106-412 Modernism, Fascism, Communism

Formerly available as 106-074. Students who have completed 106-074 are not eligible to enrol in this subject.

Usually admission to the postgraduate diploma or fouth year honours in English, see Honours entry.

This subject examines the links between the modernist movement in literature, film and art of the inter-war years and the cultural and political programs of the fascist and communist movements. It considers the demands for a politically engaged art in war-torn Europe and Russia and the ensuing debates about whether the modernist 'artistic revolution' could serve the revolutionary ideologies of the Nazi and Communist parties. It analyses the connections between the aesthetic doctrines and fascist sympathies of such major modernist writers as T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and D H Lawrence; the efforts of marxist writers such as Mayakovsky and Brecht to weld modernism to socialism; the Nazi party's demonising of modernism as 'degenerate art'; the Communist Party's initial fostering and subsequent rejection of modernism in favour of Socialist realism; and some of the ways in which writers and filmmakers employed modernist techniques either to promote or to critique socialist or fascist ideology.