Survey of the Historic Avant-Garde

The avant-garde is a famously slippery category; the definition we'll be working from, more or less, is the series of movements and individuals from 1900 to 1940, based mostly in Europe, that led culture and the arts in directions that talked back to power, pushed aesthetic limits outward, and explored ways to give the arts social and political weight. While largely focused on writers, we'll also spend a lot of time with visual artists and other media and will address questions such the line between Modernism and the Avant-Garde and the roles of women in these movements.