Humanities 104

Early English Romanticism

• wealth gap, factory workers, textile production (cotton from slavery), Indutrial Revolution

• Focus on imagination poetic insight; turn from rationality

• predetermination not a thing

• Exploration of the infinite

• Private consciousness

• Childhood as a unique moment of understanding

• Divinity of Nature

William Wordsworth

• focused on relationship humans have with nature —> industrialization and nature as a teacher

• human mind

• experiences of ordinary people

• used common language

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

• captures a rare early morning moment in London where the city is still

• able to find beauty even in the industrialization

We Are Seven

• the poet debates a young girl who thinks her two deceased siblings should be counted among her family members

• logic versus emotion

• the common person

• don’t reach an agreement leading to questions about death and family

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

• Flaneur

• inspired by daffodils he saw while walking

• discusses memory and if in the moment or reflecting later is more powerful

• beauty of the daffodils perhaps a comment on indutrialization?

Early English Romanticism Painting

intense emotion, individual imagination, and the awesome, often terrifying power of nature

Joseph Mallard William Turner

• Entered Royal Academy at age 14

• considered one of the great english painters

• gained fame at an early age

• Hamilton

Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying — A Typhoon Coming On

• less detailed, more impressions and color instead

• the chains above the water showing that these people had no way of surviving

• the woman in a compromising position

• the fish coming straight for the people thrown overboard

• blood in the water

• the ship far away

Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway

• clash between the natural world and industrial progress

• early locomotive rushing across the Maidenhead Railway Bridge over the River Thames

• ties to later impressionist movement

• A tiny hare running along the tracks in front of the train symbolizes nature trying to outrun industrial machinery

John Constable

• painted down to earth realist scene

• got his break later

• Burr

The Hay Wain

• Focus on the sky and the clouds —> incredibly detailed and perfect

• can see some places where things were painted over

• reflection of the hay wain in the water

• suffolk

• realistic

Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadow

• again focus on the clouds

• so detailed

• darker and overcast

• rainbow

A Cloud Study Sunset

• known for his super realistic clouds

• practice

• still amazing

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• center of transcendentalism

• naked eyeball

• one with nature

• lived in concord after his wife died and he came into wealth

• but faith into divinity of the natural world

• avid gardener

Transcendentalism overview

• English romanticism

• German philosophy

• idealism

• american culture of reform 1830s and 1840s

• Eastern Religion

Transcendentalism Ideas

• Individual soul identical to world soul

• natural facts symbolize spiritual facts

• self-reliance

• nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your mind

Emerson’s Nature

• believed nature was a divine order

• talked about childhood

• eyeball

• eudaimonia - absolute bliss

Nature introduction

• look at past and analyze nature/God

• transparent eyeball —> removes himself and just watches (observer), sometimes read less to know more

Beauty Chapter 3

• Ordinary beauty - “That’s a beautiful tree”

• Moral beauty - “beauty is the mark God sent upon virtue” - something ethically moral about the beauty of the natural world

• intellectual beauty - curious about how natural world organizes; absolute order of things, spirit of enlightenment which concedes we don’t know everything

• look at the journey

• beauty is not objective; everyone’s perception is different

Nature Chapter 4

• nature supplies us with language - can tell a story’

• draw metaphors from natural world

• assigning words to describe nature

• words are signs of natural facts

• “Man is an analogy”

• when thinking we are duplicating process of the natural world

Emily Dickinson

• prominent family

• avid gardener

• spent whole life in amherst, ma

• many poems written at height of the civil war

• didn’t give titles to poem

• bold unconventional style

• not many female poets at the time

• explores death nature and immortality

I heard a fly buzz when i died

• voice from grave?

• speaker announcing her death’

• transition between life and death (usually only two states)

• Fly continues to buzz - world continues after you die

• going against traditional realist ideas of death

Because I could not stop for death

• death presented as kindly, gentleman

• escorting her away

Hope is the thing with feather

• hope can take you place

• hope never asks anything of her; it is indifferent

Charles Baudelaire

• What is beautiful?

• The urbanization of Romanticism

• The flaneur

• Art for Art’s Sake

• The transformation of Paris After 1848

• antagonizing and attention grabbing'

• utilizes shock factor and disgust

To the Reader

• poet speaking directly to the reader

• looks down on humanity for hypocrisy vice and boredom

• "Hypocrite reader, — my likeness, — my brother!"

