Johns Hopkins University 3 credits Modern Languages & Literatures
This course will explore the aesthetics and politics of primitivism in European modernity, focusing on the visual arts and literature in German and Yiddish, but looking at the wider European context, including France and Russia. We will begin with the backgrounds of primitivism in Romanticism, looking especially at its ethnographic and colonial sources. We will then focus on the presence of anthropological and ethnographic discourses within various registers of modernist thought, literature, and visual culture, with special attention to visual and literary primitivism. Our central concerns will include: the attempt to create a modernist aesthetics grounded in ethnography; the primitivist critique of modernity; the place of primitivism in the historical avant-garde; the development of the notion of “culture” in modernity; and the aesthetics of modern ethnic and national identity. Key thinkers, artists, and writers to be considered include Herder; Gauguin; Picasso; Wilhelm Worringer; Carl Einstein; Hannah Höch; and Emil Nolde.
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