The Symbolist Movement in the Arts and European Thought

3 credits · Graduate

Investigates the relationship linking Symbolist aesthetics and practice with currents in European philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The reaction against Positivism; aesthetic idealism and the Platonic tradition; the influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on artists and writers; Symbolism and mysticism (Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, the occult); Symbolism and the Catholic revival; Art nouveau and theories of psychology; the anarchist impulse. Emphasis on visual arts in France, England and Germany; focus on the relationship between word and image in Symbolist poetics.