Unit name | Discourses of Cultural Degeneration |
---|---|
Unit code | MUSI20108 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | I/5 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
Unit director | Dr. David Trippett |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | Department of Music |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
This seminar traces European fears of cultural decline from the middle of the nineteenth century up to the Nazi exhibitions of Entartete Kunst. Principally we will explore the way cultural values regarding art shift according to norms and values determined by bio-medical, ethical, and social discourse. The degeneration paradigm, an inversion of Darwin’s evolutionism, is pitted against its opposite, regeneration, both of which are based on an axis of the normative and the pathological, the healthy and the diseased. Beginning with Cesare Lombroso and the pseudo-science of criminal phrenology, we will pursue ideas concerning bourgeois health and heredity, criminality, sexuality, socio-biological functionality and their impact on judgments about art in general, music in particular. Writers considered will include Lombroso, Max Nordau, Otto Weininger, Walter Pater, George du Maurier, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault.
Unit aims:
At the end of the unit, a successful student will be able to:
Weekly two-hour seminar
Students will submit two coursework essays of 2,500 words, each representing 50% of the final mark. The first essay title will be selected from a limited selected provided by the lecturer, the second will be for the student to devise in consultation with the lecturer.
Both coursework essays will allow students to demonstrate learning outcomes 1-4. The second coursework essay will allow students also to demonstrate learning outcomes 5.