Carcass

• Describes a carcass in graphic detail

• The coexistence of beauty and hideous decay is part of nature's inevitable cycle of life and death

• just disturbing honestly

Pre-Raphaelites

• intense realism, vibrant jewel-toned colors, and intricate details

• beautiful models —> idealized female figures

• drew inspiration from literary works (especially poetry), the Middle Ages, and religious subjects

• emphasis on the realistic and exact outlines of nature, particularly its colors

Ophelia

• By John Everett Millais

• intense emotional vulnerability

• symbolic nature — flowers on top of her in the lake

• devotion to the natural world

• hyperrealism and vivid colors

Christ in the Home of His parents

• by John Everett Millais

• shocked Victorian society by rejecting idealized, angelic depictions of the Holy Family

• portraying them as working-class people in a dirty, highly realistic carpentry workshop

• jesus’s hand his injured depicting he is still a flesh and blood mortal not divine yet

Elizabeth Siddal

Model for Millais and model for Ophelia, Lady of Shallot etc

Christina Rossetti

Pre-Raphaelite Model

poet

The Awakening of Conscience

• By WIlliam Holman Hunt

• Kept woman for a rich gentleman

• dead bird killed by cat reflects the relation btwn the two people

• bird trapped in cage left, but was killed

• lady looking at open window —> escape

• rich background

Claudio and Isabella

• By William Holman Hunt

• Based on the shakespeare play Measure for Measure

• when Isabella comes to visit Claudio in jail and they scheme for her friend to take her place with the duke

• Isabella crying, Claudio looks distraught and guilty —> high emotions

Camera Obscura - “Dark Chamber”

• First iteration of the camera

• Need a dark room/space and a small slit where an image would be projected upside down

Heliograph “sun writing”

Earliest known photograph by Joseph Niepce 1826

Louis - Jacques-Mande Daguerre

Daguerreotype

First photo of a person

guy getting his shoes shined while the image was developing

Calotype “Beautiful Impressions”

William Fox Talbot - Technique of producing negatives that could be reproduced on specially treated paper

The Infant Photography Giving the Painter an Additional Brush

• controversial

• baby used in art in a compromising position

• can see photographer in the mirror

Julia Margaret Cameron

• english photographer who used different setting and compositions than the normal photographer

Julia Jackson

• portrait of Virginia Woolf’s mother

• shadow on one side light on the other

• completely black background

• eyes stand out

Lady Clementina Hawarden

• photographs of her family and fashion mostly

• Controversial photograph of her daughter posed similarly to naked french models, also in a vulnerable position - asleep

Edgar Allan Poe

• poetry and short stories

• mystery and macabre

The Man of the Crowd - Poe

• unnamed narator in a coffee shop recovering from an illness

• begins people watching and putting the people going by into categories

• sees an old man he can’t figure out and follows him for literally a whole day while he wanders erratically through the streets

• The old man is never alone in the city’s mass of humanity, but he’s alone in holding onto whatever he’s hiding from the world

• Flaneur

• Connection to Wordworth (a snapshot slowing down) and baudelaire who were both flaneurs

• connection to impressionism with snapshots of the crowd

• connection to Maupassant quick glimpses into people’s lives

• conection to the camera bc it changed the way we observed

• connections to emerson with him having a transparent eyeball in nature and flaneurs having a transparent eyeball in the city

The Painter of Modern Life, Part 3

• defines the ideal artist as a flaneur —> man of the world, detached observer in the crowd, child w fresh perspective and convalescent

• gets energy of the modern city but with a detached perspective

• connection to emerson with seeing urban landscape as beautiful like emerson finds nature beautiful

• connection to wordsworth with childhood being a moment of understanding

Connections between flaneurs and other works

Guy de Maupassant

• author of about 300 short stories 3 novels a play and travel sketches

• short fiction can roughly be divided between his Paris stories and his Normandy stories

• best stories have no wasted words

• literary naturalism (outgrowth of realism) —> clear objective description, people are passive forced into things through natural forces and social environment, intense focus on day to day life

• show don’t tell

Moonlight

• stern devout priest who hates romance

• strict worldview changed by a moonlit night where he sees his niece with her partner

• realizes the beauty of the nature is out for them and understands that God made it beautiful for them and so if God accepts it why should’t he

The Jewels

• man who loves his wife very much, but she passes away

• down on his luck and begins selling what he think is costume jewelry for extra money

• finds out the jewelry is real and he was getting cucked but gets A TON of money from them and remarries

