Particular offerings of this course seek to introduce the student to the aims, assumptions and methodologies of reading and the study of literature. This course is designed as an introductory course to the Comparative Literature major and other literature and humanities majors. It is recommended that students complete English/Writing 5 before enrolling in Comparative Literature 10.
Winter 2013: Conley (12)
Modernism, Primitivism, and Outsider Art
The early twentieth century witnessed a fascination with "the primitive" in ethnography and its relation to artistic modernism. This fascination extended to attention paid to the works of art and writing produced by the mentally ill--from "the primitive" in so-called "primitive" cultures "discovered" by Western explorers and the art they produced to the "primitive" or originary version of the self buried in the unconscious, explored through psychoanalysis and tapped by the process of surrealist automatism. This course will explore these different ideas of the primitive in the first half of the twentieth century in order to see how these overlapping visions help to illuminate the ways in which Western Europeans were envisioning themselves, particularly in relation to a growing number of perceived "outsiders."
