HONOR 2108 - Modernism and Beyond

Honors students, in general, now emphatically announce themselves to be children of the 21st Century. This new course is meant to help students think critically about the 20th Century, or what is variously call the high-, late- or post-modern era. Readings will cover the development and broad distribution of new non-print technologies such as photography, the phonograph, radio, cinema, and television - the supports which make possible the current media-centered world within which Honors pedagogy is now firmly situated. Culminating with a discussion of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (both its construction and its current exhibition) the course aims to complete the IT series by leading students right into our own backyard.