Impressionism

• Organized their own exhibition separate from the slaon

• visible brushstrokes

• open composition

• emphasis on capturing the changing qualities of natural light and movement

• Rejecting formal academic styles,

• contemporary subjects en plein air to capture spontaneous, fleeting moments

• connect to wordsworth moments of time

Edouard Manet

• pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism

• father of impressionism

• painted modern life

Olympia - Manet

• nude white woman on a bed being attended to by a black female slave

• scandal caused by this painting bc of nude portrayal of venus as prostitute

A Bar at the Folies-Bergere - Manet

• features a barmaid, who stands detached and isolated amidst the bustling, disorientating energy of a Parisian music hall (she looks so done)

• mirror behind barmaid; distorts reflection and spatial perspective to disorient the viewer —> objects on the counter are not reflected correctly and in the mirror the barmaid looks like she is leaning forward engaging with the man (who is us the viewer) but in reality she is not

• gaze of the man in the mirror is right at her breasts

Edgar Degas

known for his ballet and concert scenes

Luncheon of the Boating Party - Pierre-Auguste Renoir

• captures a moment of time

• ordinary people

• see brushstrokes

• casual

Impression: Sunrise - Monet

• broke from traditional academic realism to capture the transient atmosphere of the moment, inadvertently giving the entire Impressionist art movement its name

• sun is fiery orange and is focal point

• visible brushstrokes

La Gare Saint Lazare - Monet

• paris train station

• celebrates 19th-century industrialization big change from earlier romantic artists and poets

• billowing, translucent steam into an ephemeral, luminous subject while shifting the focus toward modern technology and urban architecture

• “painter of modern life”

• fading of the steam demonstrates time changing

The Cradle - Morisot

• female gaze at a very female moment

• tender emotional moment with Morisot’s sister and her baby

• would it be possible for a man to capture this same moment?

• explores themes of motherhood and domestic life

Mary Cassatt

• Another female impressionist painter

• images of the social and private lives of women

Death of Ivan Ilyich

• a foundational piece of philosophical fiction exploring the meaning of life and mortality

• realizes while dying from a mysterious illness, realizes he has wasted his life on superficial societal expectations.

• Isolation of modern society —> people closest to Ivan reveal their emotional emptiness while he is dying

Post Impressionist

• rejected Impressionism’s strict focus on capturing the naturalistic effects of light and color

The Starry Night - Van Gogh

• painted during his stay at an asylum

• more abstract than impressionism

WWI Poetry

from early glorification of sacrifice to harrowing, visceral descriptions of trench life, and finally to bitter condemnations of the war’s futility

August, 1914

• a poignant, anti-war poem that views the outbreak of World War I through a divine lens

• loss of God through terrible earthly conflicts

In a Soldier’s Hospital

• perspective of a nurse

• seeing young boys, not even young men yet die and be crippled

• says this specific 17 yo is scared but ultimately is “a soldier yet”

• “To march, a man with men, and fight/While other boys are still at plau.y”

Dulce et Decorum est

• describes the brutal realities of trench warfare during World War I and directly attacks the patriotic propaganda that encourages young men to die for their country

• shell shock —> survivors guilt

• reality of war

• It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country —> dulce et decorum est… —> calls out this old lie

Modernism

• a cultural and artistic movement spanning roughly the 1880s to the 1970s

• rejection of traditional; abandoned classic realistic painting

• emphasizes lines shapes colors over perfect replication

• cubism an important sub-genre of modernism

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon - Picasso

• depicts five nude female figures in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó in Barcelona, challenging the viewer with direct, confrontational gazes

• multiple perspectives throughout - crouching figure on the right is shown from the back and the front simultaneously

• misogynistic

• birth of cubism

• inspiration of african tribal masks

• controversial bc it completely departed from traditional art and many people hated it and called it disgusting etc

• multiple perspectives at one time

Nude Descending a Staircase - Duchamp

• same perspective at multiple times

• very abstract

• figure is futuristic and cubist

• representation of movement

• not truly nude as the body is actually not really seen

Georgia O’Keeffe

• paintings of city buildings

• in new york city

• American precisionism

Three Musicians - Picasso

• Synthetic Cubism

• were designed to look like cut-paper collages. Picasso created two identical versions of this painting

• instruments are only things that are kind of realistic

The City - Leger

elebrates the chaotic energy, fragmentation, and mechanical rationality of modern metropolitan life

