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| Unit name |
Discourses of Cultural Degeneration |
| Unit code |
MUSI30117 |
| Credit points |
20 |
| Level of study |
H/6
|
| 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 |
Description including Unit Aims
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:
- to become familiar with a range of literary responses to the idea of cultural ‘degeneration’ after 1850
- to understanding the biological underpinnings of this phenomenon
- to understand how art was seen as a mirror of biological heath
- to appreciate how music partook in this discourse
- to critique the tendency to link discourses of generation art directly with two exhibitions Nazi Germany.
Intended Learning Outcomes
At the end of the unit, a successful student will be able to:
- Describe, evaluate and / or challenge current scholarly thinking about ideas of cultural and biological degeneration and ‘degenerate art’
- Demonstrate an understanding of concepts of atavism and decadence and concepts of music history, and an ability to conceptualise these as contingent historical ideas.
- Argue effectively and at length about matters of applied biology, social identity and composers’ whose music was discussed within these discursive fields.
- Display a high degree of skill in selecting, applying, interpreting and organising information, including evidence of a high level of bibliographic control.
- Take a critical stance towards scholarly processes involved in arriving at historical knowledge and / or relevant secondary literature.
- Apply historical information and historiographical and interpretive strategies laterally, potentially leading to innovative ideas
Teaching Information
Weekly two-hour seminar
Assessment Information
Students will submit two coursework essays of 3000 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, while the second coursework essay will allow students also to demonstrate learning outcomes 5 and 6
Reading and References
- Max Nordau, Degeneration (University of Nebraska Press, 1993)
- George Bernard Shaw, “The Sanity of Art,” in Major Critical Essays (Penguin,1931)
- Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man (Duke University Press, 2006)
- Stephen Downes, Music and Decadence in European Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
- Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals”, Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library, 2000)
- Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (Random House, 1965)
