Paper 2 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 April 11 in your TA’s folder in Fayerweather Hall, sixth floor corridor.

1. Drawing on two or more course sources, place either or both revolts against tonality in music and representationalism in painting in the cultural context of pre-World War I modernism as a whole; or explain why Clement Greenberg is ultimately right to argue that modernism involved the declaration of independence of each genre not just from inherited rules but also from any external principles (moral, philosophical, social, political, or other).

2. Drawing on lectures and one or more course sources, explain the notion that liberalism and democracy are incompatible, taking care to distinguish between the pre-World War I era and the interwar years if necessary. Is there anything enduring, or is everything temporary and local, about the European skepticism about the prospect of a synthesis between liberalism and democracy? Some possible figures to discuss: Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels, Carl Schmitt, Thomas Mann, Benito Mussolini.

3. Most observers agree that there was an important relationship in early twentieth-century Europe between modernist cultural developments — in philosophy, psychology, literature, and the visual arts — and the rise in this period of a new critique of liberal democracy, the most dramatic examples of which were fascist political ideologies. What is this relationship? Using one or more “cultural” sources and one or more “political” sources, make and defend an argument about the relationship between cultural and intellectual developments on one hand and the development of new political theories and ideologies on the other. Are writers and thinkers on politics simply applying modernist cultural and intellectual breakthroughs to politics, are they appropriating them, are they misusing them? “Political” sources include: Sorel, Le Bon, Jünger, Schmitt, Spengler, Mussolini, Riefenstahl.

The following two questions are focused examples of the above (you may write on them):

3a. “Unwittingly, Henri Bergson paved the way for fascism, since his thought quickly led to Georges Sorel’s mythic syndicalism, which in turn allowed for the genesis of Benito Mussolini’s fascist ideology.” Agree or disagree with this statement; a focus on either the connection between Bergson and Sorel or that between Sorel and fascism is permissible.

3b. Compare André Gide and Ernst Jünger. Both seem to reject comfort and embrace danger. But is Jünger’s superimposition of an ethic of violence on The Immoralist’s original philosophy of “living dangerously” an extension or a perversion of Gide’s thought? (Note: you may not write on this topic if you wrote on Gide for the first paper.)

4. “Whatever the drawbacks to his Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel saved Marxism from positivism and contributed powerfully to the analysis of society thanks to his pioneering category of myth.” Agree or disagree.

5. Using Death in Venice, “Mario and the Magician,” and “A Brother,” explain how Thomas Mann applied his prewar (and apparently apolitical) analysis of erotic submission to the rise of fascism and note the strengths and/or weaknesses of his theory of the leader’s power over the crowd. (Note: you may not write on this topic if you wrote on Death in Venice for the first paper.)

6. To what degree is Thomas Mann’s “Mario and the Magician” consistent with Gustave Le Bon’s crowd theory and to what degree is it different? Whose theory better explains the relationship between leader and mass in material we have covered? (You may want to read the brief except from Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to assist in your analysis.)

7. Using all helpful sources, explain Sigmund Freud’s modification in the interwar years of classical, pre-World War I psychoanalysis, suggesting the relevance of your analysis for one of two larger debates: a) how World War I affected European culture or b) whether Freud ever went far enough in breaking with the positivism he inherited.

8. “Georges Sorel and Marcel Proust both appropriated Henri Bergson’s thought, but each missed aspects of the master’s philosophy that the other grasped. This fact shows that Bergson’s thought is internally contradictory and has to be purified in some way to be consistently endorsed.” Agree or disagree. (You may not write on this question if you wrote on Bergson the first time.)

9. “The movie ‘Fight Club,’ it turns out, is a nearly perfect allegory of the descent of modernism into fascism. It begins with a promising cultural rebellion, in the name of individuality and masculinity, against bourgeois conformity and consumerism. It ends with militaristic squadrons, glamorized violence, and submission to a charismatic leader.” Agree or disagree with this thesis, defending it against objections (if you agree), or explaining why modernism’s fate or the film’s narrative is too complex to be equated with one other (if you disagree).

10. Drawing on sources linked from the course web pages, explain the continuities and discontinuities between prewar modernism and postwar avant-garde. How were the techniques, concerns, subject matter, politics (implicit or explicit), and/or aesthetics of post-war art similar or different from those of pre-war modernism? A focus on Marcel Duchamp is permissible, but a wider focus to include Dada or Surrealism is probably preferable.

11. Marcel Proust writes that “always we give precedence over the inner task that we have to perform to the outward role which we are playing” (Reader, p. 242). Luigi Pirandello suggests, more radically, that there is no inner self -- like the one Proust wanted to recover -- except through the external roles one plays in life. Examine the similarities and differences between the accounts of the coherence of the self in these two (and, if you like, other) modernists, and hypothesize what the comparison might teach about how modernism unfolded historically.

12. The Waste Land, in spite of all its formal innovations, represents the perversion, and not the fulfillment, of Modernism." Agree or disagree with this statement, drawing on Eliot and at least two other course authors.'