Humanities Essay 2005

Modernism: The Crisis of Liberalism

  • Essay Topic: 
Explore the thematic connections between three artifacts and the zeitgeist or spirit of the modern period.

You may select your artifacts from the worlds of art, music, literature, history, politics, science, or philosophy. Your artifacts may complement each other, or they may contradict each other; they may reflect the coherence of a given time and place, or they may reveal the tensions within a single society or between different societies. 

Ideally, you should have at least one literary artifact and one artistic or musical artifact, but this guideline is not absolute.  One of your artifacts may come from the period before 1848, but you should discuss its relevance to the modern period. 
  • Due: Friday, May 6
  • Length: approximately 6-7 pages
  • Write a formal essay, which argues from a thesis, and includes research, quotations, in-text citations, a list of works cited, and acknowledgments. 
  • Verb tense: Do not use the first person; use the past tense for sections about historical events; use the present tense to discuss a work of art or literature. 
  • You are encouraged to include graphics and musical samples to support your thesis in the actual texts of their essays. 
  • All papers should be written in Microsoft Word. 

Possible Topics: 

  • the social and literary impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution
  • the influence of Marx’s political and economic theory
  • literary responses to the industrialization of Europe
  • artistic and literary expressions of European imperialism
  • Nietzsche, Wagner and German nationalism
  • intellectual disillusionment after World War I
  • the avant-garde in Pre-WWI Paris
  • Nationalist movements in the different countries of Europe
  • Weimar Germany
  • Nazi Germany
  • the rise of Fascism in Italy
  • Anti-Semitism in Europe
  • the Russian Revolution and the Soviet socialist experiment
  • the Spanish Civil War
  • the architecture of the great cities
  • the emergence of mass popular culture: the movies, politics, and pulp novels
  • the impact of Japaneseart and poetry on the modernists
  • the impact of African sculpture on the Modernists
  • Freudian Psychology and the Surrealist movement
  • the emergence of Abstract Expressionism
  • the emergence of Performance Art….

General Sources

  • Isaiah Berlin and the Problem of Certainty: 
notes from The Roots of Romanticism (1967) Isaiah Berlin
on Monism and the Western Intellectual Tradition from The First and the Last, May 1998
on Negative and Positive Liberty from The First and the Last, May 1998