Modernism and Domesticity

Undergraduate

This course explores turn-of-the-century European attempts to craft modernist lives: how new ideas of women’s roles, childhood, the family, the domestic shaped modernist literature and art—even as modernist designers tried to change people’s experience of daily surroundings. Reform drama (Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov), experimental novels and memoirs (Joyce, Woolf, Andrei Bely, Proust, Walter Benjamin) stage the house as bourgeois comfort zone and psychic trap, while modernist architects and designers envisioned aestheticized or communal housing, experimental furniture design, reform fashion changing the parameters of daily experience. Children too were to be raised as modernists, sleeping in constructivist cradles, imbibing avant-garde picture books. The course examines modernist literature, New Woman novels and children’s books (Robert Louis Stevenson, A.A. Milne, Mary Poppins) in relationship to modernist design, fashion, stage sets, paintings, film, exemplary artists’ houses as designs for living---and their present-day posterity (Karl Ove Knausgård; “shelter magazines”, IKEA). WR , HU M 1:30pm-3:25pm