A Room of One’s Own Chapter 1

• a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction

• The essay is designed as an explanation of how Woolf arrived at her thesis

• lots of metaphors/similes and descriptive language

• explores the systemic barriers women face (financial educational and spatial) that historically hindered women

• Patriarchal Privilege & Institutional Exclusion

A Room of One’s Own Chapter 2

• Visit to the British Museum

• explores how writers discuss women and comes to the conclusion that wayyyy more men right about women than women about men or even women about women

• systemic poverty of women (women can’t own money so can’t pass it on to their daughters)

• ingrained male privilege

• systemic poverty, ingrained male privilege, and the distortion of historical truth prevent women from achieving their full intellectual potential

A Room of One’s Own Chapter 3

• the historical and material barriers that prevented women from achieving literary greatness during the Elizabethan era

• Judith Shakespeare as female version of Shakespeare and what she would have gone through

• In order to be shakespeare you would have needed financial freedom and a private space,

Virginia Woolf

• sad childhood, not happy at all

• killed herself

• queer?

• Born and raised and lived in London for almost all her life

The Harlem Renaissance

• Mass Migration of African Americans to norther cities mostly New York, Chicago and St. Louis

• Harlem, in northern manhattan became center of african american literature and art

Langston Hughes

African American poet at the time of the Harlem Renaissance

The Weary Blues

• describes a black blues singer singing in a bar in harlem late at night

• meditates on the way that the song channels the suffering and injustice of the black experience in America, transforming that suffering into something beautiful and cathartic

• beauty of black art and the pain it comes out of

Rise of Jazz in Harlem

• blend of ragtime, blues, marching band, european orchestras

• combination of african traditional music and european instruments

• spread all over the world

Louis Armstrong

• American blues and jazz trumpet player and vocalist

• one of the most influential jazz figures

Duke Ellington

• American jazz composer pianist and leader of the eponymous jazz orchestra from 1924 through the rest of his life

Billie Holiday

• American jazz and blues singer

Strange Fruit

• dark and profound song centered around the lynching of African Americans in the south

St. James Infirmary

• one of most famous songs

• combination of instruments

• pinnacle of jazz

Jacob Lawrence

• portrayal of African American historical subjects

• know for his series of paintings depicting the African American experience

Migration Series Panel no. 1 - Lawrence

• shows African Americans moving north to find jobs, freedom from oppression, and better living conditions

• cubism

Romare Bearden

• cubism

• went to BU

• white passing biracial man who had chance to go pro in baseball if he pretended to be white

• refused

Jazz Village - Bearden

• black experience

• similar to Picasso’s three musicians

Black Venus - Bearden

• powerful expression of black feminism

• bold colors

• working with different mediums

James Baldwin

• essays, novels, plays, and poems

• american writer and civil rights activist

Notes of a Native Son

• Baldwin’s assessment of his father is unflinchingly honest, thereby conveying both the hatred and love he feels for him.

• Baldwin’s father’s mental health problems cast a shadow over Baldwin’s life, as Baldwin lives with the awareness that he may inherit them.

• self-destructive relationship to the world due to racism

• At the diner, the white wait staff are not forthcoming about the fact that they do not serve black people, suggesting that they are embarrassed and perhaps even sympathetic to Baldwin, but do not feel able to express this. Meanwhile, Baldwin and other black people harbor a destructive rage that they must suppress in order to function and survive.

• He experiences a sense of fury so powerful that it overwhelms practical considerations of his own safety—yet at the same time, he feels guilt toward his white friend and fear at the murderous rage living inside his own heart.

• the way in which people avoid the truth in favor of a harmful delusion that they believe is preferable. Clinging to his hatred of his father helps Baldwin avoid the pain of losing him

• alienated from his father and from the process of mourning him. However, at the same time he experiences a sudden sense of connection to his father through the experience of hearing the song. This in turn leads him to remember their only moment of true communication.

• race riots and Baldwin’s thinking that they are ultimately unhelpful

Mangrove

• Windrush Day

• dramatizes the true 1970 story of the Mangrove Nine

• abuse from the police at the Mangrove Restaurant (raids) and across Notting Hill

• Led to the community forming peaceful protests that were ultimately stopped by the police violently and nine protesters were forced on trial for crimes they did not commit

• in the end they are all let off and justice prevails

Kelso Deconstructed - Zaidie Smith

• Kelso Cochraine who was killed —> ideas about martyrs and why we only focus on their death not life

• interesting narration

• Olivia (fiance)