Paper 1 Topics

Instructions: Write a paper of 5-7 pp. on one of the below topics. The goal is to offer a creative and convincing thesis of your own that you defend with evidence from course-related materials. Clear and lucid exposition of your argument counts for a lot too. No bibliography or footnotes are necessary: simply cite to the page numbers of class editions in parentheses. In including factual information given in lectures, you do not need to cite them. A topic of your own invention is possible IF you clear it in advance with one of the instructors. The paper is due by 4 p.m. on Friday, February 29 in one of Professor Moyn’s boxes (either in 611 Fayerweather or in corridor on third floor of the same building).

1. “J.K. Huysmans intended to break with Zola’s positivist naturalism, but in fact unwittingly continued that tradition in many ways. It is for this reason that Huysmans’ revolt against his predecessor failed.” Agree or disagree with this statement and provide an argument for your position.

2. Compare and contrast two or more representations of Salomé in the sources on the following list and explain the significance of your findings for understanding the fin-de-siècle and the transition to modernism: the Bible, Gustave Moreau’s paintings, J.K. Huysmans’ Against the Grain, Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings, Richard Strauss’s Salome.

3. “Primitivism successfully identified the most severe flaw in European bourgeois culture, the stuffiness and artificiality of middle-class mores. It only went wrong in its execution.” Agree or disagree with this statement and provide an argument for your position, concentrating on two or more of the following sources: Friedrich Nietzsche, André Gide, Paul Gauguin, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud.

4. Look carefully at the reflections on the problem of form in art offered by André Gide and Thomas Mann. Explain their significance for our understanding of the modernist revolt in the pre-World War I years.

5. Give an interpretation of the significance of homosexuality for understanding two of the following course authors: J.K. Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, André Gide, Thomas Mann. (Note: You may restrict your investigation to Mann if you rely on either “Tristan” or “Tonio Kröger” in addition to “Death in Venice.”)

6. “The intellectuals studied in the course so far exaggerated the failings of bourgeois civilization and/or philosophy and their responses to these putative failings mistakenly threw out the most important achievements of the bourgeois era.” Agree with this statement, building your case around two or more course authors or documents. (You may not write an essay disagreeing with the statement.)

7. Discuss the relationship between Henri Bergson’s philosophical critique of positivism and that of one or more other course sources and explain the significance of your findings for understanding the intellectual life of the period.

8. “Psychoanalysis is best understood as an attempt to repair positivism in light of the ongoing modernist discoveries about the nature of desire and the foundations of identity.” Agree or disagree, discussing Freud and one other course author to make your case.

9. Explain in a detailed manner what at least two of the following authors – André Gide, Thomas Mann, and Henri Bergson – mean when they use the word “life.” What, for them, is the opposite of life? Who really lives, and who does not? Compare and contrast the views of at least two of the authors on this question, and explain the significance of this for our more general understanding of modernism.

10. In response to Zola, Huysmans seems to believe that the norms of science are inapplicable to art or the spiritual. In what ways did this opposition play out in the decades after Against the Grain? Discuss at least three of the following authors: Zola, Huysmans, Gauguin, Bergson, Freud.