigate the accelerating changes that frame our experience of the modern world. One change we will examine closely is the crisis of representation. We will trace the move away from linear perspective inaugurated by Manet, developed by Picasso and Braque, and taken to its abstract extreme by Kandinsky, Pollock and Rothko; we will consider the plasticity of space-time according to special relativity by Einstein; and we will discuss the deployment of stream of consciousness by Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner all as means to articulate new modes of representing a world in flux. Our texts include The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway), Waiting For Godot (Beckett), and Stranger Than Fiction (Forster).

		Scholar:	Andrew Crick
		Location:	Harvard Hillel
		Dates:	5/6/2015, 5/12/2015, 5/19/2015