H48.2037 Lecture 4 Credits
Instructor(s): Professor Richard Porton
Anarchism and the Arts
Professor Richard Porton
H48.2037.001
Thursdays, 2:00pm-4:45pm
Graduate Students only
4 points
Since the nineteenth century, anarchist theory and practice have enjoyed a productive and complex relationship with the arts. This course will offer a comprehensive survey of affinities between important anti-authoritarian political currents and major trends in painting, literature, music, theatre, and cinema. Topics to be discussed will include the relationship of the Paris Commune to Courbet’s realism, anarchist motifs in art movements such as surrealism and lettrism, anarchist allegories in Franz Kafka’s novels, the utopian anarchist vision of Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction, the anarchist roots of “bohemianism,” the representation of the struggle within the left during the Spanish Civil War in the cinema, anarchist elements in avant-garde as well as punk music, anti-authoritarianism and sexual politics in the films of Lizzie Borden, and the anarchist impetus in theatrical collectives such as the Living Theatre and the Bread and Puppet Theatre. The course will culminate in an assessment of the ties between art and activism in recent social movements involving anti-globalization and antiwar militants.
